Last night I went looking for Kurt Cobain's head on the Internet. I had heard a rumor that a scanned-in copy of one of the medical examiner's post-mortem photographs had been posted somewhere, so I embarked on a half-assed search for something that probably did not exist.
It was more than just morbid curiosity. Whenever I try to find a specific thing amidst the 4,000+ Usenet news groups and Dog-knows- how-many ftp sites, I always manage to stumble over a myriad other interesting items. About half the time, I get so distracted that I forget what triggered the search.
Three hours of hunting (using keyword search utilities like "archie") turned up nothing on Cobain, except for a message on the Usenet news group alt.music.nirvana that attributes the rumor to WBCN d.j. Bradley Jay. But there seemed to be no end to the amount of bizarre material out there.
The first stop on our macabre scavenger hunt was Usenet. This part of the net uses a bulletin-board metaphor. Each newsgroup is devoted to a particular subject, ranging from pets to sex to sex with pets, though heavily skewed towards computers. Though most Usenet users simply read through messages (lurking), each group has a core of people that create and extend message threads, usually by disagreeing with each other over trivial details just for an excuse to mount a vicious but eloquent personal attack. These are fun to read for a while, but then you wonder if these people are just as stubborn and irritable in real life.
But Usenet is the home of alt.tasteless and alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless, the first places I thought of looking. There was a smattering of requests for any and all Cobain "headshots". However, these were outnumbered by requests for the usual alt.tasteless fare: pictures of people defecating on each other or performing sex acts on animals.
But a few people had posted ersatz Cobain pictures: photos of fatal head wounds scanned in from medical and ballistic textbooks or old issues of Soldier of Fortune. Someone had even found the actual coroner's photos of serial killer Ed Gein's victims and posted them. And someone else was trying to pass off the now-famous wire service photo of Cobain's dead body (photographed from outside of the room) as a medical examiner's photo.
I briefly checked out the main Nirvana newsgroup, alt.music.nirvana. This was the last place I'd expect to see Kurdt's bloody skull. In the aftermath of Cobain's death, this group has been a refuge for fans who are still trying to make sense of something so bloody senseless.
In reading the various messages, one gets the sense that Kurt may be the first 'Net Messiah: his fans are documenting his brief career with the fervor of early Christians. Every word he ever wrote, every single gig he ever played, every minute part of his short, painful life is being documented, posted, spread out over the 'net like a new Gospel. At the very least, he will have achieved the legendary status of James Dean or Jim Morrison; people will flock to his grave to pour alcohol on it or leave syringes and Marlboro Lights.
Alt.music.nirvana does have a dark side to it: a number of fans have taken to Courtney-bashing in a BIG way, blaming her for his addiction, the band's break-up, and his death. And although much of this is attributed to "insiders", it's all unsubstantiated and probably unverifiable. Did she really tell Frances Bean that Evan Dando was her father? (Poor kid!) Did she really sleep with Michael Stipe a week after Kurdt's death? Who cares?
I checked out a few of the other music newsgroups, as well as the drugs, firearms, and current-events groups. No dice. But the search for Cobain's head was really a trip into the long dark 'Net of the Amerikan psyche: a place where Kurt and Courtney and Frances and Ed Gein enjoy a picnic amidst fields of data and rushing streams of bytes.