Had he lived, Kurt Cobain would have turned 46 years old today. A middle-aged man on his way to being 50. And if this February 20 is like the last few, my Twitter feed will be clogged with remembrances. A "Happy Birthday, Kurt," especially if it comes from someone famous, will be retweeted hundreds of times. Imagine yourself being wished a happy birthday in public, by strangers, after you were dead. It's an odd thing. But, from another angle, it makes perfect sense: It's teenagers leaving flowers at Jim Morrison's grave, without the plane fare to Paris. The eternal romance of the untimely death. As Lindsay Zoladz wrote in her Ordinary Machines column last week, people are still figuring out how to mourn online. Death in a world of binary numbers might mean something different. John Cage, writing in Silence, said, "Mushrooms grow most vigorously in the fall, the period of destruction, and the function of many of them is to bring about the final decay of rotting material. In fact, as I read somewhere, the world would be an impassible heap of old rubbish were it not for mushrooms and their capacity to get rid of it." But mushrooms are a strictly analog phenomena; in the digital world, the dead stuff keeps piling up.

If you live long enough, you see artists transform from people into icons. Death accelerates this process because it freezes the person in time; when the image becomes fixed, ideas start attaching themselves to it. Cobain was the first big rock star who seemed close to me in age and also like someone I might have hung out with. He was a dude from a crappy town who found a way to become someone else in part through aesthetics. He seemed nice enough. And approachable. I remember reading a feature on Nirvana in Details that said he had a freezer full of frozen Hungry Man dinners, and that's all he ate. At that moment in my life, I could relate. But in the 19 years since his death, he's gone from being a guy in a band into a meme, an idea, something that keeps cycling through culture in different ways depending on the current state of media. Ten years ago, that might have meant he appeared on magazine covers advertising retrospective features, but now that means he's showing up in Tumblr and Twitter and Facebook. Which means I experience him mostly through the internet.

Late last year, the famous "Top 50 by Nirvana" list, Cobain's handwritten tally of his favorite albums, wound its way around Tumblr. People look at it and feel a sense of recognition, and in that flash of "Hey, he was kind of like me," they reblog it. It's a tiny gesture that brings you just a little closer to him, if we can define "Kurt Cobain" as a media image instead of a person. An alliance, however small, is formed. And one of the reasons Cobain's outsider appeal endures is that he was that indie kid who liked to make lists and felt like an underdog. Attaching yourself to Cobain is a way of validating your own insecurity. He was the beautiful loser who, for a couple of years, somehow managed to win. But it wasn't enough to keep him in that place.

Reluctant fame carries a kind of nobility. When you see

someone who is loved by masses but doesn't quite know

how to handle it, you imagine yourself in that position.

Two pieces of Cobain's writing have become well known in their own right, and they are related. One, of course, is his suicide note, where he chastises himself for being a big baby unable to enjoy his success. And the other is the liner notes to 1992's Incesticide where, in addition to talking about the joy he's felt in being in the presence of heroes like the Raincoats, Jad Fair, and the Vaselines, he lays into an element of what he perceived to be a growing segment of his fanbase. "At this point I have a request for our fans," he wrote. "If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us-- leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records."

He had to know that this plea would not keep a single person from coming to a show or buying his records. Few admit to hating people like this; it's always someone else with these kinds of feelings, while individual people, including people like Cobain, rationalize their prejudices. But his note was an attempt, however feeble, to make Nirvana seem like something private, something exclusive, something that wasn't for the dreaded "jocks." Something more like the indie bands that he admired. The Raincoats and Half Japanese and Daniel Johnston presumably didn't have to worry about attracting people who hated homosexuals and women because their fans' very interest in the artist was predicated on identifying with those outside the white male power structure. Cobain did not have that luxury. That's also why, according to the same liner notes, he made a million dollars that year. Through the power of mass media, he had made himself and his music available to everybody. And while there were elements to that mass fame he surely enjoyed, there was a darker side that came with it.

Reluctant fame carries a kind of nobility. When you see someone who has the trappings of notoriety thrust at them, who is loved by masses but doesn't quite know how to handle it, you imagine yourself in that position. You'd never be quite convinced that you deserved it, but you would have no choice in the matter, because something you've done has touched people. It's a powerful fantasy for people who crave acceptance but can't escape a certain amount of social awkwardness. And it's another reason why Cobain has become a touchstone. There's something perfectly cyclical about it all; he was insecure, he wrote in notebooks about bands he admired, he got to meet those bands and tell them what they meant to him, he became famous and admired himself, and then, in death, he became an object of admiration to be scribbled in notebooks (usually digital, partly-public ones). And it begins again.

Cobain said that he missed the comfort in being sad. And when his visage is presented as an emblem, someone else is, in a

very small way, wallowing in that comfort.

Shared failings is one way to build a community of strangers that feels intimate. Cobain had a good sense of humor, and Nirvana had many funny gestures (witness the t-shirt that circulated after Bleach), but I'm not sure he ever wrote a song that could be described as "happy." To truly convey happiness, he had to turn to the songs of others, like the Nirvana covers of the Vaselines' "Son of a Gun" and "Molly's Lips". Self-loathing was an essential part of Cobain's enduring appeal, especially coming from someone so talented. The "Negative Creep". I listen to that song when I want to be reminded of intense pain. Cobain's voice through the second verse terrifies me. There is no concern for his physical well being or even his future as a vocalist in a rock band. He sings as intensely as he can possibly sing. Sometimes, when I'm listening loud, I think my headphones might be breaking up from the volume only to realize that the membrane being excited to the point of distortion is actually Cobain's larynx. And the simple lyrics are so perfect: "I'm a negative creep." That's pretty bad. You can imagine yourself sitting in a dark pool of loathing with that image. But then, guess what: You're stoned. You sink deeper. "Negative Creep" is a transmission, Cobain to you, and you've either felt it or you haven't.

Cobain said that he missed the comfort in being sad. And when his visage is presented as an emblem, someone else is, in a very small way, wallowing in that comfort. But he was a guy-- a talented guy-- but in the end just a guy. We think he was a good guy but we really have no idea; we know he was a drug addict and that he abandoned his family, but many of us overlook that because we think we understand his pain, and who are we to judge. But of course, we can't do the same for people in our own lives. Forgiveness in real life is much harder and more complicated, which is another alluring thing about interfacing to an iconic image: We get to practice feelings when the stakes are low.

If Cobain were alive now, you wonder if he'd be on Twitter. You can almost see him going off on rants and then deleting tweets and then deleting an account and maybe coming back later to apologize. Who knows. What we can say is that if he was still breathing today, he'd be older and probably less cool and definitely less beautiful and he'd be fading away just like the rest of us, and he'd be lucky for it.