In the past, we didn’t like our rock stars hurt. We wanted gods, larger-than-life beings immune to everyday humdrum. We wanted Springsteen, embodying the rugged ideals of the blue-collar man, without the chronic back pain. We wanted David Bowie, beaming in from another planet, his identity as flexible as ours was static. We wanted Mick Jagger and Robert Plant yowling and strutting their way through an unabashedly rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.

But something changed in 1991. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was on its way to cultural ubiquity, and three schlubby dudes from Seattle were on the fast track to becoming the defining rock band of their time. At the center of it all was Kurt Cobain, as enigmatic a rock god as we’ve ever seen. This past Saturday, April 5, was the 20th anniversary of his suicide.

Cobain wailed with a predatorial ferocity but was so clearly a broken soul that you couldn’t help but feel for him. His aspirations were grand, but once he exceeded those ambitions by more than he could ever imagine, it was too much—the fame, the scrutiny, the crippling burden of being the man who brought “real” music back to the radio, who saved MTV from complete domination by factory-produced pop stars and hair metal douchebags. Perhaps we loved him because he was at once like us, and completely beyond anything we could comprehend. It didn’t hurt that he was devastatingly handsome but completely unwilling to exploit those good looks the way industry bigwigs must have hoped he would.

But above all, he was a fine songwriter. While he’s often linked with the grunge scene he brought to the mainstream, his music shared more with Husker Du, Pixies and Metallica than Alice in Chains. Grunge was slow and muddy—metal without the speed, punk without the fury. Much as it was portrayed as a clean break from corporate hair metal, the macho posturing embodied by W. Axl Rose and the like was very much in grunge’s DNA. The brawny groans, the impossibly low guitar tunings—this was manly music for manly men, a notion that Cobain rejected entirely.

Cobain hated the jocks and bullies that turned to alternative rock after grunge’s explosion. He would rather wear dresses and lipstick than cutoffs; he would rather tell you how he felt than hide behind long hair and torn flannel. To a generation defined by malaise spurred by the sanitized family values of the Reagan era, Cobain was real. As legend has it, kids were sick of Michael Jackson and Madonna and New Kids on the Block. Hip-hop had yet to break into the mainstream, so Cobain and his alternative-rock compatriots were the cutting edge, the scruffy punks crashing the major label party, spray-painting the walls and leaving cigarette ash on the marble floors. Though pop has grown weirder and richer in recent years (thank you, Timbaland and The Neptunes), when’s the last time you heard anything as abrasive as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on Top 40 radio?

The talent was clear from the beginning. Recorded for a scant $606.17, “Bleach,” Nirvana’s debut album, certainly suffered from low-grade production, but that beautiful rage peeked out from beneath these unassuming tunes. “No recess!” Cobain howls on “School,” a sentiment that perfectly captures his creative adolescence on this first go-round. This was an album full of slight pleasures rendered at a scale Nirvana would soon obliterate. Like particularly talented high schoolers fiddling around in their garage, Nirvana was feeling out the searing riffs and earwormy hooks they’d refine on “Nevermind.” Hearing these songs next to “Nevermind” cuts on live recordings, it becomes clear that “Bleach”’s limitations were a combination of a band not yet able to wield the earth-shaking fury they’d later develop, and low-grade recording equipment that stripped some of the muscle from promising compositions.

Then came “Nevermind.” Though it had its own production problems, you couldn’t deny that Butch Vig knew how to make guitars crunch, drums pound, vocals shred. The problem lay more in the radio rock sheen that sanded off many of the band’s rough edges. Sure, the record’s punk influences were radical by pop radio standards, but Nirvana still had plenty of aggression bubbling beneath the surface. Regardless, “Nevermind” is a deft infusion of punk grit into pop structures, casting its net wide enough for all comers. There was chaos, to be sure, but it was a tightly structured chaos, exploding in paradoxically controlled bursts. This manifested itself in Nirvana’s signature quiet-verse, loud-chorus structure that made the explosions all the more violent.

It was on Nirvana’s final long-play studio album, “In Utero,” that Cobain and his bandmates would flourish into a take-no-prisoners force of nature. Where “Nevermind” tidied up Cobain’s loose ends, “In Utero” unraveled to haunting effect. By this point, Cobain was struggling mightily with the immense pressures of stardom, making “In Utero” both catharsis and a cry for help. Though Cobain’s lyrics often found more meaning in their delivery than their text, lines as nakedly revealing as “What is wrong with me” and “Look on the bright side is suicide,” read like direct transmissions from Cobain’s tortured psyche. Cobain howled with complete disregard for his vocal chords on “In Utero”’s nastiest moments. That undercurrent of hurt that marked his previous work was now frighteningly real. His life and art had become one, and it’s that straight-from-the-gut pathos that makes “In Utero” a deeply affecting listen all these years later.

One gets the sense that this was the Nirvana that Cobain had intended. Much as he aspired to some level of cultural recognition and influence, one can perceive hints of discomfort in “Nevermind”’s MTV-approved sound. This was a band that wanted their guitars distorted, their vocals hoarse. It’s a shame they were only able to reach these rip-roaring heights once, but perhaps they would have changed gears had Cobain lived. He’d indicated in interviews he wanted to turn down the abrasion on the band’s next release, and if their truly stunning “MTV Unplugged” performance is any indication, the results could have matched “In Utero” in terms of raw expressiveness.

It’s in these relatively spare performances that Cobain’s gifts as a songwriter become undeniable. Without the noise, Cobain becomes an open wound, his songs transformed into confessions. As the first release following his death, “MTV Unplugged” is imbued with the weight of finality; one of the all-time greats was no longer, his ghost lingering over a generation that continues to reflect his influence.

While he was ultimately left to serve too many servants, Cobain lives on, whether through Drake’s bleeding-heart confessionals or Cloud Nothings’ raucous pop punk. Here’s to all he shared with us in his brief time, and to all the great music that followed. Thanks, Kurt.