JANUARY 18, 1994

In SPIN's April 2004 tribute issue to Kurt Cobain, then senior writer Chuck Klosterman posed a compelling and unique question: "What would have happened if Cobain lived?" Below, read Klosterman's theory about what the rock god's future could have held, had he not died 16 years ago.

I looked at her, sleeping now. Her skinny body looked formless in her disheveled sweatshirt. Her mouth was slightly open, her large, beautiful brown eyes shut away. Her hair was flat and lifeless from traveling, lying in the darkened compartment in the pale, colorless illumination of the unseen station lights.

There are many people -- in fact, you may be one of them -- who devote much of their daily energy toward hearing about things first, even if those specific things don't particularly matter.

I don't know what I was doing in 1998. But it must have been awesome, because I can't remember one goddamn moment from that entire year.

Whenever historians examine the past, they tend to put forth one of two points: They either want to show how things today are totally different, or they want to argue that things are pretty much the same.