Ten years ago, when Kurt Cobain made good on all the pain and sadness that made him a star and left his lifeless body for an electrician to discover, it hit me hard enough that I responded in the Post-Gazette -- as a Nirvana fan and fellow geek -- by comparing his suicide to the 1980 murder of John Lennon.

"Unlike any pop star since Lennon," I reasoned, "Cobain truly was the voice of a generation, so perfectly attuned to the spirit of the times, only a commentator as near-sighted as Rush Limbaugh would dismiss him as 'human debris' and suggest the media move on to more important issues like spelling bees. Sure, 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' is no 'Give Peace a Chance,' but this is not 1969, either. Today's kids are way more cynical than that. And nobody tapped into their youthful angst more brilliantly than Cobain."

A lot of that was clearly true.

Rush Limbaugh is a fool.

And even if you couldn't always wrap your head around Cobain's lyrics, there was something in the way he put those words across that tapped into the youthful angst of being young more brilliantly -- and yes, with more exuberance -- than any other rocker of his generation.

But now that the shock of his death has faded to nostalgia and we've had 10 years to think about it, is it fair to place him on the level of a Lennon?

No, not to either artist.

Cobain was still growing, still finding the voice that would in theory have eventually made "Nevermind" as emblematic of his life and music as "Please Please Me" is of Lennon's.

He'd already tapped into his inner R.E.M. fan on that "MTV Unplugged" appearance, captured on a posthumous release that still sounds fresh and very much alive today.

And "Nevermind"? It hasn't aged a bit -- a flawless collision of decades of punk and indie sensibilities with elements of power pop, garage punk, hard rock, even bubble gum all held together by a voice that shared its pain like "Plastic Ono Band" without the gory details. It's an intimate explosion, every ragged note in place, a celebration of and simultaneous recoiling from teen spirit, candy-coated as it is abrasive with a sense of urgency that made it feel as real at 10-times-platinum as it did the day it hit the streets.

It's not his fault it sold. And yet, it is. He didn't sell punk out, but he connected with the masses in a way a lot of bands who worked a whole lot harder for a whole lot longer couldn't.

That's the part of Cobain's legacy that matters most today -- the music, from the harder-rocking highlights of Nirvana's early work on Sub Pop through the multi-platinum hooks of "Nevermind" and the punk-credibility ploy that was "In Utero" to that amazing MTV appearance, where he'd stripped the music to its bare essentials and it held up like a champ, suggesting that Nirvana's greatest work was yet to come.

As for his impact on the course of music history? To celebrate his storming of the Bastille of mainstream American thought in the name of skinny punk-rock losers everywhere, you'd have to dock him points for where that revolution left us. More lame music was created in the name of cashing in on "Nevermind" and "alternative rock" than in the name of cashing in on teen pop or even the hair metal bands of the '80s.

Worse than that, the "revolution" took the life-affirming music of the freaks and geeks and sold it down the river to the very kids who would have beaten Cobain senseless for being a sensitive, cardigan-wearing Nancy-boy before he topped the charts.

Some victory.

So nevermind the revolution. If you want to celebrate Nirvana's legacy, it's in the music. Always was and always will be.