Kurt Cobain

In January 1992, Nirvana's Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson's Dangerous off the top of the Billboard album chart. A record by a scruffy trio from Aberdeen, Washington, had displaced the biggest pop star in the world, and the music industry spent the next several years trying to sign anything that sounded like it. Kurt Cobain, who wrote the songs, was 24 and deeply uncomfortable with what had happened.

He was born at 7:38 p.m. on February 20, 1967, in Aberdeen, according to his birth certificate. His Sun is at the very start of Pisces in the sixth house, with Mercury in Pisces beside it. Pisces is the most sensitive sign of the zodiac, absorbent, empathetic and easily overwhelmed; the sixth governs daily life, health and the body. A Pisces Sun in the sixth describes someone for whom everyday existence takes a real toll, and Cobain suffered for years from chronic stomach pain that doctors never fully explained.

His parents divorced when he was nine, an event he later described as a turning point in his childhood, and he spent his teens moving between relatives' homes. He formed Nirvana with Krist Novoselic in 1987. Their first album, Bleach, came out on the Seattle label Sub Pop in 1989, and with the drummer Dave Grohl the band recorded Nevermind for a major label two years later.

His Moon and Jupiter are both in Cancer in the tenth house, the zone of career and public life. Cancer is the sign of feeling and vulnerability, and with the Moon in the tenth, a person's emotional life tends to become public. Cobain's songs made private pain into anthems, and audiences responded to that rawness. With Jupiter there too, the response was enormous.

Virgo is on his Ascendant, a sign associated with self-criticism and high standards. Cobain was famously ambivalent about success, critical of his own work and wary of the mainstream audience that had embraced it. Nirvana's next album, In Utero, was deliberately harsher, and the band's MTV Unplugged session, recorded in November 1993, showed a quieter, more vulnerable side that many fans consider his finest performance.

Venus and Saturn fall in Pisces in the seventh house of partnership. He married the musician Courtney Love in 1992, and their daughter, Frances Bean, was born that year.

Cobain struggled with depression and addiction, and in April 1994 he died by suicide at 27. Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, and the songs he wrote in a few short years still sound like the moment an era changed.

If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available; in the United States, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.