This Is the Worst Possible Way to Start an Article About Kurt Cobain’s Death

It took two writers to come up with the worst lede you may ever read.

This is the actual beginning to an actual CNN article about a re-opened investigation into Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide.

(CNN) — “And I swear that I don’t have a gun.”

— Kurt Cobain, “Come As You Are”

Despite the pledge in those lyrics that went around the world in the early 1990s, police in Seattle say that Kurt Cobain did have at least one gun.

A shotgun. And he killed himself with it at age 27, their case concluded. Nothing has changed about that assessment 20 years after his death.

Naturally, this ridiculous beginning has inspired a whole bunch of morbid (and funny) copycats. From Deadspin:

“What else should I be? / All apologies.” Well, you can start by not being dead, Kurt Cobain. Apology not accepted.

“Monkey see, monkey do,” Kurt Cobain once pondered on “Stay Away.” Cobain must have watched a monkey commit suicide, because he did, too.

“What else should I say?” asked Kurt Cobain, who was probably unable to say much after the speech center of his brain was splattered onto the wall.

And the glorious Twitter hashtag #CNNLedes: