Kurt Cobain: The Journals [Hardcover]

I bought this book right after it came out. I read it during moments snatched from days and nights of a lot of academic work. When you open the book, it warns you 'not to read the diary when I (Kurt Cobain) am gone..' but my curiosity got the better of me. I read on to find a rather articulate and meticulous person (who else will make a checklist for every stop of the tour bus that includes 'check oil' and 'check tyres'?) quite different from the drugged persona that means a rock star to you and me. A chronicle of the way Kurt Cobain changed over time, it makes you wonder about 'success' in general and 'rock star success' in specific. Curiously there can be deep introspective moments but that was just my experience.

Strangely enough just around that time, we were discussing the changing concept of copyright in network economics. Besides I am deeply interested in privacy technologies and the social debate around it. In all, I experienced a terrible dilemma with this book - by buying this, was I aiding and abetting privacy violation (even posthumous) or copyright violation (since these are not Courtney Love's diaries so how could she publish them???).. Any guesses?

Read it only if you can deal with the conflicting emotions that rightly overcome you when you read someone's diary without their knowledge or consent.. 4 stars for the depressing times this caused me, when I could least afford the time..

I guess only Nirvana fans are reading this, hence the 5 stars. If you don't have much knowledge of Nirvana or Kurt Cobain, then this book will feel out of context. That's not a criticism of the book, because here we have a collection of personal notes by Kurt, to himself, without chapter headings, introductions or even dates.

Certainly it is without question an interesting read, and you will get something out of the experience of reading it. And nowhere else, are we 'privileged' enough to read such explicit and personal information.

But this review comes with a warning. Kurt Cobain was awash with contradiction. This book makes you question your beliefs about him, and it would be easy to assume an honesty in his writing that would lead to the conclusion that KC was manipulative and calculated - that his sincerity was a front. The ambition and drive for success that he so often mocked, is reflected from his very thoughts.

5 stars because I feel privileged to have this information available to me, that it appears uncensored, that we get a little closer to one of our most prolific artists in living memory.

Let me end on one final concern. Throughout reading this book, and now with its poignant remarks stored in my mind, I continue to wonder whether it was right to read it. Have we betrayed him, have we sold him out?

Goddamit. This is wrong. So wrong. This is like reading the diary of your best friend and realising that he's realising that he's as mundane, dull, and screwed up as you are. It breaks every last ounce of credibility that Courtney Love has : she's auctioning off the inner thoughts of a dead man who would, no doubt, be horrified to know that his wife is bankrolling his neurosis now her career has dried up.

Maybe that's why Chris Novoselic refuses to read it.

"If you read it, you'll judge" it says, scrawled in some immature pen. But who we judge is not Cobain. But Courtney. A fading, falling half-star, doomed to disintegrate on re-entry into the real world, trying to insulate themselves from their inevitable fall and their status as a has-been. A woman who sold the most private thoughts of her suicidal husband to the highest bidder.

Because she has nothing left to sell. Being a widow is not a long-term career option. It didn't even work for Yoko. And nobody's interested in a temperamental, not very successful artist who hasn't had a hit in years.

But the "Kurt Cobain's Journals" aren't that. They're not journals. They were never meant to be read. They're the disjointed, half-formed notebook rambling of a mid-US nobody who became an icon junkie rock star. Self-disgust is self-obsession honey, and Cobains favourite subject is always, always, always himself, existing in his own, insular world of punk rock poverty and an inferiority complex larger than the sun.

Letters are malformed, words mis-spelt, shrunken, twisted. Everything in Kurt Cobains world is crushed and mutated. Not only is it physically difficult to decipher the meaning from the boyish scrawl, This should never have been published. It has no artistic merit in terms of content, there is no moral justification for its publication, and is nothing more, and nothing less, than graverobbing.

That's the impression I get here. On cheap notebook paper, scrawled in biro, Cobain makes friends with old vinyl records and his insecurities, obsessing over his own flaws, pitying his lot, obsessed with his fears : women, sex, security. He painted himself as a victim for so long, adopted the role as his own, and when fortune smiled upon him, he simply switched neurosis' to another object of disgust : his own self-disgust was such that his perception of reality would not allow him to tolerate himself as anything but a victim. And so he invented narcolepsy to absolve his problems, complained of a legendary yet possibly non-existent stomach ailment, and became the kind of tedious bore that the truly self-obsessed become.

Ultimately, what these disjointed, non-linear, scrawls from a self-obsessed, self-disgusted, immature genius prove is that nothing is more tedious than depression. Every page is a variation upon the themes of inadequacy, fear, and a hatred : of himself, of others, of everything. Kurt's blind spot is that his prejudices against others were exactly the same brand of ignorant fear that he despised in others.

"Kurt Cobain's Journals" are a travesty. Aside from the odd, rare striking image that rises from the page, the quality of the writing, and the contents are dire, shopping list stuff. And these are the highlights.

Penguin, hang your heads in shame. Courtney, blow your head off with a shotgun. Readers, stick with the records. Don't fund this kind of heartless exploitation. It should have never been published. It should never be bought. It should never be read. It's heartless graverobbing exploitation of the dead who cannot defend themselves.

"Go on, take everything, take everything, I want you to
Go on, take everything, take everything, I dare you to"- Hole, Violet.