What if Kurt Cobain hadn't killed himself? Where would he be right now? Where would we be right now? Those sorts of questions are fun to ponder because the answers are open to debate, but one thing's for certain: If Cobain was still alive, we wouldn't be wasting our time reading Journals.
A recently published collection of Cobain's surviving notebooks, Journals covers, roughly, the last five years of the Nirvana frontman's life. There's very little explanation -- not even an introduction or preface -- to accompany the reproduced journal pages contained in Journals. Just the promise of an uncensored, pure glimpse of Cobain's handwritten ramblings, tirades, thoughts, and fears.
The allure of such a book is obvious. Dead for -- good lord, can it be true? -- eight years now, Cobain left with his legend intact. An iffy but forgivable debut, two classic studio albums, and two posthumous live records (one of them a classic in its own right), Nirvana hit its peak early and then ended on a creative high note. The tragic, pungent finality of a suicide only succeeded in emphasizing the galvanic spirit of his songs; it's as if by killing himself he proved how deeply he cared about the music.
But Journals doesn't offer much insight into either his artistic process or into him as a person. By now, everything about Cobain's persona is so well documented that his essence could be boiled down to a movie tagline: Loser. Rocker. Junkie. Genius. Superstar. Suicide. Perhaps the hope of books like Journals -- or biographies such as last year's Heavier Than Heaven by Charles Cross -- is to strip away the legend to get down to the real person. But it doesn't happen too often here. Journals, in its own haphazard way, does present the timeline of a young, ambitious, messed-up kid who stumbled his way into fame, but the book is so stuffed with inconsequential, off-putting writings that it serves merely as a footnote in an essential musician's life. Obviously, Cobain had no idea that these random letters, drawings, music video ideas, self-righteous screeds, and band bios would eventually be marketed as a solemn-as-death black hardcover book for 35 bucks. Nevertheless, the coffee-table seriousness of its design belies the lack of connective tissue lurking within its pages.
Cobain was by no means an obsessive cataloguer of his daily life -- and also several notebooks have gone missing, adding to the incompleteness of Journals -- and so we only get little scarps of the man's inner workings, not to mention the hints of his later greatness. A throwaway line in a letter to a friend will end up reappearing in a future song. His first lyrics, unfocused bromides, will give way to a growing surrealism and sophistication. (The evolution of "All Apologies" over time is one of the tome's few moments when you sense an artist developing in front of your very eyes.) We get glimmers, clues, encouraging signs, but the book has no momentum, no thrill of watching a talent blossoming, no gradual ah-ha as a songwriter comes into his own. It happened in real life, but it's largely absent in Journals.
Meanwhile, these entries barely hint at the rich contradictions of this man's personality. Part of Cobain's ability as a songwriter was instant empathy -- even the sicko narrator of "Polly" feels as real and knowable as yourself. Journals finds a Cobain bitching about popular music he hates, raving about the bands he worships, but only rarely discussing his own creative impulses -- what makes him tick. Discouragingly, when he does open up, he usually just sounds like one more disaffected slacker whining about his problems, as if no one else is suffering through the same family, school, and social insecurities. He talks in inane generalities about conspiracy theories, government bureaucracies, and record-label evils with the full head of steam we associate with snot-nosed little punks who haven't lived enough to have their own opinions. He sounds like the sort of lazy simpleton the media was trying to categorize all of Gen-X as -- the sort of cliche that Nirvana helped to personalize in order to satirize and destroy it.
Reading Journals, you long for the sardonic wit, exhibited in such classics as "Lithium" and "On A Plain," which put withering themes of depression and self-doubt in their proper perspective. In his music, Cobain bravely walked the line between pathos and aggression -- it made his despondent songs palatable and stirring. The book, in contrast, is a scary indicator of what Cobain might have been if he hadn't possessed an impossibly perfect sense of melody with which to leaven his angst.
With its poor grammar, spelling, and unfocused thoughts, the writing in Journals, oddly enough, only serves to emphasize what a brilliant musician he was. Nevermind is funny and corrosive and still fresh after more than 10 years. (Even his collected drawings have an impish and sometimes obscene sense of humor.) But his writings fail to capture the imagination -- they speak to his lack of formal education and overall disinterest in schooling. His method of expression went beyond prose, as Journals makes all too clear.
Even as a behind-the-scenes look at the ensuing train wreck of his life -- as the heroin habit eventually consumes him -- Journals offers little in terms of harrowing detail. Maybe psychiatrists can interpret the hidden signals in these missives -- references to a mysterious "heroine" character or whatever -- but again these notebooks feel negligible to the task of illuminating an individual. Unlike the frightening imagery and drug-dependent urgency of In Utero, the most insightful revelation about his habit is scribbled on some Italian hotel stationery, right at the book's conclusion. Still, even as he attempts to chronicle the life of an addict, his observations are obvious ("every junkie I've ever met has fought with it ... until finally they have to resort to becoming a slave to another drug, the 12-step program, which is in itself another drug/religion"). Omitting his suicide note, Journals ends as it began, incomplete and frustrating.
"Teenage angst has paid off well," he famously sang at the outset of In Utero, sarcastic as always. He was referring to becoming a star thanks to his self-deprecating, self-hating negativity. Suddenly, being a loser had worked to his advantage, made him rich, turned him into a phenomenon. But dying has paid off even better for him than his teenage angst ever could have. Genius is an elusive, mysterious thing -- especially when that genius dies young and (he thinks) romantically. The rest of us, with our feeble mortal brains, can only wonder how the lucky few get that way, and so we pour over books like Journals for keys to unlock the mystery. But, there are no answers between these covers. Maybe the idea was to make Kurt Cobain human again -- to do away with the mystique -- but this collection almost does too good a job of that. In fact, it's stunning how inarticulate and uninteresting he comes across. Somehow, I don't think that's the type of revelation Journals meant to convey about its creator.
