Reading something that was never meant for public scrutiny is an awkward experience – a privileged experience, but a voyeuristic one nonetheless. KnowReading something that was never meant for public scrutiny is an awkward experience – a privileged experience, but a voyeuristic one nonetheless. Knowing how much Kurt Cobain valued privacy and hated the tabloids, it almost felt wrong flipping through this selection from his diaries, published as Kurt Cobain Journals. He certainly wouldn’t have appreciated this level of penetration and exposure to the general public. As he aptly scrolled across the cover of one of his spiral-bound notebooks: “If you read, you’ll judge”. That’s a pretty clear message to the audience.
Although there aren’t any prefaces or footnotes to contextualize the journal entries that comprise this book, they seem to follow a loose chronological order, starting from at least 1987 and running up until about late 1993. There isn’t a clear sense of time in the anthology, and that’s probably my biggest problem with the publication. In one sense, it’s incredibly pure – we’re essentially seeing Xerox copies of Kurt’s journals during the most artistically fruitful years of his life. On the other hand, as a curated product, it misses an opportunity to situate Kurt’s thoughts within the period that gave rise to them. This lack of context is made even more disorienting, given the fact that Kurt rarely ever dated his own journal entries. A little more structure from the editor would have enriched the reading experience tenfold.
As for the journal entries themselves, they vary from the mundane to the profound. We see glimpses into Kurt’s everyday existence – philosophical ramblings, cartoons and doodles, grocery lists, and even study notes for a driving test. We also see things that would eventually take on greater significance within the context of rock music history – bits of song lyrics, poems, letters to record labels, and art for band merchandise. It’s a tremendous cultural resource and a real treat for the diehard Nirvana fans.
For me personally, one of the coolest things about his journals is that they show off the free-associative and haphazard development of his song lyrics. Some lyrics appear to have spewed out fully-formed, while others – including “Smells Like Teen Spirit” – have several different incarnations throughout the journals. This is probably why Kurt liked to switch his lyrics up during live shows. Over the years, some people have speculated that he did this to piss off the audience and shrug off the inauthentic fans. That’s probably true, but I think it also reflected a deeper commitment to freedom of expression and a recognition of the slipperiness of language.
The journals also support and contradict a lot of what we know – or think we know – about Kurt’s life. For instance, perusing the journals, you get a clear sense of Kurt’s mental health and the depths of his despair. Heaps of entries illustrate his chronic depression, self-loathing, anxiety, insecurity, substance abuse, and suicidality. “I bought a gun but chose drugs instead”, he writes following Nirvana’s Australian tour and a brief period of sobriety. There’s also a story where he tried to commit suicide on the train tracks in Aberdeen, only for the train to rush by on the adjacent set of tracks. The suicidal ideation he felt was clearly more than angsty posturing. Elsewhere, he ruminated: “[…] this little pit-stop we call life, that we so seriously worry about is nothing but a small, over the week end jail sentence, compared to what will come with death. Life isn’t nearly as sacred as the appreciation of passion.” We also see that “In Utero” was originally titled “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die”. Passages like those make me wonder how conspiracy theorists can actually believe he didn’t commit suicide, when all the evidence points directly toward suicidality as consistent with Kurt’s past thinking and behaviour. It’s dark and depressing stuff, and the journals get progressively angrier and more paranoid as Kurt approached the end of his life.
However, the journals also challenge many of the long-held assumptions that have become self-evident truths. One thing that quickly becomes apparent in the journals is just how ambitious, driven, and dedicated he was. Far from the apathetic slacker mythos that was pinned to him, Kurt’s intense, almost militant work ethic is evident all throughout the journals. On May 24th, 1988, he wrote a severance letter to one of Nirvana’s early drummers, just before Chad Channing joined the band. In the letter, Kurt writes: “A band needs to practice, in our opinion, at least 5 times a week if the band ever expects to accomplish anything.” Kurt was also a meticulous list-maker and liked to write down his priorities to the band in numbered bullet points. There’s one journal entry titled, “Things the band needs to do”, which lists four items in such a way that suggests they are akin to moral imperatives. A fifth bullet point is left blank, as if to suggest that there will always be something else to do.
Indeed, for an individual that was marketed as the poster boy of Generation-X, Kurt certainly seemed to care quite deeply about a wide range of things. Above all else, his unwavering commitment to musical expression and liberty stands unquestioned. “Punk rock is art”, he writes. “Punk rock to me means freedom. The only problem I’ve had with the situationists (sic) punk rock ethic is that absolute denial of anything sacred. I find a few things sacred, such as the superiority of women and the negro contributions to art. I guess what I’m saying is that, art is sacred. Punk rock is freedom. Expression and right to express is vital. Anyone can be artistic.” Kurt was an anarchist but not a nihilist – he obviously had his sights on the mainstream and broad appeal, but the catch was that he wanted to achieve this level of fame on his own terms, and to maintain complete control over his image and artistic output.
Lastly, I want to comment on the political and ideological dimensions of Nirvana, as they were expressed throughout Kurt’s journals. This dimension is often overlooked when people discuss the cultural significance of Nirvana and the grunge movement. In his journals, Kurt wrote that the idea behind the band name, “Nirvana”, was to express the absolute transcendental freedom heralded by the punk rock movement. As mentioned, for Kurt, punk rock meant unrestrained freedom from this-worldly pain and oppression. He understood the punk ethos as a revolutionary, anarchist vehicle for generational transformation, and he wanted to be the figure to introduce punk to the popular landscape. Similar to Timothy Leary, Kurt wanted to “turn on” the youth to punk rock and, in the process, divorce them from the social ills they inherited from their parents. Misogyny, racism, greed, gluttony, homophobia, hierarchies – all of these traditional values would be put on the chopping block in Kurt’s lyrics.
According to Kurt, the only way to accomplish revolutionary change on a broad scale was through a major label. However, there was a tension at play here, between the underground and commercial spheres. How does a punk rocker sell records and spread ideas without selling out? The answer, he thought, was facetiousness. If he could pretend to be mainstream, then he could disseminate punk rock anarchism to the masses through his music. Around the time that Nirvana signed to Geffen, Kurt wrote: “Posing as the enemy to infiltrate the mechanics of the empire and slowly start its rot from the inside, its an inside job – it starts with the custodians and the cheerleaders. And ends with the entertainers. The youth are waiting, impatiently.”
By the time 1994 came around, things obviously didn’t work out that way. Nirvana and the Seattle underground scene had been completely co-opted and commercialized by major labels, as the punk rock ethos became subsumed under the highly palatable “grunge” and “alternative” genres. Rather than swaying the Right over to the Left with their music, Nirvana became equally trendy among the groups that Kurt actually despised. I remember quite vividly how often “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was played as a hockey warm-up song in the 1990s. The irony of that is not lost on me now. It represents the paradoxical and oxymoronic aspirations of Kurt as both ambitious and non-comformist.
In the end, Nirvana succeeded commercially and critically, but may have failed politically – or did they? Many underground bands and fringe artists were given major record deals in the immediate aftermath of Nirvana’s discovery, such as The Melvins, Dinosaur Jr., Daniel Johnston, and even The Butthole Surfers. An entire generation of kids were encouraged to start their own garage bands, while mainstream radio DJs began to dig a little deeper into local music scenes. Maybe that is a political success in its own right?...more
Let me preface this by saying that I’m a huge fan of Errol Morris’ documentary films. I went into this essay/coffee table book assuming it would relatLet me preface this by saying that I’m a huge fan of Errol Morris’ documentary films. I went into this essay/coffee table book assuming it would relate more to his filmmaking, or his ideas about media and the search for knowledge. I was mistaken, and that’s the reason I found this so disappointing.
What this book actually is, is a critical précis of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, situated amidst a series of anecdotes offered by Morris during his time at Princeton. Unfortunately, I’ve never read Kuhn, nor am I particularly well-versed in the analytic tradition. As a result, many of the philosophers he references go completely over my head.
Admittedly, this isn’t Morris’ fault - I expected a certain type of book, and I got another. I’ll have to follow up by reading Kuhn, Quine, Frege, Kripke, Ayer, and the later Wittgenstein. Once I do that, maybe I will get more from Morris’ essay the second time around.
If you are unfamiliar with the analytic tradition, including the various thinkers in the philosophy of science, mathematics, linguistics and logic, I would skip this book....more
Loading...
