Kurt Cobain's diaries: Rape me, my friend

Cafe Society
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Cobain’s song about the invasive media, “Rape Me”, has new relevance now with Courtney Love’s desperate ploy to extend her 15 minutes of fame. She’s no longer a musician, not much of an actress and her Versace days are behind her so she’s playing the only card she has left: her brief association with her brilliant ex-husband. Yoko Ono did the same thing. This is shamelessly exploitative, pure and simple.

I’m totally against these diaries being released, since it’s clear form his music and interviews that Cobain would’ve hated the idea. But that won’t prevent me from buying a copy. The excerpts that’ve been released so far are surprisingly well-written and often very funny: “I want to die before becoming Pete Townsend”; “I would only wear a tie-dye if it was dyed in the urine of Jerry Garcia and the blood of Phil Collins.” There’s the occasional tendecy toward the sophomoric, punk posturing that marred some of the songs, but mostly they’re morbidly fascinating. At the very least, they’re interesting from a clinical point of view as detailed records of a severe, lifelong depression. They also put to rest any conspiracy theories about Cobain’s death. Eight years berore his suicide he very explicitly laid out a plan in one of his journals to become a big rockstar and then kill himself in a blaze of glory (suicides often plan their deaths years in advance).

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Forgot to post link to excerpts:

http://www.observer.co.uk/kurtcobain/image/0,12534,814904,00.html

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I have to admit, I did read the Newsweek article with some excerpts from the diary. But, I wont buy the book. I just keep thinking about their kid and it makes the whole printing of the diaries seem very twisted and wrong. She’s just a kid, and not only does she have to deal with her dad commiting suicide, she’s got the WHOLE frickin world reading all the intimate details. Just seem wrong. I really respect the surviving ex-nirvana members for not wanting any part of this diary thing. I think they probably knew Cobain the best and would have a pretty good idea of how he would feel about all of this.

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So… yeah.

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My gripe with these, besides the previously mentioned fact these were Kurt’s private journals, is that since Courtney Love, as executor of the estate, surely edited them to cast herself in a positive light.

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My unconfirmed suspicion about people who keep diaries is that, deep down, whether they will admit or not, they all eventually want the diaries to be read by others. Posthumously, but eventually. There is always posturing and posing in one’s diary, an assumption of various guises, including how thoughtful and soul-searching am I.

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How old is their daughter now?

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I speak here as a man who collects diaries and journals and has a collection ranging from the 1700’s to the 1950s.

It’s perfectly legitimate to publish or otherwise make available a dead persons diaries or journals (or whatever you’d like to call it). Often it’s the raw source material that speaks most truthfully of the times (far better than predigested work that scholars have already argued over).

That said, the two lines the OP quoted are, indeed, sophomoric and self-absorbed.

Don’t get me wrong, Cobain has a strong resonance with me. When he died I felt it almost physically. That may have had something to do with the fact that he was born 5 days before me. Hard to believe he’d be 35 now, isn’t it?

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Frances Bean was born on August 18, 1992. So she’d be 10 now.

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Perhaps Kurt Cobain was in fact a genius in his own right. I don’t personally think so, but that’s just my opinion. I nevertheless always find it suspect when Nirvana fans label him as such, because it always seems like for a lot of them Nirvana was the only band they ever knew that had any kind of connection to the punk rock scene that produced that band. Nirvana was really swell, and every interview and writing of Kurt Cobain’s that I have read leaves me with no doubt that he was an intelligent, kind, and creative individual. But Nirvana were participants in a scene cluttered with far greater talents, and most of the “Cobain was a genius” camp are either ignore this or are unaware of this.

Having said that, a few things in the OP stuck in my craw:

Really? I’d love to see a cite for this (though I realize there is probably none available). Yoko Ono is an easy target, especially since she hasn’t been in the public eye for a while.

Please tell me you are being ironic here.

I read that excerpt in the British music mag Q, and I recall that it sounded like a grossly misinterpreted sarcastic comment to me (regardless of his actual suicidal tendencies).

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While I would hardly expect Newsweek to be the final authority on Kurt Cobain, if the rest of the book is similar to this, it should fulfill Cobain’s worries that Nirvana will end up like Kajagoogoo of the ‘90s. Instead of showing him as a musical genius, insightful and smart, he comes across as your typical teen-age whiner. Worse, the excerpts indicate that he was a phony, manufacturing a rebellious image that backfired when Nirvana’s “Nevermind” shot to number one.

This could have come from Sony’s marketing plan. Make no mistake, Cobain knew he wanted to be successful. He just didn’t want to be too successful, because he would lose credibility and be accused of “selling out.”

Later, in an unpublished letter to his fans, Kurt tries to send up the media’s image of him – “How I’m a notoriously fucked up heroine addict, alcoholic, self destructive, yet overtly sensitive, frail, fragile, soft spoken, narcoleptic, neurotic, little pissant who at any minute is going to O.D. jump off a roof wig out blow my head off or all 3 at once” – only it sounds uncannily accurate.

The Cobain that comes across in Newsweek works hard on Nirvana, but its success led him to question the quality of his work. He’s deeply in love with his newborn daughter, yet can’t tough out the ride to take care of her. He could claim, “I am not a junkie,” forgetting that in an earlier letter he wrote “As you may have guessed by now I’ve been taking to a lot of drugs lately.” He hated the popularity, but couldn’t walk away from it.

Depression can excuse the way Cobain decided to solve his problems in the end. When you’re in that cycle, the world is shut out and nothing matters but the pain. Absolutely nothing else matters. But up until that point, the game is still in your own hands. You still decide what you want to do with your life, and during that time, Cobain made terrible choices, associated with the wrong people, and ultimately didn’t have the strength to do what needed to be done.

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:smack:

Can you really not see that this excerpt is positively dripping with irony, or are you being deliberately obtuse?

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I agree with pesch, there, Kyomara. I think you’re reaching for the irony.

Cobain always struck me a too intelligent to drip with irony in a diary. What’s the point if no one’s going to see it? If he was writing with irony he was just fooling himself.

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I don’t get this at all. No one writes ironically in their own diary? I do. Friends do. People write how they talk. Being ironic is not the same as trying to fool someone.

Kurt Cobain makes fun of the trappings of fame so many times in his diaries, I can’t believe people think that hyperbolic statements like “which we plan to incorporate into all our videos” as straight comments.

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…I’m more offended that the guy is called a genius than his diaries getting released.

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Jonathon Chance:

It is incredible that you are able to speak with such authority about the diary of a person you do not know at all. It may be tempting to simplify other people for your own amusement, but in reality diaries are not repositories of literal truth.

Kyomara:

Exactly.

The problem with trying to interpret diaries is that everything that is written in them is only a small part of the story. You have to remember that a diary is written for a particular person, who happens to have great knowledge of the thoughts behind the words, and because of that what is written may be the exact opposite of the truth, may be just a passing thought, may be irony, and while this would be immediately recognizable to the intended audience, it is completely over most peoples’ heads.

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Reaching? For the irony? Have you ever heard Nirvana? Do you remember the 90’s at all?

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This makes me terribly sad.

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“Self-absorbed”? Um, isn’t that sort of the point of keeping a diary?

And I used the word sophomoric to describe just a few of the excerpted entries, mostly the earlier ones. Overall, his observations are astute and phrased well.

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Walloon: I’m not sure I’m with you when you say that, deep down, diary writers actually want their words to be read. Just take what are probably the two most famous diaries of all time: the journals of Samuel Pepys and Anne Frank. In the first we find constant references to his masturbation habits and his favorite pornography. In the second, Frank writes about the sort of things any adolescent girl would be mortified to have anyone read: crushes on boys, her feelings about getting her period, and interest in sex. The thought that future generations might read these things as insight into the world of the 16th and mid-20th centuries never entered their heads. To tell the truth, that’s what makes them great–they’re written unself-consciously and without a trace of self-importance or notion that what they’re writing has historical import.

Cobain’s journals are another example. They’re clearly meant only for himself. First, they’re written in a barely legible, problem-child scrawl–only Cobain could make everything out. Second, a lot of it is utterly mundane shit: an early half-completed resume for a janatorial position and his mother’s recipe for seafood salad.

As far the irony the thing goes, I think Kyomara has it right. Here’s another entry in the same vein: “[Talking about Nirvana] Selling their bottled sweat & locks of hair have proven to be the largest money-maker so far, but in the future, dolls, peechees, lunchboxes & bedsheets are in the works.”

(And yeah, I recognize the contradiction when I say I’m against these things being published and admitting that I’ll buy a copy. The entire thing is fucked up, but I’m still a fan and curious about reading them. Isn’t that what the publishers who paid Love $4 million are counting on?)

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Normally I’d probably agree with you, but in this case I’m more inclined to side with Jonathan Chance and pesch since Nirvana did incorporate that image into all of their videos. If Cobain were really as sick of the “trappings of fame” as he claimed he could have just stopped making videos.