It is simply that they are devastatingly hard to contemplate. It's a pity the entries are not dated, and that no attempt has been made to provide a chronology. Apparently, there were actually 20 notebooks. The tatty front covers are sometimes themselves displayed. Most of these pages are facsimiles from what appears to be four or five other notebooks. It occurs to me that somewhere along the way, in the business that passed between his first infantile scribblings and the rehearsals and recording studio sessions with his band members, Kurt Cobain had a lot of help to reorganise, focus and realise his ideas. But the song on the CD is clear, outstanding, dark, ironic, amusing and disturbing at once. I believe that there are actually three drafts in this book. If the first draft words for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' are here somewhere, I'm not sure I could find them without help. That is, the resentful, childish, petulant and selfish desire to accuse, blame and berate the world for all its wrongs, to wish to escape, or overcome and, finally, to take no responsibility for any part of the ultimate downfall. What follows appear to be the scribblings of a crazed and depressed drug-addict in the midst of what those of us who have been through drug rehab describe as 'stinking thinking'. Another mark is 'Records/watch', followed again by a number - obviously the cost - '50'. On the same line, in a darker pen, is the second mark, the number '30'. 'Booze' - the first mark - is recorded in ballpoint, a light blue. It is an expensively and reverently reproduced photo of a page from a spiral book, the cheap kind sold in American drugstores. The first facsimile page is like a piece of pop art. The word 'Journals' is quietly inscribed under the author's name. Now here I have before me a sober and distinguished hardback. Where might a particular lyric idea have begun? What, for example, is behind the smart, striking and ironic wit of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'? If this sounds rather professorial, that's me, the first proprietor of the rock academy of lyric analysis. So I picked up this book searching for connections. Nirvana's second album, Nevermind was a breath of 'punk' fresh air in the musically stale early Nineties. The publication of Cobain's journals is considered, then, to be a major event and has been anticipated with a mixture of trepidation, curiosity and excitement.Īs a songwriter and rock architect, I was interested to look behind the creative process of Kurt Cobain. Nirvana, and their principal creative architect Kurt Cobain, are considered by many in the UK to be the most important band in the history of rock.
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