The flesh made word

“Forget the £20 sterling price tag on the hardback edition of Kurt Cobain’s journals. Discount the several million bucks his widow received upon handing them over to the Penguin group. Dismiss the unseemly squabbling over ‘You Know You’re Right’ and the remaining unreleased Nirvana material. But most of all, you can dispel the red mist of myth that has thus far hung over Cobain’s suicide silhouette like a pollutant, obscuring the fine lines and details of the man’s character

If these journals do nothing else, they should at least lay to rest the fallacy of Kurt as some angel-faced heroin drip-fed waif romantic punk poet victim of his own talent. Cobain was the architect of his own oblivion sure, but also the orchestrator of his success, never mind that it came with a side order of punk rock guilt.

It was Cobain’s decision to defect to Geffen from Sub-Pop. It was Cobain’s decision to hire Andy Wallace to give Butch Vig’s Nevermind recordings the radio-friendly varnish that guaranteed safe passage through FM radio waters. It was Cobain’s decision to hire Steve Albini to supply the boxy bullet-mic wallop of In Utero, but he also made sure that Scott Litt remixed that album’s two most eligible singles. And once Nevermind went ballistic, Kurt renegotiated his royalty rate, retro-effective, thus cutting his bandmates out of a hefty slice of the pie chart.

He was a complex character, but few choose to remember him as a calculating career strategist and self-image manipulator on a par with Madonna. Charles R. Cross’s Heavier Than Heaven biog went some way towards redressing the public image (ltd.) last year, but still Cobain’s posthumous voice gets drowned out by his more vocal wife, often portrayed as the craven harpy in the partnership mainly because she’s more upfront about her ambition.

Yet long before he met Ms Love, Kurt Cobain was plotting, scheming and perfecting grand designs like some punk prince of Denmark, and his journals offer more than adequate testimonial to this brooding intelligence. As early as page two, in a letter to Dale Grover from The Melvins about Sub Pop, he was asking, “Do you think it would be wise to demant (sic) receipts for recording, pressing costs?” Later, there’s a touchingly self-critical but unambiguous letter of dismissal addressed to the band’s second drummer Dave Foster. Later again, writing to Screaming Trees singer Mark Lanegan, he was hustling for numbers, addresses and asking his friend to pass the demos around. On page 12 there’s a scrupulously drawn list of road sign symbols and rules, presumably notes from a driving test cramming session.

Are these the writings of an incapable, self-immolated punk loser? I think not. Throughout the journals, you’ll find numerous self-penned band biographies and Things To Do lists, many of them morbidly funny. For example:

“NIRVANA sees the underground music SEEN as becoming stagnant and more accessible towards commercial MAJOR LABEL interests. Does NIRVANA want to change this? No way! We want to cash in and suck butt to the big wigs in hopes that we too can get high and fuck wax figure hot babes, who will be required to have a certified AIDS test 2 weeks prior to the day of handing out backstage passes. Soon we will need chick spray repellent.”

Or witness the scribblings about his great bugbear, English journalists, whom he describes as “enemic (sic), clammy, physically deformed, gnome-like… sincerely masochistic who would bathe in the glamour of nude photos of themselves with handcuffs behind the back, on their knees wearing a diaper with a rubber cock stuffed in their mouth, and these photos posted on every cover magazine in Europe.”

Later, in a letter to the ghost of Lester Bangs, he asks, “Why the hell do journalists insist on coming up with second rate Freudian evaluation on my lyrics when 90% of the time they’ve transcribed the lyrics incorrectly?”

Fact is, Cobain frequently proved his own most incisive critic. Check out this fragment from page 44:

“My lyrics are a big pile of contradictions. They’re split down the middle between very sincere opinions and feelings that I have and sarcastic and hopefully humorous rebuttles (sic) towards cliché-bohemian ideals that have been exhausted for years. I mean, it seems like there are only two options for songwriters/personalities, either they’re sad, tragic visionaries like Morrissey or Michael Stipe or Robert Smith or there’s the goofy, nutty white boy, hey let’s party and forget everything people like Van Halen and all that other heavy metal crap. I mean I like to be passionate and sincere, but I also like to have fun and act like a dork. Geeks unite.”