Overdosing on Nirvana nostalgia

Nirvana, the album, and Kurt Cobain, the book - RUSSELL BAILLIE tries both at the same time.


Here's a new definition of morbid fascination - open the matching, shiny hearse-black covers of the new Nirvana compilation CD and the book Kurt Cobain Journals and flick to a random page.

Here's the beginning of page 181 ...

"I kind of feel like a dork writing about myself as if I were an American pop-rock icon demi-god, or a self confessed product of corporate-packaged rebellion, but I've heard so many insanely exaggerated stories or reports from my friends and I've read so many pathetic second rate freudian evaluations from interviews from my childhood up until the present state of my personality and how I am a notoriously f*****-up heroine [sic] addict, alcoholic, self destructive, yet overly sensitive frail, fragile, soft-spoken, narcoleptic, neurotic, little piss ant who at any minute is going to O. D. Jump off a roof, wig out. Blow my head off or all three at once."

By which time the "new" Nirvana song, You Know You're Right, which opens the 15-track compilation, has swung from its creeping intro and verse into a high-volume chorus where it sounds as if Cobain is using all his lung capacity to reach the end of his lines.

The song is unearthly, what with Cobain's guitar harmonics, his trademark fuzzbox stomp and its howling core. It's also a very good start to what is a solid-enough compilation - the singles off Nevermind and In Utero, one song from the pre-major label Bleach, one from the B-sides collection Incesticide, three tracks (including the two covers) from the Nirvana unplugged session.

As slight and perfunctory an assessment of the Nirvana legacy as it is, the album has much that the book - a selectively edited reprint of Cobain's notebook scribblings from the beginnings of the band until near the end - simply fails to deliver. Like cohesion, chronology, or a sense of history.

True, it's fascinating in the early pages for how Cobain writes about the petty politics and pettier finances of being a struggling band from nowheresville, Washington State.

But by the time you get to page 181, there's the feeling that despite your efforts to squint through Cobain's increasingly spidery scrawl, you're none the wiser about him, his songs, or parts of his life which didn't involve being a guilty rock star or a self-centred junkie who didn't like the world much.

And where's Courtney? Well, just maybe the heiress of a substantial part of the Cobain estate thinks some things are sacred.

Or perhaps there is another authorised volume about their relationship in the offing, though Cobain does complain at certain points that some of his diaries were stolen.

It's a rough read in more ways than one.

Its existence seems designed to stoke the Cobain legend rather than illuminate it. And for someone who, er, wrote the book on being media-allergic, it's a cruel irony that his most muddled private thoughts are now up for sale.

Unfortunately, just as those era-defining chords of Smells Like Teen Sprit come blasting forth, reminding you of Cobain's true genius, spending much time wandering through his back pages can leave you doubting it.

Journals speaks ill of the dead. Nirvana, in its own commercial cash-in way, is still a celebration.

* Kurt Cobain Journals Penguin, $49.95.