To anyone who is not a Nirvana fan - I don’t know why you are even bothering to look at this. Read no further.

For those who ARE Nirvana fans, tread forward with caution.

This book was an insightful look into one of the most beautiful minds that I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing as it unfolded. People talk about where they were, or what they were doing when great catastrophes happened in the world. Laugh if you want, but I still remember where and what I was doing when I heard that Kurt Cobain was dead.

I thought this book was a very interesting look into Kurt Cobain’s mind. It’s not an autobiography. Kurt kept journals, drawings, clips of paper with notes and thoughts sprawled across them, rough drafts, and unsent letters. This book is a wide variety of these things photocopied from the originals. Some writing is almost illegible. On other pages you can see the emotion in the jerky script.

Most of the passages describe his frustration with the music industry, fanzines, and journalists that misunderstood him. In some areas it shows a lot of his beliefs about the world around him and what he believed to be a perfect society. When it comes down to it, you had to have been a fan to bother buying it, and you have to appreciate it for what it is.

I will leave you with my own mad ramblings in a letter to Kurt that will never be sent.

Kurt,

They’re not dyeing out like the dinosaurs. They have mutated into something much worse than you ever could have imagined. They’ve built a breed of music that no matter how many times you turn away, it keeps growing. They try to make it look like it’s for our own good, but…..

It’s just the beginning. The media has control. Now they tell us what we are supposed to like. Pop stars, the kid next door, and televised competitions for contracts? And it all revolves around selling the sexually provocative image of an under aged teen. Their voices are electronically altered, or it takes five people to sing one song, and not a single one of them knows how to play an instrument. It makes no sense to me that tweens are billboard successes, and they are singing about things that they won’t come close to experiencing for another ten years.

None of them write the lyrics. There is a small group of people in an ill lit room somewhere scribbling out the next big hit. I assure you the words; “baby”, “party”, or “hot” are well peppered through it. There are no deep meaningful songs anymore, no words to make you think hard, it’s all superficial bull. Hell no, you’re not allowed to express any other emotion than happiness or love. If you do…then it’s considered too political. POLITICAL? It’s politics to express frustration? The frustration of being spoon fed the same garbage over and over. I’m sorry, I would like some variety. Or how about you just quit playing the same crappy song so much I want to puke?

I’ve given up on finding anything original in the air waves Kurt. I say turn off the radio station, unplug your MTV (that no longer plays music), and start searching. I refuse to let them feed me what they want me to like. I do not listen to the radio and I don’t shop in stores for CDs. I’ve taken to searching the internet for bands that I’ve never heard of. I want to like bands that people think don’t exist. They ask me, “Who’s this?” I tell them the name of the band, and they always follow up with, “I’ve never heard of them.” People never ask about the band again. If it can’t be fed to them off the shelf they don’t even bother.

It’s sad really. It’s not music any more. It has just become a rhythmic beat that they all bob their heads to.