I saw Nirvana in concert 4 months before Cobain took his life. After hundreds of live shows it still stands as one of my all time favorites. In fact iI saw Nirvana in concert 4 months before Cobain took his life. After hundreds of live shows it still stands as one of my all time favorites. In fact it was the first concert I ever crowd-surfed at. I was able to get up close and personal with the band and, in doing so, saw that Kurt rarely looked up at the crowd. His eyes were glued to the floor most of the night. This book helped me to understand why. Given his recurrent heroin addiction, the debilitating stomach pain he'd fought for years, the constant fighting with Courtney, and his unhappiness with fame I can imagine that Kurt felt a pretty heavy burden on his shoulders during those years.
That being said I feel like Kurt's style of thinking only contributed to his misery. This book isn't just a treatise on the life of Cobain. It is a psychological profile of Kurt Cobain; lifting the hood over the engine and taking a look at all the rusty gears and the worn out spark plugs. Cross does an amazing job of truly understanding the way Cobain thought. As much as I idolized Kurt for most of my teenage and college years I now see that Cobain's style of thinking was as someone who saw himself as an innocent victim and he tended to be a bit paranoid. While many American kids experience the divorce of their parents most are able to put it in context at some point in their lives. Cobain never got over his parents divorce and saw his father's subsequent marriage as a betrayal; that dad was kicking Kurt out of his life. I'm sure that losing this relationship was sad but most of us would be able to develop enough understanding to move past it. For Kurt this sadness simply shifted in to anger and pushing his father away. This was the start of a "victim mentality" that never seemed to go away. I see Kurt's victimhood as his biggest failing and something that set the stage for later victimhood.
Ultimately, I developed a love/hate relationship with this book. While it was impeccably researched and extremely intriguing I felt really sad by the time I finished it. I developed a lot of empathy for Kurt throughout the reading and was devastated by the end of the book to think of all of that amazing talent wasted through suicide. Very sad indeed....more
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