Journals (Cobain)

Journals is a collection of writings and drawings by American musician Kurt Cobain, who was the lead singer and guitarist of Nirvana. Though the content is undated, it is arranged in approximately chronological order. It was published in hardcover by Riverhead Books in November 2002, and in paperback by Riverhead Books in November 2003. Journals opened at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list (non-fiction).^[1][2] It contains scrawled notes, drafted letters, shopping lists, and drawings by Cobain.^[3]

Release

Journals was released one month after the release in 2002 of Nirvana, the self-titled greatest hits album of Cobain's band before his suicide in 1994.^[4][5] Billboard thus described the book as a "music driven blockbuster" with a first printing of nearly 375,000 copies.^[4]

Letters

Journals contains a number of letters, either early drafts or unsent, that Cobain wrote to friends or peers. Included are friendly letters to

Contained in Journals is an assortment of directly Nirvana-related material, including embryonic lyric drafts,[12] early album tracklists, and even a set of unused liner notes Cobain had apparently written for In Utero in 1993. The lyric sheets are especially revealing, showing that some songs, including the band's biggest hit "Smells Like Teen Spirit", underwent major revisions before being recorded for release, while others, such as "Come as You Are", were changed very little, at least from the drafts included. The tracklists are also of interest, revealing, for example, that Cobain had intended to release "girl" and "boy" sides of Nirvana's breakthrough album Nevermind, with songs such as "In Bloom" and "Lithium" on the girl side, and songs like "Sliver" and "Polly" on the boy side.

Drawings

Journals contains a number of Cobain's rough

Throughout his life, Cobain was physically fragile and sickly; suffering from scoliosis, undiagnosed stomach ailments (which some argue led to his heroin addiction), and a touring schedule that required him to spend hours each night singing, screaming and stage diving.^[14] On top of his physical issues, he was diagnosed with clinical depression during his teenage years.^[15] In his private journals, that were later published after his death, Cobain details the horrific stomach pain he experienced. He says that eating was always followed by a relentless, "burning nauseous pain in the upper part of [his] stomach lining".^[16] He writes that the pain would, at times, leave him crunched up in his bathroom floor, paralyzed by the discomfort, continuously regurgitating nothing but blood and water.^[16] Though the root of his gastrointestinal issues was never determined, and close friends of Cobain argue that it was simply an excuse for his heroin habit, no one can deny the fact that he suffered tremendously.^[17] Other bandmates have later recalled Cobain's strange fascination with bodily functions. During a 1989 Nirvana tour, one of the band's singers, Tad Doyle, suffered from daily nausea and vomiting episodes; Kurt Danielson, a close friend of Doyle's, recalls that Cobain would voluntarily hold a bucket for Doyle to vomit into and often appeared excited to see the end result.^[18][14] Danielson remembers that Cobain admired Doyle for his struggle, and viewed his sickness as artistic and authentic.^[14] Cobain's obsession with bodily fluids can be more publicly seen in his graphic song lyrics; from sex, to urination, to vomiting, almost 90% of his songs and art were somehow influenced by the human body.^[18] In his journal entries, Cobain would often misspell words and put an anatomical twist on his spelling of a word.^[14]

Reception

Seattle Weekly said this: "The journals are like an exploded diagram of a tormented soul, a maelstrom of self-pity, intolerant pride, morbid introspection, ingenious self-delusion, merciless self-knowledge, showbiz revulsion, starstruck effusion, Faustian ambition, otherworldly detachment, and an iron will helpless to help itself. Packed into 280 pages are shocking confessions, sweetly eloquent letters to brilliant friends, hard-nosed band plans, fulminating political screeds, obscene cartoons, haunting video treatments, and lyrical poetry of tremulous Romantic sensitivity, Bukowskian crudity, dadaist flippancy, and modernist opacity." Furthermore, its release reportedly polarized fans, some of whom felt it constituted an invasion of Cobain's privacy, and others of whom saw it as a unique opportunity to better understand him.^[19]

Billboard reported that the simultaneous release of the Nirvana hits set helped fire cross-promotion at retail and that the album release was providence.^[4]

Cobain's daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, stated in 2018 that she will never read her father's journals and that she regretted her mother's decision to publish them in 2002.^[20]

References