"NIRVANA: The Biography" by: Everett True
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British rock journalist Everett True’s new six-hundred-page book, Nirvana, is one of the most comprehensive Nirvana biographies yet. It includes several decades’ worth of interviews with the members of Nirvana, musicians from Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic’s early Pacific Northwest music scene, some of Cobain’s pre-“Kurtney” girlfriends, the infamous Courtney Love, various music insiders, and the likeable young junkies who surrounded Cobain at the end of his life. True is engaged with his subjects, but hardly objective: he is or was a personal friend of many of them, including Love, whom he portrays as a major talent and intellectual powerhouse, even as he suggests that her pressure on Cobain to make money and play the role of the rock star contributed to his sense of isolation and eventual suicide.
As is often the case with books by successful music journalists, Nirvana is as much memoir as biography, and sometimes that’s annoying, especially when True reminisces at length about his drunken exploits with rock stars. But mostly his voice is engaging, whether he’s remarking that Nirvana and “grunge” allowed “people to listen to big dumb rock and retain their hipster credibility” or succinctly dispensing with Kurt-and-Courtney-are-Sid-and-Nancy clichés: “neither Courtney (too conventionally mainstream, wannabe Hollywood blonde) nor Kurt (too hardcore, sensitive and [screwed} up by his myriad contradictions) was anywhere close.”
Anyone who reads Nirvana biographies knows that there are a lot of them, and whether the world needs another is a matter of opinion. Maybe Cobain’s life was like his lyrics, beautiful, disturbing, enigmatic, and worth revisiting over and over again. Or maybe the music said it all, and the rest is just an endless feedback loop.
thank you again Myspace
As is often the case with books by successful music journalists, Nirvana is as much memoir as biography, and sometimes that’s annoying, especially when True reminisces at length about his drunken exploits with rock stars. But mostly his voice is engaging, whether he’s remarking that Nirvana and “grunge” allowed “people to listen to big dumb rock and retain their hipster credibility” or succinctly dispensing with Kurt-and-Courtney-are-Sid-and-Nancy clichés: “neither Courtney (too conventionally mainstream, wannabe Hollywood blonde) nor Kurt (too hardcore, sensitive and [screwed} up by his myriad contradictions) was anywhere close.”
Anyone who reads Nirvana biographies knows that there are a lot of them, and whether the world needs another is a matter of opinion. Maybe Cobain’s life was like his lyrics, beautiful, disturbing, enigmatic, and worth revisiting over and over again. Or maybe the music said it all, and the rest is just an endless feedback loop.
thank you again Myspace
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