Kurt Cobain's Last No.1 Hit

Why in the hell do journalists insist on coming up with a second rate freudian evaluation on my lyrics when 90% of the time they've transcribed the lyrics incorrectly?" rails Kurt Cobain in Kurt Cobain's Journals. The answer is obvious: Because even an FBI audio sleuth would have trouble figuring out what the hell he's bellowing on those songs, and because his lyrics absolutely demand psychological interpretation. He wrote cunningly encoded autobiographical statements in intentionally ambiguous and fragmentary lyrics, mumbled them, buried them in artful noise, then complained when critics got it wrong. Only now, with the publication of the journals (and the help of Charles Cross's biography, Heavier Than Heaven, which won the Timothy White Book Award last week), can we fathom his mind and tease out the multiple meanings of some of those shadowy, ever-shifting, multivalent lyrics.

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.

You have to read it the way you play Myst: patiently attentive to clues and willing to wander. Let's follow one thread, the meaning of smell in Cobain's associative process. He was obsessed with smells, according to Cross. The journal clarifies that in "Lounge Act"—one of a half-dozen songs on the epochal Nevermind album that he wrote to express his raging grief at getting dumped by Olympia's haughty Riot Grrrl Tobi Vail, the first girl he loved so much he threw up (and probably played Twister with: hence the lyrics of "Aneurysm," "Come on over and do the twist . . . love you so much it makes me sick")—the original lyric went, "I can still smell him on you."

In the studio, this became "smell her on you." This relates to the origin of his most popular hit, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," revealed by Cross. The "over-bored and self-assured" Vail, who viewed guys as "fashion accessories" (according to friend Alice Wheeler), wore perfumed Teen Spirit deodorant—no doubt ironically, to mock the product's crass attempt to manipulate the youth market.

Vail's friend Kathleen Hanna spray-painted "Kurt smells like Teen Spirit" in his room to taunt Cobain for bearing Vail's scent after sex—that is, for being clingy and needy and owned. Having no personal use for deodorant, he'd never heard of the product, and thought it was just a nifty phrase celebrating his alternative society. A dropout from a hick high school, he missed the dis when the hipper-than-thou college girl mocked him in this remarkably encoded manner.

In the weirdly utopian "indie fascist" Olympia music scene run by "that elitist little fuck Calvin Johnson" (as Cobain calls him in the journals), kids were forbidden to form traditional romantic unions. They were on strict instructions to found a new society of childlike creatures who renounced all bourgeois norms, like the Transcendentalist music freaks and free-love communards at Brook Farm. "We've made a pact to learn from whoever we want without new rules," Cobain sings in "Lounge Act." The journals' several drafts of "Teen Spirit" show that it's a utopian vision of a cultural revolution led by the "King & Queen [Kurt and Tobi] of the outcasted teens [Olympia's music scenesters]." The tune effected such a revolution.

The sex-scent theme connects with the tormented journal entry (p. 125) evidently addressed to a lover whose Obsession perfume lingers in Cobain's home. Stranded, abandoned, he obsessively identifies with beached whales, disemboweled to make perfume from their blubber. (Perfume isn't actually made that way, but he thought it was; on p. 224, he writes that whales beach themselves to convey a message of suicidal despair to humanity.) His favorite book, Patrick Suskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (which inspired his song "Scentless Apprentice"), concerns an olfactory prodigy, cast off by his mother and shuttled among relatives (as Cobain was), who kills women to collect their scent for perfume—reminiscent of Cobain's habit of picking the brains of various aesthetic mentors. "I use bits and pieces of others personalities to form my own," he writes.

Suskind's killer flees unbearably stinky and insensitive humanity (c.f. Cobain's original title for the first Nirvana album, "Too Many Humans," and his journal sketch for an album, "All Humans Are Stupid") to hide in a cave under a mountain. In the journals, Cobain wails, "You've left your . . . scent here, in my place of recovery. The place where I've crawled off to die like a cat under a house after he's been hit."

It's not easy to make sense of Cobain's journals, because they're published with practically no explanatory material, and the free association of his imagination is always as complex and murky as the scent themes traced above. The journals take you to a strange place. But if you read them carefully, you get fascinating glimpses into his many-chambered mind. Several of the entries show how deeply he thought in visual terms. He wasn't a well-trained draftsman, but his visual imagination enormously exceeded his technical grasp. People who think he was a mere rural rube, a lamebrain like Elvis, should glance at his witty drawing "Elvis Cooper" (blending the King and Alice Cooper), the sketches for the "Come as You Are" video, the "Heart Shaped Box" video, and the funny album cover he drew: "Nirvana Sings . . . Songs of Devo Wipers Vaselines and Nirvana," with the band depicted as choirboys.