Informative, detailed in most respects, a good read
Disadvantages:
Author's psychoanalytical agenda gets in the way of the facts
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
Kurt Cobain has been one of the most written about musicians in contemporary culture. A huge following and unrelenting fascination - compounded by his tragic suicide in 1994 - has made Cobain a universal icon.
‘Heavier Than Heaven’ written by author and music magazine editor Charles R. Cross, was published in 2001, after a period of great hype and speculation. The biography covers Cobain’s life from childhood to his death, and charts his success with Nirvana in adequate detail.
There is one major difference between this biography and previous books written about Cobain: the biographer had had vital input (and blessing) from Cobain’s widow and head of estate, Courtney Love. Always at the center of some controversy, Love lent Cross Cobain’s 120-something personal journals (which are now a publication in their own right) to aid his research. An advantage, surely? A big advert definitely, making ‘Heavier Than Heaven’ a must read even before it hit the shelves. However, there is sparingly little incorporated into the biography. Where it is used it is in short snatches or simply referred to second-hand, and seemingly only when it suits Cross’s purpose.
Here’s where the cynicism kicks in. Forgive me, but a lot of what Cross writes just doesn’t rest easy with me. He only seemed to use Cobain’s own words if they fit with Cross’s own personal picture of Cobain - that he was suicidal ALL THE TIME, and that his ambition could not have made him shun the media as we are led to believe, but that he craved fame and attention. For the purpose of Cross’s tale, Cobain is a psychologically damaged fame seeker, a little princess, and Courtney his saviour, his knight-in-shining-armour. Those who didn’t grant Cross interviews are ogres and trolls, and Kurt’s bandmates Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl play a smaller part in this drama than would have been reality.
Cross is competent writer, easy to read, but he tends to goes off on a tangent or two... fictional ones. Where he does stick to the facts the text is great, even excellent. But Cross fell all too easily into taking the psychological and emotive route, pushing a multitude of buttons that guaranteed the reader would respond with nothing less than upset.
Cross seems to fancy himself as a bit of a novelist. The final chapter is a particularly poignant one, and is dedicated solely to Cobain’s last moments (the finer details of which nobody does or can know). It will surely bring tears to the readers’ eyes as they get swept up in the prose. As did I. But I had to stop and keep reminding myself that 99% of what was written here was total fiction.
We may have wondered what Cobain was thinking in his final days, hours, minutes... but would we be so bold to specualte so wildly and then cement our thoughts in biography, a medium meant to be based in FACT?!
There is such a thing as artistic liscence, but please, does it have a place in biography?!
Those who buy into the romanticism of suicide will praise this book. Other fans are likely to find the emotive style overdone, even inappropriate. At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve heard people comment that they feel the book is exactly the kind of exploitation Kurt deplored. Tellingly, Kurt’s half-sister Brieann O’Connor posted an interesting review at www.amazon.com criticising the book.
My feelings are mixed. I inititally overlooked Cross’s petty errors at the beginning of the book, as misktakes inevitably do happen. But as the book progressed it was reading more like a novel. I’d even forgive you for thinking it was more of Courtney Love biography in certain places. Here is where the facts are most twisted. One glaring example are the pages describing Courtney’s huge involvement in writing the Nirvana song “Pennyroyal Tea”. Unsurprisingly, the fact that Nirvana had performed this song live in 1991 (an entire year before it is claimed the couple wrote the song) seems to have been omitted. Oops!
After a while, the warped character of ‘suicidal Kurt’ was getting hard to swallow. I suppose it’s natural after a suicide to go back and look for clues, but Cross goes overboard, making this whole book something of a psychological inquest, and seemingly concluding that Cobain was BORN suicidal, as his picture of Kurt has him severely depressed every second of his 27 years. This I find highly inbalanced, if not wholly inaccurate. We know he suffered, but this was not the basis of his existence.
If you know nothing about Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, my suggestion for a good starting point would be the excellent unbiased and official biography by Michael Azerrad entitled ‘Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana’. This is a far more balanced account of the star.
Read ‘Heavier Than Heaven’ afterwards, by all means. It’s certainly worth a read, and worth forming an opinion on, just don’t get too sucked in.
This biography was a precursor to the Journals, and they probably aren’t used to the extent any other excited biographer would have jumped at because the Cobain Estate realised they could milk more cash from the Cobain corpse if they published them raw. A move I was always against... can you tell?!
To conclude, ‘Heavier Than Heaven’ doesn’t tell you anything new, any biography would give you the same details (psychoanalysis optional). Cross’s biography is of more interest to anybody wishing to get inside the head of the troubled Cobain. Just remember that it’s not actually Kurt speaking. It's a good biography, and a good read regardless. I doubt that anything written is going to provide a totally unbiased accurate account, as Cobain always had an enigmatic quality, and that's worth remembering.
‘Heavier Than Heaven’ is published by Hodder and Stoughton in hardback (priced £17.99) and paperback (priced £6.99)
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