No Rock And Roll Fun

WOKE UP. HAD BREAKFAST. WROTE THE MOST INFLUENTIAL SONG OF THE 1990s. FELT A BIT MISERABLE. SHOT HEAD OFF.: Or, in other words, with the launch of the Observer's serialisation of Kurt Cobain's diaries, we all get the chance to play pop psychologist. "I would only wear a tie-dyed tshirt if it were dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Gerry Garcia." Hmmm. Maybe not. But if you want a snap judgement on what Kurt writes, you still can't beat Courtney's review of his suicide note; when she snapped "He's lying" midway through some of his words, she angrily caught the shortcoming of Cobain; all conviction, no courage. So, on one page, summer 1992, he's damning MTV for retailing the 'pregnant Courtney is on smack' tattle, scrawling "The old generation is going down fast fuckface"; a few months later he's boosting the Viacom bottom line recording Unplugged. We'll wait for the dinosaurs to die, he promised, and then the Now generation will be in the ascendent. If he trusted in his vision, maybe he'd have hung around. If he'd lived through this with us, I guess we'd have died for him. But he decided it was better to chicken out than to struggle away. A bitter waste.