Heavier Than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain

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Cross also noted that he understood it was a hard task to reveal a story of a man who was drug addict. So, he knew how serious his task was. He coped with this task and created a story for those “with courage to tell the truth, to ask painful questions, and to break free of the shadows of the past” (Cross xi). Having such an honorable goal Cross had to learn the whole truth about Kurt Cobain. As I listen to the Nirvana albums today, I realize that I know practically every song. I guess you can’t be a teen in the early nineties and escape the impact Nirvana had on that generation. I try to imagine what I would have done if the idol of my own teen years, Tori Amos, had committed suicide while I was in the midst of using her music and voice as a resonator for my young soul. I would probably have sobbed in grief silently under my bed covers with her album on repeat, or maybe I would have smashed her cds on the street in effigy at the betrayal. Whatever the physical actions, I know for sure that the piercing and torturous scream in my head would have been: urn:lcp:heavierthanheave0000cros_m3u0:epub:eaf8a05b-db44-453b-a8e9-62b1810f9f69 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier heavierthanheave0000cros_m3u0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t57f29w6v Invoice 1652 Isbn 0786865059 The author's almost forensic dissection of Cobain's suicidal streak marks the last and most depressing part of Heavier Than Heaven. In the end, suggests Cross, while Cobain's music conquered all, the singer simply couldn't. A hopeless drug addict for all but a few weeks of his public life, he then dragged his wife, singer and actress Courtney Love, into a spiral of heroin abuse. The very fact that Love is now a reconstructed feminist role model, says Cross, surely hints at Cobain's detachment from nearly everything; all six Nirvana albums are now to be viewed through the sweltering pain of the singer's addiction.

It is a bit of a cliche of celebrity, but Kurt Cobain really was an incredibly contradictory personality. Part of the fun of Heavier Than Heaven is trying to take all of the evidence, presented in amazing detail by Charles R. Cross, and trying to piece together what kind of person he was. He was an animal lover who took in strays and loved having a bathtub full of turtles in the middle of his dwelling. His home always smelled like the bottom of a litter tray.

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Is fame a blessing or a curse? Many people wonder what it is like to be famous. Kurt Cobain doesn’t need to. From various volumes of Cobain's notebooks and journals, Cross also unearths an early self-loathing that would be the core of the now well-established truism that Cobain was almost destined to take his own life. Two paternal Cobain great-uncles and a paternal great-grandmother had killed themselves, while Cobain boasted to friends of a 'suicide gene' in the family.

vanHorn, Terri. "Cobain Book Shows Singer's Life 'Heavier' Than Most Imagined". MTVNews.com. September 10, 2001. Kurt Cobain was born on February 20, 1967 to a middle-class family in the United States. His father, Don, worked as a mechanic at a gas station, and his mother, Wendy, took care of the children. Cobain showed an interest in music from an early age. When he returned from a trip to the park at the age of four, he immediately wrote a song about playing in the park. By the age of six, he could play music on the piano that he had heard on the radio. For the next two years, a homeless Cobain roamed the streets, sleeping in cardboard refrigerator boxes, hallways of old apartment buildings, waiting rooms at community hospitals, garages of friends, and in ten homes of ten different relatives. The shadow of being abandoned by his immediate family always lingered in his heart, and his loneliness grew with each passing day. He really, really loved his parents and sister, which is why he reacted so strongly to the breaking of his idyllic home life. He cared deeply for his grandparents and other relatives. This is the only "real" biography of Kurt Cobain in existence. Because it is furnished with interviews and source material provided by his friends, band members, family, and widow, Heavier Than Heaven is ostensibly essential reading for people who grew-up fans of Nirvana, as I did.He really, deeply, truly loved his wife and daughter. Why else would he name his albums In Utero the year after his marriage and daughter’s birth? Cobain's dark side also came to light, as he was able to calmly talk to friends about murder, rape, and suicide. At 14 years old, he told a friend, “I’m going to be a superstar musician, kill myself and go out in a flame of glory.” At the same time, he began smoking marijuana to escape his real life.

One of the themes most prevalent throughout the Biography of Kurt Cobain was that you can achieve almost anything if you keep at it. You can achieve almost anything because Kurt’s record tops the charts, he becomes famous worldwide, and he never listened to anyone who said he couldn’t do it. Tour promoters don't need a specific, coherent meaning for phrases. They just need something that sounds cool. Since the phrase never entered a wide usage, there is no specific meaning outside of a particular context. It starts out as any typical biography, detailing his birth, family life, and early childhood in a very efficient yet story-like way; a phrase that can be used to describe how this entire book is executed. A nice touch that I really love is that every chapter is named after a quote from Kurt or someone close to him which seemed to, at least in my case, reel in the reader and connect them straight to Kurt. After the name was finalized, the band first gained attention in Seattle. They recorded 10 songs in a Seattle studio. That studio's founder recorded the songs on tape and gave them to Jonathan Poneman, founder of the Northwest independent record label, Sub Pop Records. Poneman took an interest in Nirvana and invited them to perform at the label's monthly “Sub Pop Sunday” show. It was the opportunity Cobain had been waiting for. On the day of the show, they arrived four hours early, and Cobain threw up from nerves before the show. After the show, Poneman suggested releasing a single with the band.I question some parts about Courtney Love. The author made her seem like the more stable of the two. Which seeing what a mess she has been in recent years, I just question the way the author portrayed her in the book.