Kurt Cobain's notebooks

A psychotherapist friend once told me the secret of happiness was to be stupid and selfish. Kurt Cobain was neither, which is perhaps why he was so terribly unhappy. Just how unhappy comes across in Cobain's poignant notebooks, which he kept over a period of seven years and parts of which have now been published in facsimile.

The notebooks (elevated to the status of journals by the publisher) reveal an essentially decent and principled man tormented by his deep-rooted romanticism and its postmodern, ironising critique. "My lyrics," he writes, "are split down the middle between very sincere opinion and feelings that I have and sarcastic and hopefully-humorous rebuttles (sic) towards cliche-bohemian ideals that have been exhausted for years."

This struggle for sincerity in the face of confused self-doubt clearly affected Cobain's musical sensibility from the off. The earlier notebook entries show an artist attempting to define and construct an original and genuine homage to punk which could at the same time stand up by itself.

In list after list Cobain carefully separates bands he considers echt (The Vaselines, The Melvins) from those he is happy to write off as ersatz (Pearl Jam).

This tension between self-conscious irony and genuine sensibility became the defining characteristic of grunge, the Seattlebased hard rock-cum-punk amalgam Cobain helped to create.

With the flowering of grunge in the early to mid-Nineties, Cobain became, for a while, the ambivalent poster boy for a generation of young men and women (labelled Generation X by the Canadian writer Doug Coupland) who felt both exploited and trivialised by American-style high capitalism.

"I seem insincere because I can't choose or decide fast enough," writes Cobain. In Nirvana he hoped to create a reflection of, and antidote to, all that. The band was to be the sound of authenticity. But what was authentic? In a 1988 letter to a friend, beside the word Nirvana done out in big, spidery letters, Cobain scribbles, "Ooo, eerie, mystical, doom".

It's not entirely clear whether Cobain intended these jottings and cartoons for public view, but there are hints in both their organisation and tone that he did. For the most part, these are work journals. Strewn among notes for his driving test, to-do lists and other banalities, are some of the most striking song lyrics ever written.

These notebooks demonstrate how fluidly Cobain wrote lyrics, never requiring much redrafting. His songs were, quite literally, outpourings. By contrast, the detailed redrafting of notes for album covers and promos indicates a systematic ambition. Cobain was clearly driven to seek public recognition only to be suspicious of it when it came. Success did him in. It fuelled his paranoia and nihilism.

His later rants against music journalists (especially the Brits, whom he describes as "enemic (sic)...physically deformed, gnomelike and sincerely masochistic"), volleys of self-disgust and ever more turbulent exegeses on death and futility suggest a man in the self-conscious process of implosion. An ill-defined stomach condition that had Cobain alternating between laxatives and pain-relieving shots of heroin didn't help.

A reader will already need to know something about Cobain to get the best from these notebooks but if you've got this far, you'll know enough.

Even with gaps, these hand-written fragments from a life say more than any biography would or could. It is frustrating that there's no guide as to how the extracts were selected from the whole, but in all other ways, the lack of editorial intervention and explication is one of this book's most admirable features. Cobain was a man who struggled so hard for definition, it seems fitting that, even after death, he should be allowed to speak for himself.