Nirvana: The Biography Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Nirvana: The Biography? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Nirvana: The Biography. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Nirvana: The Biography ReviewOn page 131, our author states, "I used to say that the only goal I ever had with my writing was to make people jealous of me." That doesn't necessarily make our author a likeable character, and pretty much overshadowed my enjoyment of the book for about the first half. The chapter where he met Courtney, is a total waste of space. It has nothing to do with the band and he's just alluding to how close they supposedly got, like he's baiting us to care.
Please don't take the 3 star review to mean this is not an enjoyable book. It is. I flew through its nearly 600 pages in a couple days and it was quite the page turner. But all of this "this is how it really was" talk seems kind of hard to believe. For starters, Mr. True was supposedly drunk all the time so it's hard to really believe he remembers facts from these events so long ago. Also, when Kurt and Courtney hook up, he takes on the annoying practice of referring to them as "Kurtney." The book doesn't mention Dave Grohl much at all, and a lot of his stories DO seem to be only to make you wish you were him. But hearing countless stories of waking up with vomit caked to your clothes, or being wasted everynight, or waking up naked in a strange apartment, really kind of kill that desire. He calls himself "the man who invented grunge" and a Legend.. and I have no love for such arrogance. In the introduction, he constantly gets off topic and then rights himself, saying "This is a book about Nirvana." I wish he did this DURING the book himself. Wasting countless pages on Calvin Johnson, Mudhoney, and Melvins worship.
Another problem with the book is the sheer amount of errors of things we could actually prove (events recorded for all to see.) Mistakes are that Lori Goldston played cello with the band on Saturday Night Live in '93. Mistakes are messing up the order of events for the Dallas 10-19-91 show. Or the setlist for numerous shows. He'll say a song was played 12th ("More than a Feeling/Teen Spirit") at Reading '92 when it was really 13th (14th if you count "The Rose.") Nothing huge, but why bother reporting 12th? He says they played "Floyd" 4-9-93 when they didn't. The order of songs for 7-23-93 are all messed up. There are mistakes for other shows, but others where Everett turned out to be correct.
You really get the feeling he is writing all of this from memory and not trying to track down the facts first. You get this impression because of the above errors (like saying "I Hate Myself and Want to Die" from the Beavis and Butt-head Compilation was from a Brazil session, when it wasn't.) You also get the impression because he quotes people a handful of times with his own British terminology thrown in. He has Kurt saying "postman" when Americans call him "mailman." Again, not a serious thing, but it's hard to believe he is actually "quoting" people when he'll admit not having the tape on during a 15-16 year old interview.
Everett says Nirvana were possibly late to Reading '92 because of a show the previous day in another country/area. It's easy to prove there was no such show. He doesn't correct people that make mistakes either. Jack Endino says at the late Oct '92 session he did with the band, that Frances Bean was 2-3 weeks old. In reality it was over 2 months. He said Kurt's mom put out the 'missing persons' report on him, but it was really Courtney using her name. He said MTV didn't even air Unplugged until after Kurt died, which isn't true. It was originally aired on 12-16-93. He said the controversy over "In Utero"'s commerciality ended when a few songs were mixed and some of the "noisier" songs "removed"!! I really wish I kept a list of thing like this throughout reading the book, because right now I'm drawing a blank on some others.
When it gets to Kurt's mysterious and controversial death, it doesn't pull the argument much one way or the other. Cali, the male nanny, has a much bigger role in this book. His relationship with Kurt and Courtney is more established and explained. It's strange, though, after 2-3 doctors at the rehab facility Kurt fled say they didn't find him suicidal, and one day (or later on the same day) that Cali's friend talks to him in a supposedly great mood, Kurt kills himself without much warning. The Rome "suicide" note is mentioned. Courtney's overall shadiness is discussed. Her affair with Billy Corgan is mentioned. Her demands on Kurt to make money and her inability to meet him in Europe until a few weeks late is troubling. Not to mention Kurt OD'ing in Rome the same night Courtney finally arrives. It also paints a picture of her as setting out to conquer Kurt. And how he went hardcore into heroin when she came upon the scene. A lot of time is spent on when Kurt and Courtney met. Where a few contradicting stories are told and nothing really established. He DOES point out Courtney's motive for saying she met him way earlier then she did.. being she didn't want to be seen as a golddigger or riding on his coattails. Well, she was.
Maybe this book IS the truth. Maybe Nirvana's story is this dark and unfortunate. How Kurt ever got it together to play a show after hearing all this, is truly something to wonder about. But little is talked about in regards to Kurt's relationship with his band members. Dave is almost non-existant, and it pretty much shows Krist having washed his hands of Kurt after the recording of "In Utero." Some stories make no sense and video evidence refutes a handful of these things. But I still recommend this book to all Nirvana fans who read the Azzerad and Cross books. It fills in holes and is probably closer to the truth than most. You just have to overlook Everett's placing of himself in many scenes and take the "quotes" with a grain of salt. It's a fun page turner that any fan of the band would love. This exposes more like on the darkness of Kurt's mind in reaction to fame and major lable committments, but you still feel like the complete story is still out there somewhere.Nirvana: The Biography Overview

Want to learn more information about Nirvana: The Biography?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...

Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain ReviewEarly on you get a good idea of the course Cross is going to follow, when in the Author's Note he casually, but shroudedly, admits to a childhood akin to Kurt's. At least he plays fair with the reader, admitting off the top that he might be predisposed to looking for suicidal tendencies in his subject. But the reader should also take this as a warning: this is not a fan's-eye-view of Nirvana's chart-topping success (Dave Grohl makes brief and scattered appearances throughout the book), but a gloves-off biography of their tortured leader. Read in that light, it is mostly a success. Mostly.
Cross' greatest strength is the depth and breadth of his research. Apparently Courtney Love, Kurt's widow, gave Cross extensive access to Kurt's personal effects. She also sat for repeated lengthy interviews, as did many of the other notable players in Kurt's life. This kind of access gives Cross an insight into his subject that those of us who read all the Rolling Stone and Spin Magazine profiles of the man never got. It's revelatory, to be sure. For example, he is able to quote liberally from Kurt's diary, which lets the reader into Kurt's head. It offers such revelations as the following, which describes his concession to the inevitable path of becoming a junkie: "if I feel like a junkie as it is [due to stomach pains], I may as well be one." Or, in Cross' greatest discovery, he describes a long lost video of Kurt bathing his daughter Frances, in a scene of seemingly domestic tranquility. The camera focuses on father and daughter for a long moment, and then abruptly pans around the bathroom. Cross, an observant viewer, notes that in the toothbrush holder, instead of a toothbrush, is a syringe. His commentary on this image, how it destroys the conventional familial image established moments before, is some of his best work.
Sometimes, however, Cross can go a bit overboard with the facts. Just because he found out a little tidbit like, "[Kurt's] favorite [infant] game was peekaboo, his first tooth appeared at eight months, and his first dozen words were, 'coco, momma, dadda, ball, toast, bye-bye, hi, baby, me, love, hot dog, and kittie,'" doesn't mean it needs to be included. Too often Cross recounts, in laundry list-like prose, trivial facts like this, which really do very little in terms of illuminating the life. It comes across more as showing off his knowledge.
He also, at times, can't help indulging into a bit of pop psychoanalysis, where pop psychoanalysis is not welcome. In Cross' hands a picture of the Cobain family, taken when Kurt was 6, supposedly does a precise job of predicting the sorrow to come. Based exclusively on body language on posture. The picture is included here for your perusal. I, for one, didn't see anything near to what Cross saw. He also, at one point, compares Kurt's image in early band photos to "Christ in Leonardo da Vinci's 'The Last Supper'". I suppose one sees what one wants to see.
And anyone who lived through the period, like I did, will find dubious statements such as the following: "'The Cobain baby' was as talked about across lunch counters and supermarket checkout lines as the Lindbergh baby had been decades before." The Vanity Fair article that revealed Courtney had used heroin during her pregnancy was big news, true. But only within the community. It was not nearly the global tabloid scandal that Cross makes it out to be. Misleading analysis like the preceding calls into question every other statement Cross has to make. It does a lot of work undermining his credibility.
Further compounding the problem is Cross' hit-or-miss writing. For the most part he utilizes an objective, almost journalistic prose style, laying the facts at the reader's feet without unnecessary ornamentation. But every once in a while he will indulge in odd analogies: "Like senior citizens going to a dentists' appointment, the band made sure they were early for this all-important show." Was that bit of superfluous style really necessary? These bits appear out of nowhere in the text, and come off as if the writer had a burst of inspiration, albeit a rather dull one. Though, even when he's playing things by the book, Cross is still prone to blunders. He clumsily describes the *melody* of the song "About a Girl" as "sweet, slow, and *melodic*".
Despite the numerous complaints I've outlined above, Cross' book is still consistently readable; although I suspect that the power of the story being told has a lot to do with that. I've always thought that a biography should be judged on how the author was able to stay out of the way, and let the events of the life present themselves. In this case, Cross is, like I noted above, mostly a success. His reputation as a respected music and entertainment journalist is apparently well-earned, despite some missteps along the way, and his objectivity is very rarely questionable. That being said, his greatest feat, paradoxically, is the way he handles Kurt's final days. Much of it of course is speculation, for no one but Kurt knows how it all went down. But what Cross comes up with to tell this part of the tale is moving and powerful, without ever pandering to melodrama. The final moments are recounted with credibility, pathos, sorrow, and, most importantly, empathy. The book breaks from being a standard biography at this point, adding untold emotion to these well-written scenes. Cross even manages to tie up the book's (and, consequently, the life's) main themes. These final pages do yeomen's work making up for any errors Cross has made along the way, and, ultimately, they make the book a worthwhile read.Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain Overview

Want to learn more information about Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...