Elusive hero or victim of excess?

LOS ANGELES -- Eight years later, we're still talking about Kurt Cobain. "I'm going to be a superstar musician, kill myself and go out in a flame of glory," he announced as a 14-year-old, and he was right. And because he was right, because he went out in a flame of glory, we just can't get enough of him. \nNext month will see the long-awaited publication of Cobain's journals, an 800-page epic that tracks his life, in his own words, from the pre-Nirvana days straight to the time leading up to his suicide-by-shotgun on April 5, 1994. \nSo before I sink myself into retrospective pondering about why he has captured everyone's attention so consistently almost a decade after his death, let me break a few rules and say some really bad things about him. \nIn some ways, Cobain was a real ass -- he flung himself headlong into heroin addiction and never even made a real attempt to get out. His final death was not his first overdose; he kept on shooting himself up before finally shooting himself down. \nAdmittedly, the drug use started as a response to a nearly debilitating stomach condition that could've almost crippled Cobain with pain at times, and one which he was never able to effectively treat. Nevertheless, even if you treat heroin as a legitimate painkiller for the sake of argument, the excess is inexcusable. \nAnd suicide? All I can say to that is "cop out." \nSo why, then, am I, like half the rest of the music world, waiting for a peek at his diaries? There's something mystifying, even enchanting about his life and death, and even if I don't approve of how it happened, I still want to know about it. \nOn the one hand, I've heard bitter complaints from the Nirvana faithful that the release of previously unheard material and now the impending publication of his diaries besmirch Cobain's good name. \nThese are also, in large part, the same people who speculated to me that Courtney Love killed him because he had gotten her started on the path to fame with her band, Hole, and that his demise would inevitably skyrocket her to greater fortune and glory. True as that may have turned out to be, I don't buy it. \nIn any case, there is nothing left of Cobain's name that has not been denigrated yet anyway. There is little greater indignity than suicide, and Cobain went out in a particularly gruesome and sad way; in fact, his body wasn't found until days after the fact, and even then by an electrician who noticed the smell. \nWhat good remained in that name fizzled away in a flurry of lawsuits between his widow, Love, and his musical widowers, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl. A protracted competition for control of his musical legacy has popped Nirvana back into the news now and again for years, and with no end in sight, there seems to be no civilized way to just let Cobain rest. \nCobain is worthy of our interest, but not our idealization. That being said, what makes him so worthy of that interest? \nI don't blame people for wanting to hear one last Nirvana song, read one more of his words in a diary and see one more haunting omen of his demise. In all the biographies and all the interviews with his friends after his death, a portrait emerges of a guy who never could settle into success. Someone who got exactly what he wanted and then realized maybe he didn't want it after all. By then, it was too late to cast it all aside. That's what is mysterious to people, especially to us average types who, perhaps naively, think to ourselves, "Hey, fame is cool! I'd like some of that!" \nUnfortunately, it gets pretty scary to see people who go beyond interest to obsession, people who, like Cobain, portend that they, too, will someday kill themselves and go out in a flame of glory. \nCobain is hardly a role model. Ironically, that's why many people tend to favor him as one, but doing so could prove to be exceedingly dangerous. No one should be looking up to someone who threw his life away to a needle and a 12-gauge. \nIn the end, I'm sure circumstance will ultimately make those who decry the new wave of Nirvana fade back into the periphery. In time, they'll realize their own hypocrisy as they find the latest single on heavy rotation on their MP3 player and the new journals sitting on their dresser. \nHey, they'll probably be on mine.