When Kurt Cobain took his life at the peak of Nirvana’s popularity in April 1994, critics were quick to draw comparisons between his suicide and the accidental death of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious. Superficial parallels were quickly noticed—Cobain and his loudmouthed peroxided wife, Hole front-woman Courtney Love, were habitual heroin users; Vicious and his notorious bleached-blonde companion, Nancy Spungen, were also well-known junkies. Cobain and his wife even checked into hotels under Vicious’ real name, John Ritchie. Still, the most common association made between the two musicians was their inability to deal with fame—Vicious and Cobain were both characterized as “lost souls” who were unable to reconcile their love of their respective musical genres with the commercial compromise that came with it; falling into addiction as a result, and suffering ultimate untimely deaths. Cobain ended his suicide note with words of disillusionment:

I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now…Sometimes I feel as if I should have a punch in time clock before I walk out on stage…I don’t have the passion anymore and so remember, it’s better to burn out than to fade away.

Although Cobain has typically been portrayed by the media as a deeply committed musician who became swept up and ultimately overwhelmed by the accidental mass appeal of his art, the newest biography of the Nirvana frontman attempts to convince the reader otherwise. Heavier than Heaven (Hyperion, 381 pp., $24.95), by former Seattle music journalist Charles Cross, details the short and tumultuous life of a man who had always dreamed of being a Rock Star, drawing on evidence from over four years of research, 400 interviews and love letters and entries from Cobain’s private journals.

What emerges definitively is a portrait of a deeply disturbed, incredibly talented individual who deliberately planned every step of his musical career—a far cry from the ethos of the musical genre of which he was emblematic and more distant still from the sad tale of Vicious, a “tough street kid” who truly saw punk rock as a cathartic respite from his unhappy life.

The grunge movement originated in Seattle when it was still a drab, frustrated port city and not a hotbed of technological advancement. Spawned from the do-it-yourself indie scene—dominated at the time by riot grrls, anti-establishment students and angry white Gen-Xers—grunge was solidified as a genre by dirty slackers Mudhoney and the magnetic caterwaul of Soundgarden. In interviews, Cobain presented himself as the posterboy for grunge: Filthy, seemingly apathetic, and disillusioned with society, using music as a respite untainted by society’s stamp of approval. Cobain would claim in interviews that he traded valuable antique guns for his first guitar, that his lyrics were not about anything in particular and that he despised attention from the media. Yet in truth, his demeanor was contrived to maximize shock—not unlike the Sex Pistols’ deliberate attempts a decade and a half before to shock and offend the masses by cursing on national television and donning Nazi armbands and swastika t-shirts. In reality, Cobain re-invented and exaggerated many of his childhood memories, often crafting potential answers to interview questions in his journals. His music and lyrics were intensely personal and autiobiographical, always facing multiple revisions. And, in fact, Cobain was known to complain frequently when he felt that Nirvana was receiving inadequate exposure on MTV.

Kurt Cobain and Nirvana were to the Olympia indie-cum-grunge scene what Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols were to punk rock—what began as an esoteric musical offshoot of political turmoil (in the case of punk, economic and social turmoil in late-1970’s Britain; in the case of indie, rebellion against traditional gender roles in music and disdain towards the mass marketing of an art form) was deliberately sold as bandwagon rebellion. As Bart Simpson said while the Smashing Pumpkins played in front of him at Lollapalooza, “making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel,” and through deliberate and contrived publicity, the UK-banned Never Mind the Bollocks became a No. 1 album, and Nirvana moved so-called “alternative” music into the oxymoronic mainstream—their major-label debut, Nevermind, sold over eight million copies.