Despite the tenets of alienation and disillusionment upon which punk and grunge were founded, the act of selling rebellion to the masses became dependent upon making music with far-reaching commercial appeal. Although this required the purveyors of such music to all but abandon the ethos of rebellion against the status quo, this was not the case for the fans. And here lies the decline of Vicious, who began as a lower-class Pistols devotee who identified with the anger and frustration inherent in punk rock. Although Vicious was a prototypical fan of punk rock, he did not mesh well as bassist for the band. Bandmates Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Johnny Rotten had respective fantasies of rock and roll stardom—Jones was even an admitted fan of the Top 40 who often played “Stairway to Heaven” on his guitar—and founded the band under Malcolm McLaren’s direction with the explicit knowledge that the Pistols’ true purpose was to drum up publicity for the King’s Road clothing store McLaren co-owned with Vivienne Westwood. Rotten’s claim that “only the fake survive” was used to incite a reaction among his fans, but in truth his statement was autobiographical. Vicious was unable to reconcile the sell-out aspect of superstardom with his belief in the tenets of punk rock, and died of a heroin overdose after the breakup of the band.

Cross, through repeated, systematic analysis of his subject’s words and actions throughout his life, proves that Kurt Cobain was truly different from Sid Vicious—that despite his claims at the end that he could not handle fame, what Cobain truly despised was the increasing lack of control over his art and his life that accompanied Nirvana’s rise to superstardom.

The book begins with a description of Cobain’s first brush with death—an accidentally-on-purpose heroin overdose less than seven hours after Nirvana’s first performance on Saturday Night Live in 1992—an honor previously unknown to grunge bands. Cross writes that

Growing up in a small town in southwestern Washington state, Kurt had never missed an episode of “Saturday Night Live,” and had bragged to his friends in junior high school that one day he’d be a star.

Yet upon the day of his performance Cobain “acted as if it were an inconvenience to get out of bed,” making the calculated decision to refuse the limo ride to NBC and wearing the same torn, unwashed outfit onstage from the previous two days. Cobain’s overdose followed an argument with NBC officials over what he considered to be a compromise of his plans—the band were required to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the hit single they were sick of playing. Each subsequent overdose/suicide attempt that Cross presents follows a description of conflict between Cobain and other parties over control of his life and music—Cobain’s 1994 overdose followed arguments with his wife about curtailing his drug use while he was on a European tour he despised and Cobain’s suicide immediately followed his escape from a rehab center he was forced to enter by his friends and family. Through this repeated juxtaposition of struggle for personal control with self-harm, Cross paints a picture of a man would do anything to retain his control as a self-made Rock Star—even take his own life. And although it was true that Cobain truly wished to “burn out” rather “than to fade away,” his motivations for doing so were based upon self-retention of permanent superstar status, not upon disillusionment with selling out and abandoning grunge’s ethos of private alienation.