http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b09v3jyAZBY
The Meaning of "Heart Shaped Box"
The "Heart Shaped Box" video is Cobain's most ambitious artistic statement, and the journals yield insights into its elusive significance. The box in question is one Courtney sent him, a symbol of their love he believed to be suffused with her sexual scent. Originally, the song title was "Heart Shaped Coffin," suggesting existential concerns even beyond their love. The journal lyrics suggest their romance's love/hate thrill: "She fries me like cold ice cream—headaches and chills." Instead of the recorded version's more upbeat lyric, "I've been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks," the journal reads "buried in your heart-shaped box." The song describes Cobain's place in the whole universe.
The journals sketch the evolution of the video's symbol-laden, elliptically autobiographical narrative. At first, it was to star William Burroughs, whom Cobain evidently revered as a long-lived defier of convention (overlooking the fact that Burroughs survived only because he switched from heroin to marijuana early on) and for his aleatoric compositional technique, morbid mythology, and sardonic W.C. Fieldsian cynicism. Here was the first scene, expressing Cobain's sense of himself as repository of Burroughs' artistic spirit: "William and I sitting across from one another at a table (black and white) lots of Blinding Sun from the windows behind us holding hands staring into each others eyes. He gropes me from behind and falls dead on top of me. Medical footage of sperm flowing through penis. A ghost vapor comes out of his chest and groin area and enters me Body."
Burroughs wouldn't do the video, so Cobain used a generic old man on a cross and pecked at by crows. To him, birds also symbolized old men advocating death: "Me—old man," he writes. "Have made my conclusion. But nobody will listen anymore. Birds [are] reincarnated old men with tourrets syndrome . . . their true mission. To scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth . . . screaming bloody murder all over the world in our ears but sadly we don't speak bird." Clearly, Cobain spoke bird.
The journal has a great sketch of a skinny guy with a pumpkin head on a cross, beset by crows. In the final video, the old man winds up with a pope's mitre. He represents a martyred rock star; this time, the crows seem to represent Cobain's press tormentors. One shakes his beak disapprovingly at the old man.
Next, Cobain wanted the video to depict "bodies entwined in old oak trees . . . Ask about Dante's Inferno movie from the 30s to use instead of making our own props. We will use the scenes of people intwined old withering oak trees." He refers to the 1935 Spencer Tracy movie Dante's Inferno, about a man who stages a Coney Island carnival attraction based on Dante. He bribes the inspector, the building collapses, and people die. The theme of corrupt showbiz and mass death appealed to Cobain.
So did the Inferno. The bodies entwined in trees, briefly seen in the finished video, are from Canto XIII of Dante, the suicide canto. God turns people into trees to punish them for stealing their own souls: when Dante snaps a twig, it bleeds, and he hears a cry. God also sends winged harpies to torment them, like Cobain's crows.
The journals contain several sketches and plans for "Heart Shaped Box's" central symbol of purity: a 4-year-old "Aryan" girl in a KKK hat. (Could she be associated with his beloved blond kid sister and blond toddler daughter?) She is oppressed by her parents' views, but when her hat blows off, it symbolizes the fresh wind of revolutionary ideas. She reaches up to the half-human trees with fetuses dangling from them (another image of purity).
This captures the theme of the lyrics: "Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back." Cobain had a deep need to crawl back to the womb. In a journal quoted only in Heavier Than Heaven, he writes that his first memory was fighting to climb back up into his mother's womb when his head first protruded into the terrible alien air. His first sight was the aqua floor tiles, perhaps related to the color of Nevermind's underwater cover, inspired by an underwater-birth documentary Cobain had seen. The last album, and the "Technicolor" palette he planned for the "Heart Shaped Box" video, was to be the color of the Inferno instead. "Heart Shaped Box" is his metaphor for a womblike place of safety: his marriage, the protective warmth of loved ones. It is also a confinement associated with the afterlife, as is the warm snugness of heroin.
The craving for innocence expressed in the video notes, and throughout the journals and albums, was acted out in Cobain's last days in a poignant way. With his ever- juvenile delinquent friend Dylan Carlson, he hot-wired a car, went on a joyride, and trashed it. He could have bought a car lot full of brand-new BMWs, but instead he stole a crummy car and destroyed it, perhaps as a way to recapture the lost innocence of his lost vandalistic youth. It was pathetic. And yet, in his art, he could shape his yearnings for innocence and his appetite for destruction into something of lasting value.
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the whole byrd gang is here like kurt cobain was here
whats really raelly really good... killa yo im writing some rhymes right now im finishing working on this song its gonna be crack fam...nah'sayin 
: capo!! lemme do the adlibs 
at the end of the day that sh*t garbage b.... you know what im sayin? at the end of the day nobody wanna listen to rogaine rhymes b... it dont even make no sense man... 
