Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  So what does Albini think of In Utero? “I like it far more than I thought I was going to,” he allows. “I like this record way more than I’ve ever liked a Nirvana record. I find myself listening to it of my own free will, occasionally.”

  “I think it’s a far better record than they could have made under any other circumstances,” Albini continues. “Is it one of my top ten favorite albums of all time? No. Is it in my top one hundred albums? Maybe.”

  Kurt admits his lyrics are hard to decipher. “I slur and run words together a lot,” he says, “and I have a fake English accent sometimes.” This time, Kurt might actually consent to print his lyrics. “I really like them, there’s really nothing that’s embarrassing about them so I might print them this time,” he says. “I’d rather do it now than read reviews and have these idiots write the wrong lyrics in.”

  Besides the pedestrian fact that it’s their third album, the classic causes of the sophomore jinx did not apply to Verse Chorus Verse. Often, when bands get famous quickly, they fall into the easy life, disconnected from what inspired them in the first place. This was clearly not the case for Kurt or indeed Chris and Dave, for that matter. The material for follow-up albums is typically thrown together on the run during a lengthy tour that often ends a week before recording begins. That didn’t apply either—Nirvana didn’t tour for most of 1992 and into 1993, so Kurt had plenty of time to develop material.

  But Kurt’s expressions of pain, which once tapped into the mass consciousness so perfectly, may now be less relevant. Just when the country is starting to feel optimistic again, here comes Kurt with a huge sack of woe. And the cause of his pain is no longer something that everyone can relate to. Most people are not familiar with the sensation of being publicly pilloried because of their drug use. Months before the album was released, it remained to be seen if Kurt had translated his personal experience into a universal feeling, as he has done in the past.

  The lyrics aren’t as impressionistic this time—they’re more straightforward, which is not to say they’re as literal as “Sliver” or “Polly.” A medical theme runs through most lyrics, expanding the vocabulary of “Drain You.” Virtually every song contains some image of sickness and disease and over the course of the album, Kurt alludes to: sunburn, acne, cancer, bad posture, open sores, growing pains, hangovers, anemia, insomnia, constipation, indigestion. He finds this litany hilarious. “I’m always the last to realize things like that, like the way I used guns in the last record,” he says. “I didn’t mean to turn it into a concept album.”

  Once again, the record is a product of Kurt’s opposing sensibilities. On the one hand, as Courtney says, “He chews bubblegum in his soul.” But that deeply held pop instinct has an equal and opposite reaction. “Sometimes, he may be his own worst enemy in terms of thinking something is too hooky or too poppy,” says Butch Vig. “I think maybe that’s one of the reasons they wanted this new record to be really intensely brutal sounding.”

  The music reflects some powerful opposing forces in Kurt’s life; the rage, frustration, and fear caused by his and Courtney’s various predicaments and the equally powerful feelings of love and optimism inspired by his wife and child. That’s why In Utero takes the manic-depressive musical mode of Nevermind to a whole new extreme. The Beatlesque “Dumb” happily coexists beside the all-out frenzied punk graffiti of “Milk It,” while “All Apologies” is worlds away from the apoplectic “Scentless Apprentice.” It’s as if Kurt has given up trying to meld his punk and pop instincts into one harmonious whole. Forget it. This is war.

  Amazingly, Kurt denies it to the bitter end. “I don’t think of it as any harsher or any more emotional than the other two records,” Kurt says. “I’m still equally as pissed off about the things that made me pissed off a few years ago. It’s people doing evil things to other people for no reason. And I just want to beat the shit out of them. That’s the bottom line. And all I can do is scream into a microphone instead,” he adds, laughing at the futility of it all.

  Kurt had a little more time to work on the lyrics for In Utero than he did for Bleach and Nevermind. “I swear the lyrics I wrote on those last two albums were so rushed,” Kurt says. “They were absolute last-minute, quick-fix, taken from poems. Most of the lines that I took from poems had to be rearranged to fit the song phonetically, so they don’t have much personal meaning at all, really.”

  “There’s definitely some pieces in there that reflect on my personal life,” Kurt says, “but really, they aren’t as personal as everyone thinks they are. I would like them to be more personal. The emotions, the songs themselves are personal. I can’t do it—I’ve tried to write personally and it just doesn’t seem to work. It would be too obvious. Some things that you could read in could fit into anyone’s life that had any amount of pain at all. It’s pretty cliché.” Of course, it isn’t cliché—it’s just that once again, Kurt rightly won’t reveal just how personal this album is, if only to encourage different interpretations.

  But even Dave acknowledges that the lyrics are loaded with personal meaning. “I guess just knowing what has happened in the past eight months and listening to some of the lyrics and knowing what they’re pertaining to is kind of strange,” Dave says, “because there’s a lot of spite, a lot of ‘Fuck you’ or ‘I’ve been fucked over.’ And a lot of lines that refer to money or legalities or babies. The hit I get off of that is very weird. It’s intense but at the same time it just seems like Kurt feels like he’s backed up against a wall and he’s just going to scream his way out. A lot of what he has to say is related to a lot of the shit he’s gone through. And it’s not so much teen angst anymore. It’s a whole different ball game: rock star angst. At the same time, the lyrics are similar to the first demo they’d done.

  “There are a lot of lyrics to this record whereas with Nevermind, there was a verse and a chorus and it was usually repeated,” says Dave. “But on this one, there’s a lot of lyrics and with a lot of lyrics comes a lot to say. So you kind of figure that Kurt has something to say.”

  “I really haven’t had that exciting of a life,” Kurt protests none too convincingly. “There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up—I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.”

  Kurt likes to talk about his “boring life,” but there’s no doubt that he’s merely being disingenuous. For one thing, the year before the recording of In Utero was hardly Dullsville. “No, it wasn’t,” he says, “but if I were to write some songs expressing my anger toward the media, it would really be cliché and everyone’s expecting that, so I’m not going to write a single fucking song, I’m not going to give anyone the pleasure. I would be easily able to write a song and it wouldn’t be so obvious that I would come out and say ‘Fuck the media.’ ”

  “Rape Me” would seem to be about just that. “I wrote that before this happened, but it could easily fit in,” he concedes. “It was actually about rape. That was what it initially was supposed to be about, but now I could definitely use it as an example of my life for the past six months or year, easily.”

  Kurt had written “Rape Me” on an acoustic guitar at the Oakwood as they were starting to mix Nevermind. Although the song addresses an issue that Kurt has long felt strongly about, it has certainly taken on a new cast since the savaging he and Courtney endured. It seems to be addressed to all the journalists who assailed the couple, all the fans who bothered Kurt for his autograph, all the people who wanted to squeeze whatever they could out of Kurt and the band without thinking about the personal toll it was taking. “Yeah, it could, it definitely could,” he says.

  The song is perhaps the ultimate statement of resignation from someone who’s been beaten so badly already that it doesn’t matter anymore. “Rape me, my friend” is an invitation to a public that doesn’t realize its adoration is hurting its object. “I’m not the only one,” Kurt wails, meaning Courtney and Fr
ances, too. The “Teen Spirit” reference in the opening guitar strum is no accident. Like the chorus of “In Bloom,” it packs a powerfully ironic musical joke—“Teen Spirit,” after all, is the song that started the whole thing.

  “My favorite inside source,” Kurt sings on the bridge, “Appreciate your concern/ You’ll always stink and burn.” The lines are a not so opaque reference to the manager of a Seattle band, who patronized Kurt about his addiction and whom the Cobains believe was a key anonymous interviewee for the Vanity Fair article. They even sent the manager a Christmas card last year that read, “To our favorite inside source.”

  Kurt says that “Milk It” is a really good example of the direction the band had been moving toward in the six months before recording. “We’ve been trying to write new wave songs,” he says, “something that’s aggressive and weird and experimental but still has … It’s still not going any farther out of the boundaries than we’ve gone before but it’s different. It’s a really good mixture of sounding like a punk rock band yet being melodic—or at least memorable.”

  The song contains yet another metaphor for a co-dependent relationship, this time expressed in even more chilling terms. “I have my own pet virus,” Kurt sings, his voice trembling with dread, “Her milk is my shit, my shit is her milk.” The song explodes into the chorus, “Doll steak, test meat,” at once nonsensical and hellish, delivered in bursts of hysterical rage.

  “I just tried to use a medical theme—viruses and organisms and stuff,” Kurt says of the lyrics. “Just word-play, images.” But surely it’s not “just word-play, images”—Kurt couldn’t just sing a page out of the phone book with the same passion and conviction. “Yeah, I could,” he insists. “That’s practically what it is. That’s what those lyrics are. But I think they’re written cleverly enough, I like them enough to where I’m not embarrassed to sing them. In general, it’s about my battle with things that piss me off. And that’s the theme of the whole album—with every album I do, actually.”

  “Scentless Apprentice” came together during the rehearsals for the album and marks a watershed for the band. First, Dave showed Kurt the guitar riff which forms the backbone of the song. “It was such a cliché grunge Tad riff that I was reluctant to even jam on it,” Kurt says frankly. “But I just decided to write a song with that just to make him feel better, to tell you the truth, and it turned out really cool.” Kurt brought in the ascending hook line and Chris devised the second section and then Kurt arranged it all. It was the most collaborative song the band has ever done.

  “I think most of the reason that song sounds good is because of the singing style and the guitar parts that I do over the top of the basic rhythm,” Kurt says. “But hell, that was great—he came up with the beginning of the song and we worked off of that and that was really different. We’ve never done that before.” They split the music royalties evenly.

  “Scentless Apprentice” was inspired by Patrick Süskind’s 1986 novel Perfume, about a maniacal perfume maker in pre-Revolutionary France who has no scent, yet his acute sense of smell alienates him from society. Perhaps this is a character Kurt can relate to. “Yeah, more so a few years ago,” he says. “I felt like that guy a lot. I just wanted to be as far away from people as I could—their smells disgust me. The scent of human.”

  Although it’s an identical sentiment, the hysterically screamed chorus of the song—“Go away, go away”—makes the raw wails of “Stay Away” sound mighty tame in comparison.

  Kurt explains “Heart Shaped Box” by saying, “Every time I see documentaries or infomercials about little kids with cancer I just freak out. It affects me on the highest emotional level, more than anything else on television. Anytime I think about it, it makes me sadder than anything than I can think of. Whenever I see these little bald kids …” He stops and pauses for half a minute as his face reddens and his eyes well up with tears. “It’s just really sad,” he finally manages to say.

  Kurt came up with “Heart Shaped Box” at the Spaulding apartment, where Courtney had laid out her extensive collection of heart-shaped candy boxes in the front room. Kurt has always liked heart-shaped boxes, too, but he insists they don’t have too much to do with the song. “Most of the lines in it are just from [different] poems anyway,” he says. “I just thought they painted a good picture, every line. But the basic idea of the song is about little kids with cancer.”

  He forgot about the song for a while, then picked it up again at the Hollywood Hills apartment. The band tried it out several times but nothing came of it. “I was just so tired of them relying on me to come up with everything all the time,” Kurt says. “During those practices, I was trying to wait for Chris and Dave to come up with something but it just turned into noise all the time.” But one day, they were jamming on some ideas when Kurt decided to give the song one last try. “I just all of a sudden wrote the whole song as we were jamming on it,” he says. “I came up with the vocal style instantly and it just all flowed out real fast. We finally realized that it was a good song.”

  Despite Kurt’s emotional description, the song seems not to be about little bald-headed kids with cancer at all. It seems to be about Courtney. “Meat-eating orchids forgive no one just yet” and “I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black” would appear to refer to his wife’s storm-cloud disposition while lines like “Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back” and being “locked inside your heart-shaped box” describe an almost horrific dependency. But the biting sarcasm in the chorus shows signs of an imminent psychological jailbreak—“Hey, I’ve got a new complaint,” Kurt sings, “Forever in debt to your priceless advice.”

  Kurt does project—and cultivate—an air of childlike vulnerability and naïveté which can coax others to coddle him. The K Records ethos may be an inspiration for that air, but it may also be a way of rationalizing it. The members of the band, and Kurt very much in particular, have become very dependent on others to insulate them from the realities of their career, attracting the inevitable coterie of hangers-on from the press, radio, and other media who somehow feel charged to “protect” the band, proud of their possession of closely held secrets, sure they’re helping Kurt by shielding him from the cold, cruel world. Then again, Kurt has always had someone who would take care of him, from Wendy to Tracy to Chris and Dave to Courtney.

  “Serve the Servants” is a typical smattering of different themes. One of them is the aftermath of Nirvanamania, beginning with the opening lines, “Teenage angst has paid off well/ Now I’m bored and old.” “That’s obviously the state I feel right now,” Kurt says. “Not really, but I may as well make some sarcastic comment on the phenomenon of Nirvana.” “Self-appointed judges judge more than they have sold”—people who criticize Kurt and the band without knowing what it’s like to be in their position. The “Get Courtney” movement also makes another appearance—“If she floats then she is not a witch.” The line refers to a test used to see if someone was a witch—the town wise men would weigh down the hapless suspect with rocks and throw her in a well. If she sank, she wasn’t a witch. Unfortunately, she was also now dead.

  “Serve the Servants” also contains a very direct and personal message to Don Cobain that will be heard from Iceland to Australia, from Los Angeles to London. “I tried hard to have a father/ but instead I had a dad/ I just want you to know that I don’t hate you anymore/ There is nothing I could say that I haven’t thought before.” The second line is a rather cruel thing to say—that Kurt won’t tell his father what he really thinks of him. The lines got put in at the last minute. “They just happened to fit really well,” says Kurt.

  “I just want him to know that, that I don’t have anything against him anymore. But I just don’t want to talk to him because I don’t have anything to share with him. I’m sure that would probably really upset him, but that’s just the way it is.

  “But that’s not what the song was originally about,” Kurt says. “I mean, none of the songs are abou
t anything when I write them. That’s pretty much one of the only things that would be personally tied with me.”

  “The legendary divorce is such a bore,” he adds at the end of the chorus. Kurt is growing tired of the well-publicized idea that his parents’ divorce made a traumatic impact on his life. “It’s nothing that’s amazing or anything new, that’s for sure,” he says. “I’m a product of a spoiled America. Think of how much worse my family life could be if I grew up in a depression or something. There are so many worse things than a divorce. I’ve just been brooding and bellyaching about something I couldn’t have, which is a family, a solid family unit, for too long. I’ve grown out of it now. I’m glad that I could share it with kids who have had the same experiences, but overall it’s sad that if two people choose to marry and have children that they can’t at least get along. It amazes me that people who think they’re in love with one another can’t even have enough courtesy to their children to talk to one another civilly when they see each other even once in a while when they pick the kids up from the visit. That’s sad, but it’s not more my story than it is anyone else’s.”

  Kurt tended toward lengthy titles for the new songs, basically as a reaction against the way so many so-called “alternative” bands use one-word titles for song and album titles. “It’s a cop-out,” says the guy who named his first three albums Bleach, Nevermind, and Incesticide. “Ooooh, just think of the irony in this word, ‘cartoon,’ ” he mocks. “There are so many angles on it.”

  Hence “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle,” written in honor of the Cobains’ patron martyr, many of whose persecutors remain in Seattle to this day. “In her false witness/ We hope you’re still with us” is a clear message to the fans about the Hirschberg piece in Vanity Fair, while the next line, “To see if they float or drown,” repeats the witch-test imagery in “Serve the Servants.” The song ends on a note close to Kurt’s heart—revenge. “She’ll come back as fire/To burn all the liars/And leave a blanket of ash on the ground.”