CHAPTER NINE
IT IS NOW TIME TO MAKE IT UNCLEAR
Nevermind came without a lyric sheet. “I guess I wasn’t confident enough,” Kurt says. At first, he wanted to print some of his poems, then some “revolutionary debris,” then nothing at all—no pictures or anything. At the last minute, he picked some lines out of the songs (and a couple that aren’t in any of the songs) and ran them together into a poem.
Kurt says “revolutionary debris” meant “all kinds of anarchistic, revolutionary essays and diagrams about how to make your own bomb.” “And I just thought we better hold off on that,” he says. “If we ever really want to do that, we’d be more effective if we gained popularity first. Then people might actually think twice about it, rather than us alienating everybody right off the bat. But once we started to get really popular, it was really hard to hold back. We played the game as long as we could.”
Part of playing the game is going out to dinner with powerful music magazine editors and pretending to be friendly with them so they’ll give the band an article or a favorable review. On one of these junkets, the band went out to lunch at a swank Beverly Hills eatery with Rip magazine editor Lonn Friend.
Before lunch, Kurt, Chris, and Dave visited Friend’s office. “I looked up on his wall and I noticed that Lonn has a fetish,” says Kurt. “A rock and roll butt fetish. He has to have all these pictures taken with him and up-and-coming bands where either he’s naked or the bands have to drop their pants. He’s pinching their butts. There are all these pictures of him with naked rock stars that have been in this magazine. He’s in the bathtub naked and they’re standing around him and it started to scare me.”
“It was a disgusting scene because we were basically pimping our personalities to this person to see if he liked us before he decided to promote us,” Kurt continues. “It was the most sickening thing I ever experienced. I just decided to not say a word and sit there and be pissed off and act really insane. The only words he said to me after he got up to leave were, ‘Kurt, you shouldn’t talk so much.’ He was really offended, totally pissed off.”
Sure enough, Rip didn’t support Nirvana until it practically had to, at the height of Nirvanamania. When the band refused to cooperate any more with Rip after the magazine ran a special edition on the band without their permission, the letters page just happened to feature more and more anti-Nirvana screeds. “If we were smart,” says Kurt, “we would have played the game a little bit longer to get the acceptance of the Rip readers, to where they liked us so much that no matter what we said, it wouldn’t matter. But we blew our wad too soon. But at the same time, I feel sorry for those kids, I was one of them. You can’t blame a fourteen-year-old kid for calling someone a fag if he’s grown up in an environment where his stepdad has been saying that for years and it’s an accepted thing that you’re practically forced into.”
While oldsters called Kurt’s lyrics incoherent, his Whitman’s Samplers of images, ideas, and emotions fitted the short attention spans of channel-hopping kids everywhere. “I very rarely write about one theme or one subject,” Kurt once told the Seattle Times. “I end up getting bored with that theme and write something else halfway through the rest of the song, and finish the song with a different idea.”
Like the Pixies’ Black Francis, Kurt didn’t necessarily write his lyrics for linear sense. They’re at their most successful when words and music collide to produce a powerful and distinct third sensation—“A denial, a denial” (“Teen Spirit”); “And I don’t have a gun” (“Come as You Are”); “she said” (“Breed”) or even a good old “yeah,” repeated thirteen times for emphasis in “Lithium.” Most of the lyrics come from lines of poetry that Kurt writes in spiral-bound notebooks every night before going to sleep, so the impressionistic quality comes mostly from the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated lines, rather than a stream-of-consciousness approach from word to word.
The effect is like a musical Rorschach test, but more importantly, they added up to very coherent ideas and emotions that you can comprehend conceptually. Of course, sometimes even Kurt got a little confused. “What the hell am I trying to say?” he sang on “On a Plain.”
In his songwriting, Kurt deals in extremes and opposites that animate the songs. One of the most famously obscure couplets in “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was “A mulatto, an albino/ A mosquito, my libido.” It is really nothing more than two pairs of opposites, a funny way of saying the narrator is very horny. The lyrics often loft an idea and then shoot it down with one little burst of cynicism. Even the music echoes the dynamic contrasts of the imagery. Many of the songs—“Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Lithium” foremost—alternate between subdued, rippling sections and all-out screaming blitzkriegs, while the album itself encompasses songs like the acoustic “Polly” and the majestic “Something in the Way” as well as primal scream workouts like “Territorial Pissings” and “Stay Away.”
Kurt is smart enough to recognize that the dualities are a reflection of himself and perhaps his audience. “I’m such a nihilistic jerk half the time and other times I’m so vulnerable and sincere,” he says. “That’s pretty much how every song comes out. It’s like a mixture of both of them. That’s how most people my age are. They’re sarcastic one minute and then caring the next. It’s a hard line to follow.” Few songs on Nevermind combine that mixture better than “Teen Spirit.”
“It was basically a scam,” Kurt says of the song. “It was just an idea that I had. I felt a duty to describe what I felt about my surroundings and my generation and people my age.”
One night, Kurt and Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill had gone out drinking and then went on a graffiti spree, spray painting Olympia with “revolutionary” and feminist slogans (including the ever-popular “GOD IS GAY”). When they got back to Kurt’s apartment, they continued talking about teen revolution and writing graffitti on Kurt’s walls. Hanna wrote the words “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.” “I took that as a compliment,” says Kurt. “I thought that was a reaction to the conversation we were having but it really meant that I smelled like the deodorant. I didn’t know that the deodorant spray existed until months after the single came out. I’ve never worn any cologne or underarm deodorant.”
Early lyric sheet for “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” “Who will be the King & Queen/of the outcasted teens,”
Virtually ever since he arrived, Kurt had been inundated with the Calvinists’ discussions of “teen revolution” in Olympia coffee shops; after all, that’s what bohemian people in their early twenties do—it’s in the rule book. “I knew there was some kind of revolution,” he says. “Whether it was a positive thing or not, I didn’t really care or know.”
The Calvinists would bridle at the comparison, but in many respects, teen revolution resembled the aims of the Woodstock Nation. It meant that young people were creating and controlling their own culture as well as their political situation, rescuing them from a cynical and corrupt older generation. The idea was to make youth culture honest, accessible, and fair in all respects—on the artistic side, on the business side, and even in the audience—making it the diametrical opposite of what corporate America had turned it into. After that, political change would be inevitable.
Kurt didn’t doubt that the Calvinists were earnest and he liked their ideas, but he also was dubious about their prospects. He found their altruism naive—they didn’t seem to realize it was all a pipe dream. “Everyone seems to be striving for Utopia in the underground scene but there are so many different factions and they’re so segregated that it’s impossible,” Kurt says. “If you can’t get a fucking underground movement to band together and to stop bickering about unnecessary little things, then how the fuck do you expect to have an effect on a mass level?”
Kurt even felt that pressure was being put on Nirvana to help with the revolutionary effort. “I just felt that my band was in a situation where it was expected to fight in a revolutionary sense toward the major corporate machine,�
�� says Kurt. “It was expected by a lot of people. A lot of people just flat out told me that ‘You can really use this as a tool. You can use this as something that will really change the world.’ I just thought, ‘How dare you put that kind of fucking pressure on me. It’s stupid. And I feel stupid and contagious.’ ”
So “Teen Spirit” is alternately a sarcastic reaction to the idea of actually having a revolution, yet it also embraces the idea. But the point that emerges isn’t just the conflict of two opposing ideas, but the confusion and anger that that conflict produces in the narrator—he’s angry that he’s confused. “It’s fun to lose and to pretend” acknowledges the thrill of altruism, even while implying that it’s plainly futile. “The entire song is made up of contradictory ideas,” Kurt says. “It’s just making fun of the thought of having a revolution. But it’s a nice thought.”
Part of embracing the revolution is blasting the apathetic types who aren’t part of it. Even Kurt admits that his generation is more blighted by apathy than most. “Oh, absolutely,” he says. “Especially people in rock bands who aren’t educated. That’s also an attack on us. We were expected to shed a minimal amount of light on our ideals, where we come from, but we’re not even capable of that, really. We’ve done a pretty good job of it, but that was never our goal in the first place. We wanted to be in a fucking band.”
“Teen Spirit” sounds violent—the drums clearly take a vicious pounding, the guitars are a swarming mass of barely contained brutality, the vocals are more screamed than sung. “I don’t think of the song like that,” Kurt says. “It’s really not that abrasive of a song at all, really. It only really screams at the end. It’s so clean and it’s such a perfect mixture of cleanliness and nice candy-ass production and there were soft spots in it and there was a hook that just drilled in your head throughout the entire song. It may be extreme to some people who aren’t used to it, but I think it’s kind of lame, myself.”
Kurt’s family turmoil may have had a lot to do with why Nirvana’s music sounds so angry. “I’m sure it did,” Kurt says, “but I have enough anger in me just toward society that I would definitely have looked for this kind of music anyhow.”
Dave Grohl has a slightly different take on the song’s message. “I don’t think there was one, to tell you the truth,” he says. “Most of it has to do with the title of the song, and that was just something that a friend had written on the wall. It was funny and clever. That, paired with the video of us at the pep rally from hell, I think that had a lot to do with it. Just seeing Kurt write the lyrics to a song five minutes before he first sings them, you just kind of find it a little bit hard to believe that the song has a lot to say about something. You need syllables to fill up this space or you need something that rhymes.”
Impromptu scribblings aside, one remarkable aspect of “Teen Spirit” was that unlike many previous songs of its type, it didn’t blame the older generation for anything—it laid the blame at the feet of its own audience. That implies a sense of responsibility that didn’t quite fit the slacker stereotype. Although “Teen Spirit” was a bold and provocative dare, Kurt feels he crossed the line into condemnation. “I got caught up in pointing the finger at this generation,” says Kurt. “The results of that aren’t very positive at all. All it does is alienate people and make them feel the same feeling you get from an evil stepdad. It’s like, ‘You’d better do it right’ or ‘You’d better be more effective or I’m not going to like you anymore.’ I don’t mean to do that because I know that throughout the eighties, my generation was fucking helpless. There was so much right wing power that there was almost nothing we could do.”
“I know that I’ve probably conveyed this feeling of ‘Kurt Cobain hates his audience because they’re apathetic,’ which isn’t the case at all. Within the last two years, I’ve noticed a consciousness that’s way more positive, way more intelligent in the younger generation and the proof is in stupid things like Sassy magazine and MTV in general. Whether you want to admit that or not, there is a positive consciousness and people are becoming more human. I’ve always been optimistic, but it’s the little Johnny Rotten inside me that has to be a sarcastic asshole.”
“Introducing that song, in the position that we were in, I couldn’t possibly say that I was making fun or being sarcastic or being judgmental toward the youth-rock movement because I would have come across as instantly negative. I wanted to fool people at first. I wanted people to think that we were no different than Guns n’ Roses. Because that way they would listen to the music first, accept us, and then maybe start listening to a few things that we had to say, after the fact, after we had the recognition. It was easier to operate that way.”
“In Bloom” was originally aimed at the dilettantes of the underground scene, the jocks and shallow mainstream types who had begun to blunder into Nirvana shows after Bleach. But remarkably, it translated even better to the kind of mass popularity the band enjoyed. The song mixes images of fertility and decay with a chorus about a gun-toting guy who likes to sing along to Nirvana’s music, “but he knows not what it means.” The brilliant irony is that the tune is so catchy that millions of people actually do sing along to it. It’s also a good description of former band members like Jason Everman, Dave Foster, and Aaron Burckhard, who were honestly attracted to the band’s music but didn’t quite go along with Kurt and Chris’s punk rock ethos.
“Come as You Are” sounds unlike anything else on the record—with its mysterious murky, watery feeling, it shows Kurt’s metamorphosis from misanthrope to a more open-minded person. “I’m tired of people passing judgments on one another and expecting people to live up to their expectations,” says Kurt. “I’ve done that all my life. I’m a Pisces and it’s a natural thing for Pisces to be upset with people and expect them to be a certain way and then they aren’t, so you’re just mad at them all the time. I just got tired of it.” The narrator admits that he’s unsure how the other person will be, but is ready to accept the other person, contradictions and all. Furthermore, he adds that he won’t be judgmental when the meeting occurs—“And I swear that I don’t have a gun.” It’s a remarkably beautiful sentiment.
Early lyric sheet for “In Bloom,”
More dualities emerge as Kurt beckons someone to “Take your time, hurry up” and to “Come dowsed in mud, soaked in bleach.” Kurt is full of opposites, too: masculine/feminine, violent/nonviolent, pop/punk. He’s decided to accept it all, to come as he is. Perhaps instead of resolving the contradictions, he’ll let them live together under one roof, sometimes warring, sometimes joining to produce a powerful third entity.
Early lyric sheet for “Lithium.”
Once “Breed” builds up its hurtling momentum, Kurt wails “I don’t care” half a dozen times, then “I don’t mind” and finally “I’m afraid,” saying about as much about the straight line between apathy, ignorance, and fear as needs to be said. “I don’t mind if I don’t have a mind” is merely icing on the cake.
The title of “Lithium” is an update on Marx’s description of religion as the “opiate of the masses.” Kurt says that the song may well have been inspired by Jesse Reed’s family, the only born-agains he had ever had direct contact with. Kurt says he isn’t necessarily antireligion. “I’ve always felt that some people should have religion in their lives,” he says. “That’s fine. If it’s going to save someone, it’s okay. And the person in that song needed it.” The song is not strictly autobiographical, but it’s easy to see a resemblance between Kurt’s despair and loneliness in Olympia and the sorry state that the character is in. Kurt didn’t find religion that winter of 1990, but he did find another kind of nirvana.
“Polly” is based on an actual incident which occurred in Tacoma in June of 1987. A fourteen-year-old girl returning from a punk show at the Community World Theater was kidnapped by a man named Gerald Friend (no relation to Lonn), who hung the girl upside down from a pulley attached to the ceiling of his mobile home and raped and tortured her with
a leather whip, a razor, hot wax, and a blowtorch. She later escaped from his car when he stopped for gas. Friend was later arres led and eventually convicted and will likely spend the rest of his life in jail. Kurt’s only embellishment to the story was the hint that the woman got away by fooling the rapist into thinking she enjoyed what he was doing to her.
Rape is a continuing theme in both Kurt’s interviews and his songs. It’s almost as if he’s apologizing for his entire gender. “I don’t feel bad about being a man at all,” Kurt says. “There are all kinds of men that are on the side of the woman and support them and help influence other men. In fact, a man using himself as an example toward other men can probably make more impact than a woman can.”
Although the title of “Territorial Pissings” blasts macho posturing, the song is frequently the occasion of the band’s end-of-set instrument-smashing orgies. The lyrics are basically a handful of disconnected ideas which appealed to Kurt. He explains the opening words of the song (“When I was an alien …”) by revealing that he always wanted to believe he was really from outer space. The fantasy, which he only recently stopped playing with in his mind, was that he was actually an alien foundling. “I wanted to be from another planet really bad,” says Kurt. “Every night I used to talk to my real parents and my real family in the skies. I knew that there were thousands of other alien babies dropped off and they were all over the place and that I’d met quite a few of them.” For Kurt, the fantasy supported the idea that “there’s some special reason for me to be here.”
(Coincidentally, the creatures in Kurt’s paintings look remarkably like artist’s rendering of aliens which have appeared in everything from the Weekly World News to the cover of Communion, Whitley Strieber’s allegedly nonfiction book about close encounters with beings from outer space.)
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