Kurt Cobain told Michael Azerrad that the lyrics to Nevermind‘s ominously brooding closer were written “like if I was living under the bridge and I was dying of A.I.D.S., if I was sick and I couldn’t move and I was a total street person. “It has a groove,” he explained in Seattle Weekly, “and it’s the sole survivor of the Doom Pop experiment.” Luckily, contemporary bands like Torche seem to have continued his research. Perhaps not coincidentally, he also called “Blew” his favorite song on the record. Novoselic later described the resultant sound as “doom pop,” and pointed to Bleach‘s leadoff track as the only C-tuned track to actually make it to the album without being recut. The consequence was that they went “one lower,” to a positively leaden “drop-C.” Which, in the case of “Blew,” essentially plunged Kurt’s languid vocals and loping melodies into a tar pit. But when Kurt and Krist dropped their lowest strings during the recording of Bleach, they didn’t realize their respective instruments were already tuned down a full step. The reason? Nirvana, like many of their Seattle peers, favored “drop-D” tuning, which involves lowering the bottom E string on a guitar or bass one whole tone. The very first sound we hear on the very first Nirvana studio album – Krist Novoselic’s rumbling seven-note bass figure in “Blew” – is so low-toned as to be almost indecipherable. Inspired by one of his favorite novels, Peter Süskind’s 1985’s violent tale of a super-smeller, Perfume, Cobain pointed out that “Scentless,” like “Frances Farmer,” is a song where he sticks to a theme as opposed to constructing “cut-ups” of poems in his beatpunk style. (To wit: It’s the only song on the album where all three members have a songwriting credit.) Of course, beyond Grohl’s fleet-footed bass drum pattern and Novoselic’s menacing low-end, Cobain lyrics are some of his most evocative. “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.” Easily the most rhythm-driven song in Nirvana’s catalog – and handily besting Alice in Chains’ “No Excuses” as having the best “grunge breakbeat” – this prickly, pummeling song is In Utero‘s best place to experience Nirvana as the sum of its parts. “It was such a cliché grunge Tad riff that I was reluctant to even jam on it,” Cobain told Michael Azerrad about the guitar part that drummer Dave Grohl had brought to the band. One fan who definitely missed the joke was Noel Gallagher, who claimed that countering the “fucking rubbish” nihilism of the song was one of his motivations to write Oasis’s “Live Forever.” TOM MALLON It was totally satirical, making fun of ourselves.” Even in hindsight, “I Hate Myself” doesn’t exactly sound confessional – the demo version on With the Lights Out shows how little the lyrics evolved from melodic grunts to a goofy sketch that Cobain could barely bother to finish with “one more quirky clichéd phrase” (and a nearly inaudible monologue from Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts”). “We knew people wouldn’t get it they’d take it too seriously. “ nothing more than a joke,” Cobain told Rolling Stone in late 1993. Eventually surfacing on The Beavis and Butt-Head Experience comp (huh-huh), the band buried the lurching piece of infectious sludge-pop because they (rightly) feared that no one would get its black humor. “We could write that song in our sleep,” Kurt Cobain once said of “I Hate Myself and Want to Die.” Even if it were a throwaway, it looms large in Nirvana mythology mostly by virtue of its ill-omened title, Cobain’s original name for In Utero. Still, you can imagine how Cobain – who once wrote the line “All in all is all we all are” – would hear in a rambling, philosophical credo that ends in, “But those are all just guesses / Wouldn’t help you if they could”: The freedom of shrugging your shoulders and letting go. Like a lot of II, “Plateau” is mystical but banal and ultimately a little vague – the kind of wisdom proffered by guys on porches at rural gas stations. “MTV didn’t really want it to happen, as I recall,” bassist Cris Kirkwood told Willamette Week “They were somewhat disappointed we were the guests they chose to take on TV with them.” But Nirvana was just returning a favor: “I owe so much to them,” Cobain once said – a quote that ended up on a sticker tacked to the Puppets’ 1994 breakthrough Too High to Die. “Plateau” was the first of three songs Nirvana covered from the Meat Puppets’ 1984 punk-country totem Meat Puppets II at their MTV Unplugged date – a major boost to a band that spent the entirety of career underground.
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