“Why in the hell do journalists insist on coming up with a second-rate Freudian evaluation of my lyrics?” Well, Kurt, I’m no journalist, but coming up with second-rate Freudian evaluations of rock lyrics is more or less the raison d’etre of my blog, and Nevermind provides ample opportunities for doing precisely this. But first, to the background – arguably, this is the defining album of the 90s, the decade’s Revolver, Ziggy Stardust, or Purple Rain. It represents a point when “punk broke”, when the acerbic, abrasive guitar music pioneered by the likes of the Sex Pistols in the late 70s went mainstream and briefly toppled pristine pop from its commanding position atop the charts. The broader cultural ramifications of Nevermind’s stratospheric and unexpected success entailed the rise of grunge in the US and Britpop in the UK, with crotchety hard rock albums such as Dirt by Alice in Chains and Definitely Maybe by Oasis ratcheting up the kind of mind-boggling sales figures and radio omnipresence which, but a decade prior, had only been conceivable, let alone achievable, by the soft, synthy likes of Michael Jackson and Madonna.
The success of grunge as a genre and Nevermind in particular becomes all the more baffling from the perspective of 2024, when its easier to perceive the sheer distance between the utter madness of this album and, say, Like a Prayer, which was released just two years prior. Nevermind is untrammelled male rage and incipient psychosis rendered slightly more palatable by a handful of deceptively accessible singles. First and foremost amongst these is, of course, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, one of many songs on Nevermind which is, in some oblique way, about the band’s fanbase and the experience of fame. The Wild West twang of the verses and the explosive rage of the choruses are punk throwbacks, but what immediately sets this music apart from its irascible ancestors is the sound of the vocals and the content of the lyrics. Whereas Johnny Rotten sang with a hate-filled sneer, Cobain’s voice carries the weary, slightly stoned, bewildered resignation of a disillusioned East Coast hippie. Rotten offered a life-affirming rage at the state of the world, but poor Kurt sounds exhausted and defeated, fully cognisant of the failure of the flower power project, with only fatalistic irony to leaven his learned helplessness (“oh well, whatever, never mind”).
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” is an anthem for a pissed off but powerless generation which had grown up with deindustrialisation and the steady erosion of the social fabric, a toxic cocktail contrived by two decades of neoliberal economics and overreachingly progressive social policy. Its lyrics are typically opaque, but they’re surely about the experience of getting wasted at a rock gig, where the “lights are out and it’s less dangerous”. The grandiose stomp of “In Bloom” offers a slightly more scurrilous, though equally anthemic, take on those sections of Nirvana’s fanbase who “like to shoot their guns” and “like to sing along”, even though they “don’t know what it means”. That is, presumably, the jocks and rednecks who drank and moshed despite not sharing any of Nirvana’s cosmopolitan “values”. Kurt Cobain’s frank dislike of the unreconstructedly masculine section of his own fanbase, and his proclivity toward left-leaning political causes and women’s rights, is also implicitly articulated on the disturbing country song “Polly”, which relates the experience of a female Nirvana fan who was kidnapped and raped after leaving a gig.
And yet, it’s ironic that Kurt complained about his fans “not knowing what it means” because, for the most part, it indeed means nothing. I won’t subject the reader to another diatribe about how, from the 70s on, rock lyrics increasingly came to resemble nonsensical, stream of consciousness verbal diarrhoea, jotted down immediately prior to being recorded, but, well, this is explicitly what Dave Grohl admitted to in an interview (“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.”)
I suppose that, in some ambiguous way, much of Nevermind is about Kurt’s breakup with Tobi Vail, lead singer of a succession of early-90s West Coast punk bands. These songs are, predictably enough, rather crazed. The first verse of “Drain You” depicts two babies, one of which says to the other “It is now my duty to completely drain you”, while the chorus describes the eminently romantic act of chewing meat and passing it from mouth to mouth while kissing. “Lounge Act” is riven with incoherent jealousy and recrimination (“I’ll go out of my way to prove I can still smell her on you / Don’t tell me what I want to hear”), while “On a Plain” charmingly declares “I love myself better than you” and alludes to an abusive relationship which haunted Kurt’s childhood (“my mother died every night”). Overall, these songs are jagged, inchoate, abrasive narrations of the toxic relationships of damaged teenagers, largely bereft of anything resembling positive energy, and in a way, highly illustrative of the pre-verbal emotional intensity of young, fucked up love.
At many points on Nevermind, however, the combination of nonsensical lyrics and ear-splitting punk music effectively and distressingly conjures the disintegrative experience of psychosis. “Territorial Pissings” is a cacophony of crazed raving, an adrenaline-soaked mosh pit anthem which cautions that “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.” “Breed” is similarly unhinged, the detonated psychotic shrieking “get away from me” at his imagined persecutors, before settling down into strange and fragmented musing on the prospect of starting a family and assuming adult responsibility (“We don’t have to breed / We could plant a house, we could build a tree”). This lunatic asylum symphony is followed by the deceptively and unsettlingly lackadaisical “Lithium”, which apparently describes the experience of a man whose wife has recently died and who is forced to turn to God in order to preserve his sanity (“I’m so happy, because today I found my friends, they’re in my head”). The light and swingy sound of the opening verse contrasts with the punk pandemonium of the chorus, the lyrics of which raise several discomfiting questions about how exactly our protagonist’s significant other met her end (“I love you, I’m not gonna crack / I killed you, I’m not gonna crack”).
In a way, it might be argued that grunge took the belligerent, but bright, sound of early punk and married it with the introspective, self-lacerating, troubled lyrics of post-punk acts such as Joy Division. This was definitely the case for Alice in Chains, and especially Layne Staley, whose date with the Grim Reaper was absolutely foreseeable from the first thirty seconds of “We Die Young”, the opening song on their debut album Facelift. In some ways, however, Kurt Cobain strikes me as a strange candidate for suicide. Yes, Nevermind is laced with madness, rage, and frazzled, sub-psychotic miasma. But it’s also full of languid stoner humour, clever, mischievous and playful lyrics, and the overall sound – like much early punk – is unmistakeably bright, even jubilant, in contrast to the more menacing sound developed by Staley and Jerry Cantrell.
In my opinion, there are only two moments when Nevermind is deserted by its characteristic and compelling undercurrents of irony and vigour. “Come as You Are” is a chilly slice of post-punk, a cold-blooded and haunting reworking of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take”, with anti-conformist lyrics that mock society’s contradictory expectations of the individual (“Take your time, hurry up, choice is yours, don’t be late”). Toward the end of the song, and with the benefit of hindsight, this becomes rather eyebrow-raising (“no, I don’t have a gun”). But most discomfiting of all is the album’s closer, “Something in the Way”, a profoundly unsettling, cello-laden acoustic number about homelessness and the feeling of being stuck, trapped by one’s own demons. Musically, these are two of the softest moments on Nevermind, and they perhaps lay bare the fundamental sense of despair and dislocation which lay beneath the surface-level explosiveness of grunge.
So the Cold War had been won for the West, but the kids were most definitely not alright. Nevermind’s singles are anthems for this generation, perfect slices of slick hard rock, while the rest of the album’s combination of obstreperous music with frankly unhinged lyricism represents a compelling channelling of the grunge ethic. Like many 90s albums, though, it’s too long; its latter third comprises a succession of more or less indistinguishable and, in my opinion, disposable punk cacophonies that could have been profitably cut from the track list. Moreover, and despite the gargantuan size and longevity of this album, it is not grunge’s finest or most exemplary hour. That moniker belongs to Dirt, Alice in Chains’ second record, an utterly harrowing listen which eschewed Kurt Cobain’s impish playfulness in favour of Layne Staley’s drug-fuelled death wish, and which, in my opinion, makes for a more consistent listen.
In fact, it’s questionable whether or not Nevermind’s highlights can really be considered grunge music at all, given how radio friendly they are, a fact that the band implicitly recognised and reacted against with the more confrontational In Utero. Still, the artistic achievement of getting an all-guns-blazing rock song with the lyrics “load up on guns, bring your friends / it’s fun to lose and to pretend” to dominate the airwaves, a mere two years after “cherish the love, cherish the life” smothered the world in bubble-gum, remains almost uniquely impressive in the annals of rock.
8/10
Highlights: “Smells Like Ten Spirit”, “Come as you Are”, “Something in the Way”