Teenage Angst Has Paid Off Well: 30 Years Of “In Utero”
Looking back on Nirvana’s 3rd album on its birthday
If you didn’t live through it, it’s hard to explain the kind of outsized impact a band like Nirvana had on an entire generation. Not only did the group push the post-punk malaise of grunge into the mainstream, but the shocking suicide of the lead man at the height his popularity was two whole generation’s version of the JFK shooting—unreal. World-shifting. People cried in the streets.
Despite this blast radius, Nirvana only had three albums, each with its own sonic aesthetic, each a fully fleshed narrative, each now occupying the space of classic in rock-and-roll consciousness.
While Bleach was an offbeat ode to Seattle punk, and Nevermind’s slick, big production literally changed the entire music industry, it was Nirvana’s third album, In Utero, that is the most fitting example of the band’s legacy. Released on September 21, 1993, the album was the band’s official response to the global hysteria that was “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Kurt Cobain, shy but crowd-pleasing, performed the howling pain of being profoundly misunderstood, despite so desperately wanting to be heard, throughout all twelve of its tracks. In Utero is Nirvana at its angriest, its roughest, but also its most reflective.
For the thirtieth anniversary of this album, I asked some of my favorite writers and cultural voices to talk about an In Utero song that was meaningful to them. What resulted is a mixture of reflections and trivia, and of memories unearthed, in a mixture of styles and from various voices.
Six months after this album came out, Kurt put a gun to his head and fired. It’s hard not to hear anguish and finality throughout the record—as if they knew it was the last—from the opening line that fires a shot across the bow of the music industry (“Teenage angst has paid off well, but now I’m bored and old”) to his final message and resigned rumination (“All and all is all we are”).
“Serve The Servants”, Elias Cepeda
“What type of music do you like?”
“Rap, classical. Some salsa.”
“Alternative?”
Alternatives to rap and classical, I thought? I guess so, but nothing was coming to mind in the moment. There was too much faux-pressure in the moment as the older kid on the swim team took a few seconds to ask me those questions as he sat on one of the locker room benches of the park district where we were all on the swim and water polo teams in the inner-city of Chicago with his fellow older kid buddies. I’d be driven in the car of the cool lifeguard and water polo coach Bolo along with his entourage of favored team members, kids all only slightly older than me, numerically, from my 10 years of age.
They had girlfriends. They made dirty jokes. They knew what alternative rock was.
I could tell I wasn’t being teased—there was a warmth of genuine, if fleeting, interest in what I liked since they were deciding what to play in the car on the way to the match.
I shook my head, ‘no.’ Admitting that I didn’t even know what alternative was, and asked what the term meant.
“It’s just rock music. But, now. You should listen to it.”
About 9 months earlier, In Utero had been released to no fanfare in my house or bedroom where I used blank tapes in my boom box to record whatever came on our local pop station B96. Every couple days I’d throw on studio or concert recordings of whatever I was practicing in piano class, or dance to Caribbean music put on by my mother after work.
I liked rock and roll, but as an Oldies thing. It was the stuff played by the band at the dance in Back to The Future, or depicted in my Archie Comics. I was still a few years away from borrowing my Dad’s Santana and Hendrix albums.
One of the guys on the team later recommended the local radio station Q101 to find some alternative. My pallet was unrefined. Alice In Chains felt too thrashy, Jane’s Addiction was interesting but too sad to handle, at times, and a little shrill. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were a compelling party, but then something came on that felt like twisted familiarity.
A three-snap count-in from drumsticks, a guitar chord warped by the E flat note in the middle smashed then held for a moment, followed by the bass, guitar, and drums all working together with a drop and kick beat and rhythm that was all of the 50’s teen rock band stuff I’d heard, plus.
The singer was clear, but sounded like he’d forgotten to clear his throat. The slightly high baritone seemed unconcerned with artifice or maintaining the energy I would have expected from rock as he experimented with light warbles. There was low-volume anguish in his voice.
The singer was unrefined, and the band didn’t end in unison, at the close. The song came to a stuttering, sloppy close. It was a garage take that somehow got on the radio.
I could sell this to my parents, I calculated. The rhythm and beat were close enough to whatever they could remember of 50’s rock, but the flat notes seemed transgressive with a nod towards dissonance.
So did the lyrics….lyrics I figured my parents’ adult ears wouldn’t be able to make out—as opposed to the swearing in the rap songs. I don’t think they’d understand this guy. But, I could.
“Teenage” was the first word! I had been told for years through pop culture that adolescence was a time to look forward to. I wasn’t old, yet, but I was already a bit bored. Hurt, adolescence, boredom…Vague rejection perhaps of things I’d been taught to value—service and the thought that it would be repaid.
The lyrics helped me imagine that whoever was singing was still young, but had seen some things, felt even more, and had a grasp on what was to come. So, I should listen-up.
Elias is a writer based out of Chicago and runs the Deconstructing Consent newsletter.
“Scentless Apprentice”, Stoya
The guitars are like a grinding, grease-exhaust-releasing mechanical metaphor for the way America’s school system exists to produce workers, and reproducers. The vocals open with a palpable apathy—present throughout most of Nirvana’s work but particularly evident here—angry but too tired to do more than drone. Scentless Apprentice contains lyrics full of moments which evoke scent.
Cobain’s voice alternates between a now-known-to-be-heroin-induced mumble and a piercing screech. Isn’t that how everyone truly alive felt in the ‘90s? Isn’t that how everyone who was truly alive in the ‘90s feels today, despite the fact that we’re decades past our teenage angst, despite the fact that we no longer smell like Teen Spirit but like anxiety, like pharmaceuticals, like hormones interrupted by the EDCs in plastics?
We are wrecked by the world, and Cobain knew it already. We knew it in our souls. It’s what attracted us to his music. But the baby in Scentless Apprentice smells like nothing. He is not yet ruined. He is hope. Only to be rejected in the second verse. Only to be disposed of in the third.
The rounds of “go away, go away, go away” screech like nails on a chalkboard.
Nirvana foresaw the way most of us would be trapped, by trauma, in our childhood selves. Stuck in the schoolroom, raging and moaning and checking out. Because, even though the rest of the world couldn’t see it yet, we who were youth at the time knew something was rotting from the inside. Yet we love where we were born. We love the voices who criticized. Those who tried to point out the smell.
Jessica Stoya (StoyaStack) is a semi retired pornographer, public intellectual, and devotee of cat worship.
“Heart-Shaped Box”, Chris Kaye
“Heart Shaped Box” isn’t the best song on In Utero (that would be “All Apologies”) but it is the one that got my attention: I paid no mind to Nevermind; it smelled simply like slick Pixies and its fratboy fans made it tough to take seriously.
But there are no palominos or mosquitos here. Dadaist libidos have nothing on this dentata of a libretto. Meat-eating orchids? Umbilical nooses? Lyrics like an arterial splatter on an O’Keefe canvas.
Cobain’s corporeal concerns are fleshier than usual on this track. In the hands of a lesser artist, this would be a throbbing squirm, a gurgling bloody mess. But this is a (re)birth, not an abortion. The Nevermind baby swam so the transparent cenobite angel on In Utero’s cover could fly. Kurt’s fascination with femininity and his occasional crossdressing clearly annoyed the conservative jock rockers Nirvana helped put out to pasture. And his ideas about gender probably cracked some eggs. Was he trans? Who knows and it doesn’t matter. He was the first white guy with a guitar to wake the fuck up.
In this box, that guitar cuts the chords. Sinister drones backed by bottom end bends and drums that sound like actual fucking sticks on skins instead of compressed cannonfire. It’s the ticking clock, the beating breast of the album. A hellraising puzzle. Even if it is about Courtney’s (or his own?) vajunes.
Chris Kaye is a global news editor at Insider.com. Talk to them about D&D at @chriskaye.bsky.social.
“Rape Me”, Jeb Lund
How would you feel if this song came on at a party?
Nevermind broke when I was a sullen high school freshman with nothing to do but watch MTV and rehab a broken kneecap, and I believe I had the appropriate sullen teen response by being hostile toward it.
Children!—please believe me!—as it happened, the Nirvana experience was like one of those social media days when a guy lets his son get eaten by an alligator and Trump almost dies of his own disease—except they're happening on the same day, which lasts almost four years. Sonically speaking, imagine if Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know" played for almost all of high school. Except you're still in a monoculture: There are a few dozen fortysomethings having an insanely smart conversation about Big Black on a BBS somewhere, but it’s 1992, and you don’t know what Big Black or a BBS are.
You could be forgiven, then, for thinking that my taking to In Utero represented a contrarian streak, but it's difficult to overstate how much I and pretty much everyone else welcomed a chance to talk about a different Nirvana song. That, and I was a Pixies fan, and you can hear them all over it. Regardless, even if I grudgingly nursed an affection for tracks from Nevermind, I was glad to enjoy a new set of tracks on the new one. Even if some I didn't.
I know "Rape Me" wasn't the first time I realized I was experiencing something that was already part of its own meta-narrative—I'd watched the Berlin Wall come down live, and it was impossible not to think at some point, "I am watching the Berlin Wall come down, live"—but it was definitely one of the first times I witnessed several tornadoes of meta-narrative converge on one bit of ground and Cuisinart it. The song is 2 minutes and 50 seconds, but you could and still can fit so much discourse in that badboy.
There was the "Kurt writes meaningless lyrics last-second" brigade condemning the song and clashing with the "these more poetical songs represent a change in his composition" defenders. There was a bad-faith "it's pro rape" discourse colliding with a fanboy cohort eager to cite how it was written as a response to audiences misunderstanding "Polly." I side with the fanboy cohort, personally, but it's hard not to notice that kludgy bridge. At least enough to ask Kurt if, "My favorite inside source / I'll kiss your open sores / Appreciate your concern / You'll always stink and burn" had a media component, which he partially conceded, and which vitiates some of the good-allyship the rest of the song conveys. It's dissonant to have a song ostensibly about this profound violation suddenly turn to seem to be about the consequences of being a front man for a major-label band that makes music videos and became wildly successful.
"Rape Me" came rolling out of the speakers like an eight-year-old saying "fuck." Didn't expect that, did you? After a few years of Kurt and Courtney's media provocations—smugly hostile and contrarian interviews that seemed to say "if a bovine specimen like you likes A, then B is good"—it felt like another in a line of look-at-me's, ones that trivialized the effect of the words "Rape Me" before they arrived and helped leverage the bridge against the rest of the song. And that's assuming that the intro sounding like "Smells Like Teen Spirit: Sad Movie Trailer Version" didn't predispose you to wonder if this wasn't all a troll job in the first place.
That's not where you want to be with a song named something like "Rape Me." The dominant question you should be asking yourself isn't, "Am I getting worked here?" But that question felt like so unnecessarily much of the Kurt Cobain experience at the time and still does, and I think people cope with it in the same way: Use the words you need, ignore the ones you don't, maybe never look them up, roll on vibes, don't overthink it. Unless you want to, and treat it like art and interpret the hell out of it. Maybe this is a survivors' anthem, or maybe it's an overgrown boy's self-pity. Schroedinger's Albino doesn't mean anything until you decide how you want to look at it. That bridge can mean anything you want.
Jeb Lund is a former political reporter and columnist for Rolling Stone, The Guardian and Gawker, and has appeared in (Old) Deadspin, Esquire, GQ, The New Republic, Vice and The Washington Post, amongst others. He produces and co-hosts the Hallmark movies podcast It's Christmastown with David Roth and the Dennis Quaid retrospective Quaid in Full with Sarah D. Bunting. You can follow him on BlueSky.
“Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle”, Leila Brillson
When this album came out, I had no idea who Frances Farmer was, but I did know that there is something insidious and weaponized about calling a woman hysterical. Farmer was a Seattle-born starlet who had a bright career, starring in films next to Bing Crosby and Cary Grant. As her career grew, she chafed underneath the oppressive Hollywood studio system (where she was “lent out” often) and became “difficult”, which led to her to be involuntarily committed several times. Towards the end of her life, speculations about her mistreatment—forced lobotomies, sexual assault, brutal treatment—emerged, thanks in part to a post-humous autobiography, Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, and (how Kurt found out about her) Shadowland, by William Arnold, a fictionalized “reimagining” of her life story. Kurt loved the book so much that he called Arnold and left him a message before he died. Arnold had a to-do list that said, “Return the call of K.C. - the Nirvana guy!” when Kurt killed himself. (Note: Call people back!)
Years ago, producer Steve Albini named this his favorite song on In Utero, probably due to the Sonic Youth-iness of this song. (I don’t agree: My favorite is “Milk It”, but I think this one is culturally significant.) Kurt Cobain was not known as a technically great guitarist, but his guitar had a distinctive sound and he played it in imaginative ways, which you can hear in the distortion throughout the song. If you wanted to show someone one track that exemplified Cobain’s guitar style, this is it: It has the roars, the strums, and those weird twists and turns that became his signature.
Kurt saw a lot of his wife in Farmer, a woman who was pilloried for being angry, messy, drunk. When they got married, Courtney Love wore a dress of Frances Farmer’s. Their daughter is even named Frances (though apparently named after the lead singer of The Vaselines, but clearly not a coincidence). Kurt was acutely aware that fame did not protect you from accusations that you were crazy—doubly so if you were a woman.
In a career of hard to sing-along-to/understand choruses, I would be remiss not to mention the simplicity of this one. Kurt repeats, again and again, his voice wavering in repetition, “I miss the comfort of being sad.” In a song about a woman punished for showing her own emotional turmoil, forced to normalize her behavior, this line is so heartbreaking. Maybe we should’ve just let her be sad. Maybe we should have just let him, too.
Leila Brillson writes the newsletter you are currently reading.
“Dumb,” Richard Vergez
The initial thing that struck me about In Utero was the cover art. A transparent assemblage of a figure framed by generous amounts of negative space, suggesting birth but also transcendence. Framed by the elegant, condensed serifs of the Nirvana font and contrasted with the pedestrian, Letraset type of the album title. Provocative with its simplicity and fragility. Wings suggesting space. Iconic.
Was this the aviatic mother that spawned the swimming baby from Nevermind?
“Dumb” was the track that illustrated this visual the most poignantly to me. A minimalist groove punctuated by the sweeping cinema of the cellos in the refrain. Patience and restraint. Sustain and release. Proof that a quiet, spacious track as this could have just as much impact as Nirvana at their loudest. The lyrics, a quotidian meandering of ignorance as bliss, taking us back to Kurt’s happy/unhappy place from “Something in the Way.” A painfully creative, outcast mind wanting to escape the trap of self-loathing, striving to be more “like them.” But not really.
This one track is better than some bands’ whole careers. Sonically, “Dumb” connects the dots through the slowcore of bands like Low or Galaxie 500, towards the post-rock of Slint and the Constellation label, whilst still retaining the distressed allure of the grunge era that communicated to the masses. Something timeless that only Nirvana will ever possess.
Richard Vergez is a mixed media artist and nonmusician. He is based in Miami where he runs the experimental music label Noir Age.
“Very Ape.”
“Milk It”, Gene Park
"Milk It" feels like a destabilized moment in life. It's at a steady 4/4 time signature, but the beat rests don't occur where they should be. It's an emblem of Kurt's songwriting, how he would twist the melodies while still struggling to stay within itself. But "Milk It" was on constant repeat during my teen years because it sounded like how I often felt. Being a teenager is already disorienting, but I grew up with heavy substance abuse. The song sounds like anger at oneself over being so dirty and damaged, and the more you pull and dig out, the more it stays true. When I hear it again today decades later, I still hear echoes of a younger me, a twisted melody struggling to stay within himself.
Gene Park is a games critic for The Washington Post, and Nirvana is the most influential artist of his life.
“Pennyroyal Tea,” Luke O’Neil
It was going to be the third single off In Utero but the B-side was “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die” and I guess the record company didn’t want to put a message like that out into the world. You wouldn’t want to capitalize on a famous person’s pain and anguish. You wouldn’t want to do that.
Kurt thought it had a lot of potential as a single, he said. As big as their other hits, he said. They re-recorded and remixed it a number times to get the final version. He was right about that. His instincts were right on that matter but not on some others.
I literally just ate some cherry-flavored antacids before I sat down to write. I’ve been eating them for a few months now. I didn’t even ever think about the lyric until I just put the song on for the first time in years. CVS brand. They keep breaking in half when I go to poke them out the back of the tinfoil.
It’s weird when a song is one of your favorite songs of all time and you avoid it. Like avoiding your parents at Christmas.
I’m not up to the task here I’m afraid. I write regularly about beloved musicians that have taken their own lives or died from substance issues all the time—Elliott Smith and Jason Molina and David Berman and Chris Cornell and many others. But I’m not up to the task here. I regret trying.
Please make that my epitaph: I regret trying.
Sitting down to write about this song feels all of a sudden like when you first meet a new therapist and you want to convey everything that has ever happened to you and everything you have ever thought all at once because going through each distinct aspect of your whole deal week by week would take too much time.
Or maybe it’s talking to someone you all of a sudden love in a way you’ve never loved someone you just recently met before.
As if you want to scream into an overdriven and ungrounded microphone instead. Feeling the electric shocks because the fucking soundguy is nodding off in the booth and you’ve got nothing in the monitor.
But not letting go. Still screaming.
There. That is what I think.
“Give me Leonard Cohen afterbirth.”
Ok, man. No idea what that meant at the time. Kurt and Michael Stipe trying to get me a dumb fuck kid from suburban Massachusetts—and not the liberal part—to listen to Leonard Cohen. What did I know about mortality?
“I’m so tired I can’t sleep.”
That line fucked me up when I was in high school. I also didn’t have any idea what that meant. Not one single idea. I slept well when I was a teenager and into my twenties until eventually I found drugs and alcohol. And then I knew how to not be able to sleep.
Many years later, this line was like when someone in a movie is trying to crack a safe and they have to put their ear up to it and listen so closely and you can hear the internal machinations and it finally slides into place and the vault door is opened.
I don’t do drugs anymore, although I did the other night for the first time in a year or two and after I laid there twisting and writhing in bed and then later still on the floor in my little blanket fort punching myself in the face trying desperately to go to sleep. Trying to do anything to go to sleep.
Luke O'Neil is the author of the newsletter Welcome to Hell World and the book of the same name. His most recent collection of short stories A Creature Wanting Form came out this summer.
“Radio Friendly Unit Shifter,” Vladimir Cassel
One of the most aggressive songs on a mostly radio unfriendly album. The opening swells of feedback are too distinct for you to convince me Kurt's not paying homage to Nirvana's noisy benefactors, Sonic Youth. I can almost see him scraping a drum stick across his strings like Thurston Moore. Or maybe he was just showing off for Thurston's old pal, Steve Albini.
Once the unease is set, Krist Novoselic's bass drives this song. In the long shadow of Kurt, most people don't realize what a smart bassist Krist really was. Never too melodic or complex, he knew what he was there to do: punk rock. A constant counterweight to Kurt's shifting ambitions between underground credibility and pop stardom.
"What's your name? Do you like me?"
Kurt, always one to play the media like a fiddle while coyly feigning apathy, is at his most aware here of the gristmill he's trapped himself in. The song's title is in reference to Nevermind's radio friendly production. It was originally called "Nine Month Media Blackout", for the time between late '91 and early '92 when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” dominated the charts and single-handedly shifted an entire industry's economy.
Kurt gets called a "voice of a generation" so often that it's easy to take for granted that he really was. It's one of those passive platitudes you can imagine Melissa Joan Hart or some other so-and so has-been parrot on I Love the ‘90's for an easy buck. But fuck you if "A blanket acne'd with cigarette burns" doesn't deftly sum up Gen X malaise as much as "Here we are now, entertain us" does. Not bad for throwaway poetry lines hobbled together last minute.
Just as this all starts to get tedious, Kurt, too self-aware to ever preach before, spake thusly: "Hate your enemies. Save your friends. Find your place. Speak the truth." Sage advice before ascending from the muck so few of us ever escape.
Towards the end, the band sounds like they're running out of gas, but they find a second wind before Kurt unleashes another wall of feedback and burns this track to a cinder. From ashes to ashes.
Vladimir Cassel is an artist and writer interested in generative art and music.
“Tourette's”.
“All Apologies,” Parker Molloy
Five words that come to mind when I think about "All Apologies": Apathy. Dread. Ennui. Conflict. Peace.
The final song on Nirvana's last studio album makes for a fitting finale. Its iconic opening riff, the sardonic and self-interested lyrics, and its intense dynamics render the tune a veritable journey. The ambiguity of the lyrics fascinates me, and I appreciate that there isn't one definitive version universally recognized. If you ask someone to play "All Apologies," you might hear the Unplugged rendition or the track as it was found on In Utero. My personal favorite is Steve Albini's original mix. The unyielding beat of the drums, the resonant bass, Cobain's guitar's overwhelming fuzz in the chorus eclipsing his vocals, culminating in a peace that emerges from recognizing the uncontrollable world beyond, after albums of introspection.
All in all is all we are. All in all is all we are. All in all is all we are.
Parker Molloy is the writer of The Present Age, a newsletter about media and culture.