No Apologies: All 102 Nirvana Songs Ranked

A mustache might be a cool facial accessory in this day and age – but in 1988, when Nirvana recorded this hard-pounding track for Bleach, a moustache was considered (at least in the alt-rock crowd) to be an emblem of hopelessly regressive masculinity. But macho rednecks aren’t the only ones on blast here: Lines like “Help me trust your mighty wisdom / Yes I eat cow I am not proud” sarcastically dig at the hipper-than-thou Olympia scene that, while immensely attractive and inspiring to Kurt, also often made him feel like a hick from the sticks. DANIEL EPSTEIN

This Bleach track is one of the most tempestuous and restless in Nirvana’s catalogue. The guitar playing is as anxious as sweaty hands, and Chad Channing’s drums race ahead of the action like he’s late for a meeting. The feeling fits the content, in which Cobain sets the scene of two hometown losers too busy exchanging “arts and crafts” to shut up and have sex already. Cobain wasn’t known as a storyteller, but he was known as a Seattle thrift-store fiend (see his guitars and amplifiers) years before Macklemore. This caustic snapshot of life back home, then, works like a snapshot jotted down from one such swap meet, the outsider judging the insiders from the periphery. As Nirvana’s reputation grew, this small-town send-up seemed to fall out of favor, with the band playing it less than almost any song released on an official studio album. Too bad: It’s a musical fistfight. GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN

“Out of all the bands who came from the underground and actually made it in the mainstream, Devo is the most subversive and challenging of all,” Kurt said in 1992. “They’re just awesome. I love them.” Originally the B-side of the Akron new wave band’s biggest hit, “Whip It” (as “Turn Around”), this headlong sneer was recorded for Nirvana’s 1990 Peel session, and reappeared as the opening track of their Hormoaning tour EP. Dave Grohl was clearly having a blast channeling Devo drummer Alan Myers’ “human metronome” technique, and Kurt gets to affect a clipped accent that’s not too far off from what Carrie Brownstein would later adopt as her singing voice in Sleater-Kinney and Wild Flag. DOUGLAS WOLK

“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. “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. 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. 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. MIKE POWELL

“I didn’t give a flying fuck what the lyrics were about,” Cobain told SPIN in 1993. If “Scoff” sounds like an afterthought next to Bleach‘s more iconic tracks, that’s because it was. In the oft-told “Kurt wrote 80 percent of Bleach‘s lyrics the night before recording” legend, “Scoff” and “Sifting” came dead last, when Cobain was already exhausted. The result was competent but unremarkable grunge-by-numbers: churning riff-rock; a listless fuck-you-parents verse repeated three times verbatim; and a frantic, non-sequitur chorus. Though “Scoff” does mark one of the rare early spots that showcased Kurt’s love of chart-topping pop, though: The drum intro is nearly a direct lift of the Knack’s “My Sharona,” an homage that made more sense when Kurt’s Top 50 albums list appeared in 2002’s Journals: Get the Knack sat comfortably alongside Sonic Youth, Scratch Acid, and Bad Brains. TOM MALLON

Kurt was famously obsessed with the little-known, short-lived, sex-crazed Glasgow duo the Vaselines. He called Eugene Kelly and Francis McKee “the Lennon and McCartney or the Boyce and Hart or the Ferrante and Teicher of the underworld.” They became so inseparable from Kurt’s fandom that when the Vaselines reunited in 2010, McKee started timing how long it took for interviewers to mention “the N-word.” For the most rocking of the three Vaselines covers they tackled in their career, Nirvana recorded “Son of a Gun,” the opening track from the first Vaselines EP – one verse, one chorus, repeat ad lib. In a letter he wrote to Kelly, Kurt explained that he wanted to release it on a record called Nirvana Sings The Vaselines, Wipers, Devo & Nirvana, which seems to have become 1992’s Hormoaning EP. DOUGLAS WOLK

Originally titled “Perky New Wave Number,” Kurt Cobain said he didn’t know what this punky, swinging In Utero hard rocker was about, but here are some clues. “It’s kind of an attack on men in a way and people that have flaws in their personality and they’re real manly and macho,” he said. The lyric, “If you ever need anything please don’t hesitate to ask someone else first,” might be the pinnacle of Nirvana’s alt-rock slackerism. And, according to Michael Azerrad’s Come as You Are, the bit about being the self-proclaimed “King of Illiterature” referred to how Courtney Love teased him about not being very well read. KORY GROW

Jesus Lizard singer David Yow recalled to the Village Voice in 2011 that he and Cobain discussing doing a single “first time I saw ’em, first time I met ’em,” at a 1990 Jesus Lizard/Nirvana show at New Jersey’s Maxwell’s. “I was just so impressed because I wasn’t that familiar with Nirvana and I knew it was Seattle and grunge and I don’t like Soundgarden, and I didn’t care much for Mudhoney… But I thought [Nirvana] were fuckin’ great.” While his band donated the careening “Puss” to the split single – which finally arrived three years later – Nirvana returned the volley with a mid-fi blast, emerging in the gulf between Nevermind and In Utero. In contrast to the slick sound on Nevermind, “Oh, the Guilt,” almost D.C.-punkish in its stop-start thud, was recorded in a Seattle basement studio by Barrett Jones. JOE GROSS

“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. 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. “[It was] nothing more than a joke,” Cobain told Rolling Stone in late 1993. “We knew people wouldn’t get it; they’d take it too seriously. 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”). 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

“Well, let’s see, in 1993 I was listening to a lot of the Jesus Lizard,” Dave Grohl told NPR – noting the Austin band whose Steve Albini-produced albums (Head, Liar, Goat and Down) constituted some of the most cathartically feel-bad music of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Nowhere was Nirvana’s affection more evident than on “Milk It,” four minutes of neg-head rhythm riffs and screaming over what sounds like someone throwing a bag of rocks at a barn door. Cobain’s gift was always his ability to smuggle pretty melodies into otherwise ugly situations; while Jesus Lizard scaled back on melody in order to expose the bare power of rhythm: Here is one of the rare Nirvana moments when the ugliness wins. “Completely wicked,” Krist Novoselic called the song late last year – and the song that best embodies the toxic meanness of In Utero. MIKE POWELL

A draft of the lyrics for “Tourette’s” contained just three words: “fuck,” “shit” and “piss.” Cobain’s singing voice, like vocal cords in a blender, yowls in a way that approximates similar frustration. When Cobain looked back on the song, he said, “I didn’t make any sentences or words, I just screamed.” But for all its unfocused acrimony, the song does have one coherent piece of commentary: The clearly spoken words “moderate rock” are a jab at the “modern rock” radio format that had made Nirvana megastars just a few years earlier, nipping at the hand that feeds. KORY GROW

“Drain You” was the literal birth of a relationship and “Lounge Act” its slow erosion and breakup (by “Stay Away,” the restraining orders were being busted out). While the meaning behind Cobain’s songs were often opaque, it was no secret that “Lounge Act” – with its themes of jealously, insecurity, and overbearingness – was about Kurt’s ex-girlfriend, Bikini Kill’s Tobi Vail. According to producer Butch Vig, “Lounge Act” earned its title because it sounds like a “lounge song” thanks to its jocular riffs and Cobain’s more-polished-than-usual delivery – but early lyrics for the song in Cobain’s Journals also featured a line about “lounging in the sea.” DANIEL KREPS

“‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’ started life as ‘Nine Month Media Blackout,’” wrote Charles R. Cross in the Nirvana bio Heavier Than Heaven,” the title a joking response to journalist Lynn Hirschberg’s magazine-unit-shifting article in Vanity Fair about the Cobain clan. The song’s final name, it is ironic: Radio Friendly Unit Shifter is about as close as Nirvana got to the corrosive noise-rock of Big Black, In Utero producer Steve Albini’s brilliant mid-Eighties trio; and Killdozer, the Butch Vig-produced band whose heft Cobain wanted Nevermind to match. JOE GROSS

First recorded with producer Steve Fisk during the 1989 sessions for the Blew EP, “Even in His Youth” (and later re-recorded with Dave Grohl on drums for a “Teen Spirit” B-side) was one of a handful of songs that served as a bridge between the unrefined sludge-punk of the previous year’s Bleach and the brighter, more pop-tinged sound that would come to the fore on Nevermind. Lyrics like “Daddy was ashamed” reference Cobain’s adversarial relationship with his father, though the bile-filled words are contrasted by a buoyant buzzsaw riff. RICHARD BIENSTOCK

“I was simply blown away when I found out that Kurt Cobain liked my work,” said David Bowie, “it would have been nice to have worked with him, but just talking would have been real cool.” Though some thanks should be due to early Nirvana drummer Chad Channing, who introduced his bandmates to David Bowie’s 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World, and to guitarist Pat Smear whose enthusiasm for that album resulted in Nirvana doing an accordion-fueled cover on MTV Unplugged. DOUGLAS WOLK

“Stain” gives “Negative Creep” a run for its money in the self-loathing department, even if it’s not quite up to the same level of musicality. Lines like “He never leaves ’cause he’s got bad luck” and the insistently self-flagellating chorus reflect Kurt’s perpetual “outsider” state of mind, one that derived in part from being harassed by rednecks in his hometown of Aberdeen, while also never feeling quite cool enough to fit in with the Olympia crowd. DANIEL EPSTEIN

The young Cobain’s idea of a joke shows that he definitely chose the right path by picking music instead of a comedy. “Floyd the Barber” is a sub-Beavis & Butt-head bit of couch-jockey surrealism, in which he imagines a sexually violent spoof of beloved TV classic The Andy Griffith Show. The Melvins’ Dale Crover played drums here, during their first recording session in January, 1988. “There was no way that I could predict those guys would have sold millions of records,” Crover said later. That’s certainly true here: The thudding, punishing “Floyd the Barber” is about as unfriendly as Nirvana got. JON DOLAN

The funny, slow-paced, apolitical Fang weren’t like the other Bay Area punks in 1982; and Nirvana weren’t like the other major label rock bands on the festival circuit in 1992. Feeling alienated by their new life of hopping from giant outdoor stage to outdoor stage on a European tour, the band snarkily added Fang’s venomous, sludgepunk eyeroll “The Money Will Roll Right In” as the opener of their set as they careened through Sweden and Spain. The money had actually rolled in for Cobain, the Nineties’ most accomplished “rich as shit” fame anthropologist, thus making their cover more pointed and hysterical than, say, Soundarden’s cover of Cheech and Chong’s similar “Earache My Eye.” According to James Washburn, the Green Day pal known as Brain Stew, Courtney Love sent all of Cobain’s Fang records to frontman Billie Joe Armstrong. CHRISTOPHER R. WEINGARTEN

Somewhere in the muck of rock history, nostalgia and band psychoanalysis, Nirvana’s punk roots often get buried. But on “Pay to Play” (renamed “Stay Away” for its Nevermind inclusion), their pure fidgety energy is out front and you could riot to it. Beyond its mosh factor, Cobain’s screaming about a very specific code of ethics endemic to punk: “I’d rather be dead than cool” and “Fashion shits fashion style.” Too bad for them that they became both, but still a perfect song to slam your bedroom door to. JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

“I’ll Be a Sunbeam” is the title of a children’s hymn from the early twentieth century, but the Vaselines’ “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam,” from their 1988 Dying For It EP, owes no more than its first line to it. When Nirvana covered the Vaselines song (with its title slightly altered) on MTV Unplugged, Kurt called it “a rendition of an old Christian song,” and it was generally mistaken for a gospel number, which it couldn’t be less like. In fact, it had been a staple of Nirvana’s live repertoire for years already: They first played it on stage the day Nevermind came out in America. DOUGLAS WOLK

“Something just drove Kurt to keep busting it out,” Krist Novoselic told Gillian G. Gaar for her 2006 book about In Utero. “He had some kind of unattainable expectations for it.” The song in question, one of the few white whales of Nirvana’s catalogue, is “Sappy.” Cobain wrote and recorded the lament against the expectations of others in the late Eighties; he then re-recorded it in most every major studio session for the rest of his life, never to be completely satisfied. After nearly making Nevermind, “Sappy” was never released under Nirvana’s name. Various takes and demos bound around the Internet (including a muted and wonderful turn with Butch Vig), but the official version arrived as an uncredited hidden track at the end of No Alternative, the 1993 AIDS fundraiser. That take, with Dave Grohl on drums and Steve Albini behind the boards, is crisp and cutting, with a guitar solo that dips and climbs and vocals that suggest irritation morphing into emancipation. GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN

Far from its provocative title, “Rape Me” is a double-entendre from jump, as the opening chords are a bizarro-world inversion of those that open Nirvana’s mega-est mega-hit, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It seemed to refer to Cobain’s disdain for the anti-punk, corporate rock star lifestyle that squashed his spirit so completely that he referenced it in his suicide note. But it was also the closest to an actual Bikini Kill song that he would ever write, using the lyrics as a woman-empowering taunt to show would-be rapists that their victims’ spirits would not be tamped, a bit of riot grrrl infused into those dirty guitar chords that so many have come to associate with men in a vibrant era of tough women-led rock bands. It deserves extra points for its seriousness. JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

Dare to attempt a somewhat literal reading of this “Teen Spirit” B-side and the song appears to be about injecting heroin. Dare to take Kurt’s own account of it (as told to roommate Dylan Carlson) and the song is about his vomit-inducing love for Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail. The reality might wind up somewhere between the two: Per Charles R. Cross’s Heavier Than Heaven, Cobain wrote the song in the months following his break-up with Vail – also around the same time that he began experimenting with the new drug. NICK MURRAY

One of Nirvana’s first forays into the more sinister side of social commentary, “Polly” was based on a real-life case in which serial rapist Gerald Friend tortured and sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl, who then outsmarted and escaped him by convincing him that she enjoyed it. Written from the eerie perspective of the disturbed perpetrator, both versions convey the song’s ominous nature – whether soft and sludgy on Nevermind or, in “(New Wave) Polly,” frenetic and unforgiving. Though “Polly” is disturbing, it reflects Cobain’s dual fascination with the macabre and extremely sensitive nature, as well as his interest in feminism under the tutelage of his ex-girlfriend, Bikini Kill’s Tobi Vail. Though it’s certainly not a protest song, it deftly delves into the mind of a sicko, like a succinct Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and is an example of the thoughtful depths Cobain was willing to plumb. JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

For a band defined by angst and immortalized by suicide, Nirvana could be uncommonly funny. “Start this off without any words,” Cobain offers by way of an opening here, landing on one of his best refrains: “Love myself better than you/I know it’s wrong, but what can I do?” The riff is chipper, the melody delivered in the singsong of a nursery rhyme. In a lot of ways it parodies the person Cobain became: A junkie too lost in his own pain to realize he has control over it, the voice of a generation wondering what the hell he’s trying to say. Apparently he wrote the lyrics five minutes before recording them. MIKE POWELL

The first of Nirvana’s three recorded Vaselines covers initially surfaced in a dodgy live recording on a split single with the Fluid, as part of the deal by which Nirvana were bought out of their Sub Pop contract. As with many of his versions of other people’s songs, Kurt changed the lyrics a little: “She’ll take me everywhere/She’ll take me anywhere/As long as I’m good and clean” became the druggier “She’d take me anywhere/She’d take me anywhere/As long as I stay clean,” for instance.) The title’s not a drug reference, though: The two-chord song is apparently about actress Molly Weir, and MDMA wasn’t known as “molly” until long after it was written. DOUGLAS WOLK

In a 2013 interview, MTV Unplugged producer Alex Coletti remembers Cobain purposely wanting to perform the Meat Puppets covers in keys slightly out of his range, so his voice would sound strained. See “Lake of Fire,” a surrealistic fantasy about the afterlife whose images are pinched straight from the Book of Revelation, where the pinch in Cobain’s voice makes him sound less like an ambassador of youth than some wizened pappy staring into middle-distance from his rocking chair. An especially canny choice when placed before “All Apologies” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?,” two songs that made the band sound in touch with evils much older and more mysterious than corporate rock. MIKE POWELL

Full of jabs at Vanity Fair writer Lynn Hirschberg, who wrote a negative story about Courtney Love, this In Utero rager also paid tribute to Seattle-born actress Frances Farmer, who was committed to an insane asylum against her will. “I guess that’s my way of letting the world know that bureaucracy is everywhere and it can happen to anybody and it’s a really evil thing,” Cobain said. “The story of Frances Farmer is so sad and it can happen to anybody and it almost felt at a time that it was happening to us.” But before Cobain had lyrics for it, it was an instrumental the trio jammed on in Dave Grohl’s basement sometime before In Utero. “When I heard ‘Frances Farmer,’ I thought, ‘Oh, my God, there’s going to be another record,’” Grohl has said. Full of anger and pathos (“I miss the comfort in being sad,” goes the chorus), the final song is one of In Utero‘s most primal – right down to the toy piano Cobain played in the bridge. KORY GROW

“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. “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. (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. 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. CHRISTOPHER R. WEINGARTEN

A two-minute verse-chorus-verse-chorus concoction influenced by the Vaselines’ compact pop-punk template, “Been a Son” first roared to life on 1989’s Blew EP with Chad Channing on drums, appeared later in a Dave Grohl-assisted live performance on the CD single of “Lithium,” and most famously emerged on Incesticide via a BBC session – one of the rare Nirvana songs to be officially released in three different versions during the band’s lifetime. The song (later covered by the Manic Street Preachers) was clearly a favorite of Cobain’s, possibly inspired by his difficult relationship with his father, who would have preferred him to engage in more “manly” pursuits like sports and hunting rather than art or music. DANIEL EPSTEIN

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. 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. 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 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. 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. Perhaps not coincidentally, he also called “Blew” his favorite song on the record. “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. RICHARD BIENSTOCK