The Nirvana song Kurt Cobain always liked the most: “An ode to women”
It was going to take a lot for Kurt Cobain to ever compliment his own work.
He didn’t like the idea of making music for the masses, so as soon as Nirvana became one of the biggest bands in the world, you could hardly find a single interview where he was ever talking about what made their music sound good. As far as he was concerned, music for the masses was what cheapened their magnum opus to begin with, but that didn’t mean that he was going to trash every single thing he ever released.
Sure, he had complaints about how Nevermind was mixed and said that it sounded closer to a hair metal record, but there’s a good chance that he was still a little bit proud of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. No one writes an anthem like that by accident, and when looking through some of the biggest songs of that decade, nothing quite defined the slacker generation quite like those opening power chords.
But Cobain did really call his shot when talking about their rise to power. ‘In Bloom’ was already one of the biggest songs that they had ever made, but when you look at the lyrical content, they were already writing about how normies could listen to their music and not have a clue what they were talking about, even when they were still in the studio, not knowing if they would take off or not.
If there was one thing that Cobain wanted to be remembered for, though, it was making an impact as an advocate for women’s rights. There was far too much toxic masculinity in hard rock when he saw people like Axl Rose, and if he could sway the opinion of the public only a little bit, he would have gladly done it by talking about the horrors of sexual assault on ‘Polly’ or the gender norms that needed to be squashed out on tunes like ‘Sappy’.
And even when he was screaming his lungs out, he was still trying to make a statement every time he picked up a guitar. ‘Territorial Pissings’ might be an inherently funny title if you don’t know what the song is about, but even in a single line, Cobain was interested in giving his audience food for thought, especially with a lyric like “Never met a wise man/if so it’s a woman”.
The song wasn’t exactly single material by any stretch, but Cobain felt that the tune said everything that he wanted to say on Nevermind, saying, “I think I like ‘Territorial Pissings’ the best. It’s just an ode to women and my appreciation of them… as a whole, as people. I think they deserve a lot more credit than they get.” It’s not exactly the catchiest song they ever made, but it does give you an insight as to what Cobain wanted to be.
I mean, look at the one other song that he seemed proud of from Nevermind: ‘Drain You’. Both of those tunes are still heavy on the roaring guitars half the time, but a lot of what makes them work is being the clearest example of what they wanted to do. ‘Drain You’ was a lot more erotic than ‘Territorial Pissings’, but you could definitely tell that both of them were close to Cobain’s heart based on how well they were written.
And if those tunes were what Cobain wanted to be remembered for more than anything, it makes a lot of sense when the band talked about not identifying with the grunge label back in the day. Sure, they had some grunge influences, but given how raw ‘Territorial Pissings’ sounds, Nirvana just happened to be a punk band that just so happened to have pop and metal influences sprinkled in for good measure.
