‘In Bloom’: the song Kurt Cobain wrote as an attack on “abusive” rednecks
No one has a choice when it comes to who likes their music. Once everyone gets out of the studio, all of the music is out into the world, and the public can do what they want to with any of your songs, whether that’s celebrating them like they are their anthems or throwing them into the trash. While most of the 1990s crowd managed to accept Nirvana with open arms, Kurt Cobain was not ready to become known as the voice of certain members of his generation when the band broke through.
Then again, Cobain always had a strange relationship with his own star power during his time in the spotlight. He had always talked about the idea of taking over the world in the same way that The Beatles had done decades before, but the punk rock ideals that came with it made him both elated and disappointed when Nevermind started selling in droves upon release.
Granted, there’s not much to complain about when it comes to Cobain’s melodies on their sophomore release. The band had already begun making some of the best alternative rock of their time, and although not everyone could make out what he was saying half the time, they at least knew that he believed every word when he screamed at the top of his lungs on ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.
But even if they played songs with massive riffs, that brought along a certain clientele that Cobain was not comfortable with. He could still appreciate the music of bands like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith during his time, but once he found out that most of their songs revolved around casual misogyny and not being the most respectful towards their fellow man, he was disgusted seeing those same fans flock to his group.
That’s not to say that he didn’t have some sort of backup plan, though. A lot of the lyrics on Nevermind might be hard to parse out, but once everyone bothered sitting down and reading the lyric sheet, Cobain slipped in his feminist beliefs to retool the standard misogynistic lyrics of the genre, like saying, “never met a wise man, if so it’s a woman” on ‘Territorial Pissings’.
And since a lot of the abusive people in Cobain’s circle went along with the typical redneck behaviour he saw, ‘In Bloom’ was his way of punching back at them. When talking about the tune, Cobain said that the whole thing was a direct attack on what he called “rednecks, macho men and abusive people,” eventually saying, “I chose to live the life of a recluse. I didn’t hang out with anyone else because I couldn’t handle their stupidity.”
What’s even funnier is that there’s a good chance that some of the people whom Cobain was aiming at probably didn’t even get they were being made fun of. Not everyone bothers to listen to a song beyond a catchy tune, and perhaps some people even took some perverse pride in thinking that Cobain was one of them who liked to shoot his gun and not know what songs meant when they came on the radio.
For anyone remotely in the know about Nirvana, this is the greatest example of a 4D mental trick that any lyricist could have come up with in the 1990s. Cobain wasn’t going to suddenly change the way he played music, but it takes a true genius to make a song all about the disgusting sides of toxic masculinity and still manage to sell it back to those same toxic people without them being able to tell the difference.
