“Boring”: the songs Kurt Cobain didn’t want to remember
It’s hard to really get a handle on when Kurt Cobain was being serious every single time he gave an interview.
There are plenty of moments where he seemed genuine about loving underground bands, but when he talked about his love for staples of classic rock, it was never clear whether he was being sincere or he was having fun messing with the interviewer every single time he was on camera… There was no real set answer to what he liked all the time, but he did have a pretty good idea of what he wanted Nirvana songs to be whenever he went into the studio.
And if he learned anything from working on a commercial album like Nevermind, it was that he never wanted to make a record like that ever again – Butch Vig did a phenomenal job turning their songs into classics, but when the record got its polished sheen, it ended up sounding closer to what the rest of the hard rock scene was sounding like, and if you know anything about Cobain, that’s pretty much the last thing that he wanted to do.
Guns N’ Roses and Poison were the kinds of bands that he couldn’t stand on a good day, and when looking through a lot of his own records, he could only see the moments where things didn’t sound right. In Utero was the closest that he could get to pivoting away from Nevermind, but when you look at where the band had been, it’s not like they were afraid to have those big choruses.
If anything, Cobain wanted to amplify that side of their sound once they got signed to Geffen Records. Sub Pop was a great way for them to get their start, but considering he said that he saw Nirvana as a mix of The Beatles and Black Sabbath, that doesn’t sound like a recipe for disaster or anything. After all, if there was one thing Cobain didn’t want to do, it was to repeat the sessions for Bleach.
The band’s proper debut does sound pretty great for as little time as they spent on it, but a lot of their sound gets buried underneath the “grunge” label the most on that album. Most of the songs are wearing their influences from bands like Melvins on their sleeves, and while a tune like ‘Sifting’ was the kind of raw dissonant noise rock that Cobain loved, he felt that those songs ended up putting him in a club that he didn’t want to be in.
He wanted to pay tribute to his influences, but he didn’t want to be considered a grunge rock before anything else, either, saying, “They take a song and think that the whole album is like that. On Bleach, there was ‘Sifting’ and the other slow, boring song ‘Paper Cuts,’ two very slow songs, with less feedback, so they stick in people’s minds, and they forget about the rest of the album.”
And when you listen to the lion’s share of Nirvana’s music, those songs are only a small facet of what they could do – sure, you could call them a grunge band or an alternative band, but when you look at the way that they interacted among the rest of the Seattle scene at the time, they were far more interested in being a punk-adjacent band, especially since their biggest influences came from the punk scene.
So how do you describe Nirvana, then? They’re not purely a pop band, a punk band, a grunge band, or a heavy metal band, so what the hell are they? The answer: all of the above. They had all of those influences inside of them, and when they struck on the right riff, they had the potential to churn out virtually any genre that they wanted to if they had real passion behind what they were doing.
