The 1960s TV show that inspired an early Nirvana favourite
In short, Nirvana are one of the greatest bands of all time; there can be no denying it. What the trio did for the advancement of rock music and broader popular culture is so significant that even three decades after they broke through with their 1991 sophomore record Nevermind, we still see and hear their influence ubiquitous today, musically, aesthetically and ideologically.
The Seattle band delivered three of the most cherished rock albums ever released in the form of Bleach, Nevermind, and In Utero, as well as a host of other classics that include the compilation Incesticide and the live masterpiece MTV Unplugged in New York. From the lo-fi sludge of their first record to the darker, more punishing sounds of their last, Nirvana established what a band should and could be in the modern world.
Led by the late Kurt Cobain, they fused sugary pop melodies inspired by The Beatles and The Monkees with the visceral pace and dynamics of hardcore legends Black Flag and doom merchants Melvins. Augmenting their music power was Cobain’s lyrical style. This intensely dark and surreal form managed to rile us up for rebellion and mystify us as to what was actually going through his mind.
From penning songs about the abduction and rape of a teenager to that of Hollywood icon Francis Farmer, to many, Cobain’s lyrics were the darkest thing they’d ever heard. He had a penchant for the morbid, the weird and the eerie, and this only served to make the music more profound.
One of the fan-favourites from Nirvana is the thunderous second track on Bleach, ‘Floyd The Barber’, a thunderous piece that was one of the earliest indications of Cobain’s dark writing style.
Notably, the song is about a small American town where everyone becomes a mass murderer. The story follows a man who goes into a barber for a haircut, and it doesn’t pan out how he’d expect. After he has a hot towel put on his face, he is tied to the chair, and forced to perform fellatio on the titular barber. He is then murdered.
The people mentioned in the song, Floyd, Barney, Opie and Aunt Bee, are all based on characters from the 1960s American sitcom The Andy Griffith Show. In his typically dark humour, Cobain wrote the track, thinking, “What if all these people were mad, sadistic, killers?” This is what led to the character in the barber shop being assaulted in various ways by the show’s characters, who were so unoffensive in their TV forms, before being strangled by Andy Griffith himself at the end.
