The 1993 song Kurt Cobain wished he never wrote: “It hurt the album”
Being in a band like Nirvana was never going to be easy for Kurt Cobain by the time that 1992 started.
They had become one of the biggest draws in the rock and roll industry overnight, and even if they were just trying to write the best songs that they could, being put in the same conversation as bands like Guns N’ Roses and Metallica wasn’t something any of them were particularly thrilled about. But if Cobain couldn’t have control over what the media and the interviewers said about him, he could still have control over the music that he was making whenever he went into the studio.
And when Cobain decided to get started on his next record, he only had one goal in mind: don’t make Nevermind again. Their second album did help turn the band into a global force, but he wasn’t exactly in love with the idea of people listening to his tunes with that production. The whole thing sounded way too slick, but if that was the band flirting with the idea of making a pop-leaning record, In Utero was them dismantling everything they built and starting again from scratch.
Everyone at the label might have been a bit wary of the band working with someone like Steve Albini behind the scenes, but his dry production is what made the album sound the best. Albini didn’t want to throw in any fancy effects on the production, and even when the band did tweak a few things when it came to the vocals, that didn’t stop people from getting audio whiplash when listening to ‘Heart Shaped Box’ and then going immediately to a song like ‘Rape Me’ directly afterwards.
There are points on the record where the album doesn’t want you to listen to it, and considering the audience that the band had, that’s not necessarily an accident. None of the band members were all that happy that jocks were showing up to their shows and thinking that their music was great, so if they could scare some of them away with tunes like ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’, that was always a plus.
But sometimes the more mindless parts of the record were a bit too flimsy for Cobain’s taste. ‘Milk It’ does have one of the strangest guitar breaks of the 1990s and features some of the most atonal verses that Cobain ever made, but even if you can feel the band having fun in the studio and even hear Cobain laughing on the tune, ‘tourette’s’ is the kind of song that Cobain felt needed to go through a few more rewrites if it found its way onto the record.
The song isn’t exactly a classic, standing at a little over a minute, but even compared to their greatest works, Cobain felt that the whole thing was way too hollow for him to give it the green light, saying, “That song didn’t need to be written–if anything it hurt the album. I could scream my guts out at any time [and] fool myself and everybody else. At the time, I felt the majority of the album was a little too middle-of-the-road, straight 4/4 rock songs and I wanted some faster songs. I guess I didn’t have time to write anything better.”
Sure, it’s not going to be on anyone’s ‘Top 10 Best Nirvana Songs’ list or anything, but for all of the raw nerves on the rest of the record, this is the kind of change of pace that fits best with the record. They weren’t going to go too outside the box, and considering their roots as a punk band, this is the closest that they’ve ever come to sounding genuinely disturbed, especially with Cobain sounding like he’s on the verge of insanity by the time he hits the final few lines of the song and starts rambling incoherently.
Many Nirvana fans who hopped on with tunes like ‘Come As You Are’ would have called a song like this absolute garbage, but it did serve its purpose on the record to break everything up. Cobain was still looking to make something that sounded heavier than Nevermind, and while it didn’t have as much substance to it, he could still write one hell of a catchy tune even when he was close to bursting a blood vessel.
