Happy 30th Birthday to Nirvana’s In Utero, King of the Toxic Follow-Ups

The trio’s other studio masterpiece took Steve Albini, feminism and the ugliest riffs they ever made to No. 1

September 21, 2023 Ted Miller 0 Comments 1993, 30th Anniversary, Courtney Love, Dave Grohl, Heart-Shaped Box, In Utero, Krist Noveselic, Kurt Cobain, Nirvana

Nirvana couldn’t shake their success if they tried; I know because they did.

Then-fledgling producer Butch Vig made Nevermind the world-changing breakaway album of the entire 1990s by tricking Kurt Cobain into double-tracking his vocals (“John Lennon did it all the time,” Vig cajoled) and embarrassing him with a result that sounded “more like Mötley Crüe than a punk record.” Unsettled by the notion of losing his underdog identity and unaccustomed to any kind of accomplishment, much less worldwide fame, Cobain rebelled against himself, found his inner screech and roared from within the turmoil of his head and gut to create an abrasive, throbbing vein of an album as an encore.

Enlisting Big Black frontman and Pixies engineer Steve Albini to capture Nirvana at their most stained, black, and roiling, the band let their unprecedentedly perfect meld of melodic precision and thundering dissonance dissemble like oil and water. Here be their scariest music (“Milk It,” “Scentless Apprentice,” “Tourette’s,” “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter”) and their prettiest (“All Apologies,” “Dumb,” “Heart-Shaped Box”) with very little in between. One of the most comparatively middle-of-the-road and conceivably commercial cuts is entitled “Rape Me,” and it’s no coincidence that Cobain fitted it with a very similar riff to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as commentary. Another is the less outwardly provocative “Pennyroyal Tea,” which is more easily identified via Google today as an abortive. And for whatever it’s worth, the always must-quote Courtney Love says the album’s megahit “Heart-Shaped Box” is named after her pussy. (This era’s beloved b-side “Moist Vagina,” however, is about weed.)

VIDEO: Nirvana “Heart-Shaped Box”

There had been “difficult” followup albums before. Despite making plenty of the same moves as Thriller, Bad’s metal-informed “Dirty Diana” wasn’t “Beat It” and the paranoid “Leave Me Alone” wasn’t visionary and danceable like “Billie Jean”; becoming astronomically rich made Michael Jackson reveal himself to be a wholly unrelatable person. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk was a coke-fueled monument to artistic excess; switch up the drugs and so was the Beatles’ white album. Prince followed up having the number-one single, album, and movie in the country — a feat with no precedent — by releasing the not-beloved psychedelic detour Around the World in a Day, whose only achievements were “Raspberry Beret” and naming his studio after the song “Paisley Park.” While any of these moves may have displayed different degrees of an artist’s unconscious desire to self-destruct, perhaps as a coping mechanism for incomprehensible fame, none of them made that explicit.

In fact, only Sinead O’Connor’s roundly lambasted big-band covers exercise Am I Not Your Girl? released almost exactly one year prior to In Utero, had ever followed up a chart-topping smash with such a full-length fight-or-flight response. Except In Utero didn’t flop; it topped the charts just like its predecessor. Much moreso than Nevermind, In Utero created a universe that briefly convinced major record companies to start bidding wars over the likes of Dinosaur Jr, the Jesus Lizard, the Flaming Lips, and all sorts of fringe-alternative holdovers from college radio’s sludgiest depths. Pussy Galore’s Jon Spencer and Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes became familiar faces on MTV in its aftermath along with Kim Gordon (and by extension, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna in Sonic Youth’s “Bull in the Heather” clip). Influential Pixies bassist Kim Deal scored her own radio smash with the Breeders’ joyously inscrutable “Cannonball” in the same year.

While the resultant 120 Minutes- and Buzz Bin-propelled hits of this era like the Surfers’ “Pepper” or Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair” were hardly discordant, they weren’t dressed to the nines in platinum-plated stadium fidelity like Nevermind either. It was In Utero that helped crossover alternative let its unkempt hair down, that gave Drive Like Jehu and Steel Pole Bath Tub and even Boredoms and Daniel Johnston their one bizarro-world shot at the major leagues in a brief and entertaining timeline glitch.

Shortly after Cobain’s tragic suicide, alternative rock splintered into more concrete factions: first highly sampled and hip-hop-influenced collagists like Beck and Beastie Boys mutating into nutball novelties like Chumbawamba, Smash Mouth, and the swing revival. Then pop-punk, ska, and nü-metal. Commercial alternative’s final iteration commenced with the long-brewing postpunk-turned-emo scene and post-post-post-grunge diluted from any direct Nirvana, Pearl Jam or even Stone Temple Pilots influence to bands whose primary reference point was Creed or Nickelback: Three Days Grace, Seether, Shinedown, et al. long before AI technology made it possible to simulate Eddie Vedder’s vocalizations from coding alone.

That is, whatever you think of these artists, they don’t have any foils. Occasionally you hear about a career struggler like Puddle of Mudd’s Wes Scantlin, but these bands are mostly happy to be here. Many of these musicians are healthier and more balanced than Kurt Cobain. But their art doesn’t extend beyond rock-radio festival tailgaters for a reason; they don’t play as fiercely, feel as deeply, or create music as bracing as Nirvana in their prime (or out of it; Breaking Benjamin should kill for a tune as incredible as “Blandest” or “Oh, the Guilt” much less a “Sliver”).

Kurt warred with himself mentally and physically, reached down into his cursed stomach for ungainly wounded animal sounds to describe his pain in terms so abstract you can only analogize them to Jackson Pollock or something, spattering throat-puddles and genderless whinnies unheard in most music much less chart-toppers. It would be unlistenable if he didn’t apply these performances to compositions as brilliant and tidy as Lennon-McCartney’s, which is why he earns the Plastic Ono Band comparisons. Steve Albini’s astounding propensity for studio room mic placement made Dave Grohl’s drumkit explode like it was made of bricks, like no titan’s since John Bonham. Complicating this force is that these powers were harnessed in the service of macho’s diametric opposite. In Utero, as the title intuits, also has a lot to say about the not-yet-separated-in-1993 states of femalehood and womanhood.

Some of this was merely obsession; references to reproduction and childbirth like the “umbilical noose” in “Heart-Shaped Box” abound in the Cobain-curated artwork and lyrics. At times, his conception of women’s everyday terrors feel like an effort to reach out and feel pain deeper than his own in order to conjure screams and power beyond his merely male ken; the subdued “Polly” said more about literal assault than “Rape Me” does. But armchair tantrums like “Very Ape” and “Milk It” are powered by an underlying self-loathing at his own kind (maybe even “I think I’m dumb” at the heart of it), and stray darts like “everyone is gay” were somewhat intentionally baked in to rile up their new jock fans. Providing Wal-Mart shoppers with the even more garbled “clean” title “Waif Me” was a good one, too.

Whether or not the certainly flawed Cobain was a good feminist isn’t for me to determine, but he was certainly the first male rockstar to make it explicit his desire to be one. Nirvana rejected male chauvinist fans, performed on highly visible platforms in dresses, publicly lampooned toxic masculinity and championed women forebears every chance they had. Along with Pearl Jam, R.E.M., and Rock for Choice founders L7, their support made safe abortion access a pillar of mainstream rock causes.

More overt eyerolls at their own success were no less spirited musically if more tiresome as punk; the merits of “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” are more about its giddiness for its own momentum. The glue-huffing of “Dumb” would be Beavis and Butt-Head pandering (to whom they donated the even less responsible “I Hate Myself and I Wanna Die”) if it wasn’t so tenderly performed. That doesn’t make it any less of a (literal) toxic joke, though, when Cobain couches a straightforward proclamation of happiness inside multiple drug references. Life-ending depression notwithstanding, few rock icons were funnier than the sulking, beflanneled left-handed guitar god who returned to announce “hey, wait / I’ve got a new complaint.” He does sound like he’s having more fun when he’s complaining, though, kicking off with the Lennonesque sarcasm of “Serve the Servants,” which was as far from a “Teen Spirit” clone as he could get: “Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old.”

Those are the bits that are saddest to hear 30 years later, the “Leonard Cohen afterworld” and a 26-year-old’s ruminations on old age that he’d never live to see, attempts to comprehend the pregnancy he fathered and wouldn’t be around to parent much longer, the suffering of motherhood and daughterhood he couldn’t know amidst the fatherhood and husbandhood he couldn’t endure. In Utero’s legacy was bringing rock and roll closer to primal scream therapy than Lennon could ever imagine, transmuting as literal pain as it could see — from imagined childbirth to real addiction and real invasion of privacy — into the shrill noise of Albini’s dreams and the classic ballads that FM radio demands at once.

In trying to make the latter uncomfortable with the former by sploshing female reproductive organs onto their face, Cobain helped widen new lanes for those who don’t identify as men or male to imbue the mainstream with their own firsthand reportage of subject matter that Jann Wenner’s rock curriculum never touched. He didn’t usher in punk and he certainly didn’t begin a feminist revolution, but he used the pulverizing amplitude of his voice and riffs to expand their reach beyond what anyone thought possible. Turns out a lot of music fans feel a lot of gleeful, raging self-sabotage and anti-establishment feelings towards the accepted nature of masculinity themselves. They also love 12 great tunes.