In 2019, Nirvana still feels eerily powerful, cathartic, and prescient. "Fill my toilet bowl full of a cloudy puss / I feel the blood becoming chowder rust." But the fidelity is so gross that it couldn't possibly be anything but their least essential recording. There’s something to this skeletal song that again reminds me of those first fraught months of parenthood — sleep cycles ruptured by screams, bodies turned into feeding mechanisms for newborns. Cobain was in no mood to screw around: "If you ever need anything, please don't / Hesitate to ask some else first," he sings snarkily over a fittingly primal punk-metal riff. "The Money Will Roll Right In," Live at Reading (2009)Continuing their mission of exposing the world to obscure bands, Nirvana looked to the California punk band Fang for "The Money Will Roll Right In." And Cobain’s scream at the climax razes everything in its path. There were only three official LPs, a handful of EPs, a smattering of singles and one-offs. "Nothing more than a joke," he told Rolling Stone of the name. But until the archives were culled for every last scrap of tape on With the Lights Out, one of the only songs to survive the demo in early Nirvana set lists was “Downer.” A bonus track on the Bleach CD and included on the B-sides comp Incesticide, it’s a furious thrasher with a political message that for some reason Cobain delivers with a stuffy-nosed British accent. 96. His shift from soft croon to gnarly scream is a time-capsule moment. The track peaks with a furious instrumental climax and a blaring guitar solo that resembles a short-circuiting dial-up modem. type of pop song on a grunge record, in that scene, was risky." Grohl's melodic gifts are already in full bloom here, even if he sounds a bit under-confident as a vocalist. 99. Cobain deploys short-story-like details to convey the full emotional roller coaster of childhood: the innocence, moodiness, weird exaggerations, peculiar notion of time (“I fell asleep and watched TV”), inchoate anger, and violent urge to want to be alone. Kurt knew well the dark, brutal side of masculinity, and at times in his self-scrutinizing songwriting he wholly embraced his own inner creep, but singing “Polly” from the rapist’s vantage puts the song in a lineage with the likes of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and In Cold Blood. “Love Buzz,” single (1988) and Bleach (1989). For as muddy and hasty as the songwriting can get, a 21-year-old Cobain allowed sweetness, sensitivity, and sincerity to peek through Bleach’s murkiness. This In Utero outtake is the sound of Nirvana's classic trio in full flight — if only they were armed with a song. While no doubt having some roots in Cobain’s own experiences with the arts-and-crafts scene in small-town Washington, the song is powered by a catchy riff and depicts a couple making their folk art out of detritus like “seashells, driftwood, and burlap” (a detail carried over from the older Cobain song “Mrs. "Opinion," With the Lights Out (2004)Our frontman sneers and snarls over a hotly mic'ed acoustic guitar strum, railing against the media's lazy writing ("It's a year's subscription of bad puns") and seemingly constant negativity ("They have an affect on our heartbeat's tock"). Cobain told Azerrad it was a fantasy of sorts, “like if I was living under the bridge and I was dying of AIDS, if I was sick and I couldn’t move.” The song was rendered in the control room of Sound City Studios (where Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours was recorded), with all phones and air-conditioning turned off so Butch Vig could capture Cobain’s hushed performance. Their take is effectively a disco edit, lopping off extra verses to emphasize the chorus and lengthening the instrumental break to give Cobain space to indulge in some Eastern-tinged guitar shredding. The song itself is mostly mood, but what a mood — from the bluesy main riff to the herky-jerky chorus. "And then it turned out to be a really good song.". 12. “That song for me always exemplified kind of how you feel when you’re young, when you know that there’s a piece of yourself that you haven’t really put together yet,” Bowie said of the track. No quiet-loud structure here: The band sails through one of their most laid-back performances, with Kera Schaley's melancholy cello adding to the ambiance. It also has the best single-syllable ending: “She saaaaid … duh.”, 22. 30. In Nirvana’s brooding take, you have some of the band’s standard tropes, from antisocial urges to queerness (“Not straight, not so straight / Reject, reject”), but you also have topics the band never again broaches, namely Greek philosophy and science fiction (with lines about “astro borders”) and the furious chorus about “Dimension Seven.”. They play in several bands together, including Stiff Woodies. "Serve the Servants" is much more than a pissed-off rant, filled with veiled references to the media's attacks on Courtney Love and direct nods to his tense relationship with his father. They never finished it off, so Love passed the symbolic baton to Iggy Pop, but her late husband's hero politely declined. It’s a haunting, burdened, one-of-a-kind moment in their discography (and the doom-laden version they cut at the BBC is incredibly heavy). 17. Not an out-and-out awful song from Bleach, but probably something that would be summarily dismissed on first listening were it not attached to the Nirvana legacy. 50. Watch Queue Queue. The answer to the movie’s titular battle prospect is obviously Kong, The 100 Best Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now, The True Events That Inspired Regina King’s. (It also could just be one friend ribbing another — in the Unplugged footage, the singer does appear to crack a smile after that jab.) Leave it to Nirvana to take what’s basically a Grunge 101 riff and turn it on its head in making the band’s most carnal cut. But this 1989 leftover — his most overt exploration in that vein — is more interesting in theory than as an actual song, despite Novoselic's colorful bassline. The first signal that Nirvana had perfected a balance between metal’s immensity and pop’s effervescence. Cobain’s contempt for born-again-Christian mentality is evident almost anywhere you look. Or, as Cobain put it, “We could write that song in our sleep.”, 45. "Lithium," with its signature combo of grunge riffs and sugary pop melody, envisions a man who escapes grief via faith — a sly commentary on faith as a bandage, on its dual capacity to help and harm. "Big Cheese," "Love Buzz" single (1988)Some high, atmospheric vocal harmonies prove Cobain wasn't afraid of pop beauty early on, despite what the raucous onslaught of Bleach may have suggested. According to producer Barrett Jones, Nirvana nailed “Return of the Rat” in one or two takes despite having never played it before, but you can tell Cobain had listened to it thousands of times. Newborns’ sense of smell is the most developed of their senses (which start to develop some 28 weeks in utero) and is the means by which they learn to identify their mother and father once they are out in the world. “Verse Chorus Verse,” Nevermind reissue (2011). There are deeper, more depressing wallows to be found than this Blew B side, though, and the song is basically just one verse repeated three times. Nearly three decades later, “Drain You” remains the pinnacle of all of Nirvana’s powers, a summation of Cobain’s songwriting brilliance and an encapsulation of the band’s awe-inspiring might. Its punk velocity and heavy riffs anticipated grunge by almost a decade. Top 10 Nirvana Songs Characterized by dynamic shifting between chorus parts and verses, the front-man of the band, Kurt Cobain, said that he wanted to combine rock and punk elements to make compositions that would sound grunge with a tinge of rock. A song about the heart-bursting rush of new love or a song about the surge of euphoria from mainlining heroin? 44. "And that had a bit to do with why we decided to take it off. But where does it finish among Nirvana's best tracks? 52. But Nirvana perfected their first pop classic on MTV Unplugged, dropping the distortion and focusing on the hooks. 1. "Old Age" started out in 1991 as a loose cassette recording intended to showcase their material for producer Butch Vig (who went on to produce Nevermind); and the band recorded an in-progress take during the sessions for that album. Cobain’s death squelched plans for the song as the album’s third single, but its quiet-loud-quiet dynamic on In Utero doesn’t do full justice to the song’s qualities. Extra points to the frontman for attempting the Jimmy Page guitar solo. Sonic Youth must have been intrigued by the TMI lyrics — they recorded a cover version in 1998. The superior acoustic take on Nevermind puts the narrative in full focus, with Cobain taking us inside the jumbled thoughts of a serial rapist. While original drummer Chad Channing provided the whirling snare pattern on “Pay to Play,” not until Dave Grohl took over did the drum part become a ferocious helicopter blade of a beat. “And I sat down for like half an hour and wrote the lyrics, and then we recorded it.” The song goes through a laundry list of Cobain’s ailments — physical, chemical, mental — which were all still haunting him when the song was recorded for In Utero. 39. (Fist bump to Novoselic for his melodic bass part, dancing high above the detuned din.). It’s orchestral (Grohl called it the “Bohemian Rhapsody” of the album), a little silly (cue the rubber-ducky, squeaky-mouse, hair-spray-can, and wind-up-monkey sound effects), unhinged, and insanely focused. “I think there are so many other songs I’ve written that are as good as, if not better than, [‘Teen Spirit’], like ‘Drain You,’” Cobain told Rolling Stone. An Investigation into Joshua Bassett’s “Lie Lie Lie”, What does “Lie Lie Lie” tell us about the current. I wanted it to be the title of the album for a long time. Nirvana went through a succession of drummers, the longest-lasting and best-known being Dave Grohl, who joined in 1990. But the band also wanted to call the song “The Seattle Scene,” quipping, “If we could have thrown in Soundgarden’s name, we would have.” Taking a simple grunge lick and a repetition of lines worthy of the blues, Cobain finds the existential angst latent on the playground, at your local music venue, or before thousands of adoring fans onstage. We've taken a look at everything from "Beans" to "Big Cheese," from "Mrs. Butterworth" to "Mr. Moustache" to compile this list of All 100 Nirvana Songs Ranked Worst to Best. K Records founder Calvin Johnson was the college town’s unofficial mayor, his band Beat Happening the champions of unlearned, awkward, and childlike twee-folk. Check out this list of songs to hear from The Guardian, featuring 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', 'Heart-Shaped Box', 'Lithium' and more. The Nevermind liner notes, for instance: “The second coming came in last and out of the closet.” The third single from Nevermind, “Lithium” is as much about manic depression as it is about those who blindly follow religious dogma, and it blurs the lines between the two types of mental illness. "Lounge Act," Nevermind (1991)One of the only Nevermind songs that sounds like Cobain knocked off five minutes before recording, "Lounge Act" lacks the immersive darkness or dynamic shifts that define their masterpiece. Courtney Love revamped it for Hole's MTV Unplugged set — hardly a worthy preview of the actual Nirvana version, which finally surfaced on the band's best-of set in 2002. "I was heavily into pop. "Mexican Seafood," Teriyaki Asthma, Volume I (1989)"Mexican Seafood" is the grossest song in a catalog that features many a queasy lyric. 90. “Son of a Gun,” Hormoaning EP (1991); “Molly’s Lips,” Hormoaning EP (1991); and “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam,” MTV Unplugged in New York (1994). The credits curiously only listed Love's name, though Novoselic confirmed to The Stranger in 1998 that "Old Age" was a Cobain composition. Still, the way he howls the word nails conveys the absolute fear of being buried alive in a single agonized syllable. Albini's production here is stunning in its simplicity: Grohl's drums, captured with that famous bone-dry clarity, thwack through the speakers, and the frontman's voice explodes with a natural reverb on the first note of each verse's second line. (Some fans have joked that the lyric "I've been looking for Day Glo" sounds like "I've been looking for Dave Grohl" — given how mumbly Cobain's lyrics were at this point, I guess we can't write it off for sure.). 75. “Serve the Servants” rambles through a number of targets: the media, the fans, those who criticize Cobain’s wife. Farmer’s ghost hangs over this splenetic, feedback-pierced song, and the plaintive “I miss the comfort in being sad” remains one of the band’s most wrenching choruses. It still sounds so delectably rancorous — engineer Steve Albini captured the brute beauty of Grohl’s hits, the subtle yet crucial glue of Novoselic’s bass work, and every contour of Cobain’s fraying voice and mind. 46. He was also capable of ... this: "She had a moist vagina / I particularly enjoyed the circumstance / I've been sucking walls of her anus / Anilingus." “Death / Violence / Excitement” goes one blood-boiling scream, thrilling and nihilistic at once. But the phase didn't last, and as a lyricist he frequently blasted organized religion's herd mentality and hypocritical followers. All grunge bands have had their fair share of heavy material but right now I'm going to focus on the vicious sound of Nirvana by listing what I consider to be their top 10 heaviest songs. Every Nirvana song ranked in order of greatness. 71. "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," MTV Unplugged in New York (1994)Cobain continued his Lead Belly obsession during Nirvana's MTV Unplugged set, reinterpreting this traditional murder ballad with a quiet intensity. The Kirkwoods’ songwriting style stands in stark contrast to Cobain’s: surreal and enigmatic, one part folk wise, the other part stoned philosophy major. You\'ll receive the next newsletter in your inbox. Seemingly overnight, the music industry was suddenly chasing down the likes of Royal Trux, Steel Pole Bath Tub, and the Jesus Lizard so as to hand them suitcases of cash. The lyrics were inspired by an Aberdeen family who imprisoned their kids in a dark room: "The lady whom I feel maternal love for / Cannot look me in the eyes," Cobain sings. “Milk It” refines a Cobain theme to a whetted tip, wherein intimacy is inherently equated with parasitic relationships. If you bought it on CD, it surfaced like a nightmare, a cherry bomb in a disc changer, Cobain’s stomach pain manifested in sound. The joke would soon be on Nirvana. I will be counting songs that are on live albums if they are unique to that live album and do not appear on a studio album. The song was written in 1992, the year Frances Bean Cobain was born, and I think she’s a deep influence on it. 33. To an almost cosmic degree, “Sliver” arose thanks to some ridiculously auspicious circumstances. Songs April 4, 2014 12:10 PM by James Jackson Toth fittingly, flubs flow aplenty: Cobain 's solo. 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