Happy 30th Anniversary to Nirvana’s Incesticide compilation, originally released in Europe December 14, 1992 and in the US December 15, 1992.
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One balmy night in the summer of ’89, Sub Pop co-owner Bruce Pavitt threw a raucous disco rager for visiting Minneapolis band Babes In Toyland. Nirvana had just released Bleach (1989) on Sub Pop, and for months the band had been obsessing about getting the label to sign a contract. Nirvana hoped to receive regular accounting statements, and, as Kurt Cobain said, “We thought that if we signed a contract, we’d be able to hold it against them in the future if we wanted to get out of their contract.”
Right after Pavitt had shooed everyone out of his house and was getting the Babes settled into their lodgings next door, a very drunk Krist Novoselic sauntered up to Pavitt’s house, banged on the window, and shouted, “You fuckers, we want a contract!” and then promptly fell into some bushes. Pavitt walked up at that very moment. “I often wonder,” muses Pavitt, “what if I had stayed next door one more minute?”
The $600 contract ended up having the opposite effect Nirvana intended—it made it harder to get out of their relationship with Sub Pop when the band ended up signing with a major label, Geffen’s DGC imprint, for the release of 1991’s Nevermind. Sub Pop raked in an initial $75,000 buyout fee (half of which came out of the band’s advance), 2 percent of sales on the next two albums, and Pavitt and his partner Jonathan Poneman even managed to negotiate having the Sub Pop logo printed on the back of every copy of Nevermind. The deal almost singlehandedly revived Sub Pop, which had been dangerously close to shuttering. “Had we not had that agreement, Bruce and I would probably be washing dishes at this moment,” Poneman said.
Cobain was pleased that the deal resulted in the continued support of indie artists (“I don’t necessarily regret it now because I know that I’m helping Sub Pop put out some really good music”), but he wasn’t entirely happy when he learned in 1992 that Sub Pop was planning a release of Nirvana rarities and B-sides, tentatively titled Cash Cow (ha!). Nirvana had already been kicking around the idea of releasing a similar compilation, and two would be overkill. So, another deal was inked with Sub Pop—DGC would distribute the album, while Sub Pop would receive a cut of sales. Meanwhile, after a year of making compromises he often viewed as selling out, Cobain was able to finagle for himself almost complete control over the final product—from the music selection to the artwork to the now-infamous liner notes.
He called the album Incesticide, likely named after a song by Foetus that had appeared on a compilation called Mesomorph Enduros, which included Nirvana’s friends the Melvins, TAD, and the Jesus Lizard. However, the title also hinted at an assertion Cobain made in a letter to ex-girlfriend, and Bikini Kill drummer, Tobi Vail: “It’s almost impossible to de-program the incestually-established male oppressor, especially the ones who’ve been weaned on it thru their families...like die-hard NRA freaks and inherited corporate-power mongrels.” The 1,000-word essay he penned for Incesticide’s liner notes (over the course of more than 20 drafts) was a love letter to the underground music scene, an invective against the mainstream media, and an indictment of rape culture and misogyny.
1992 had been a hell of a year for Nirvana. Nevermind had knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous (1991) out of the #1 slot on the Billboard charts. Cobain married Courtney Love in a private ceremony in Hawaii, and then the press hounded the couple relentlessly about their heroin use, most notably in a Vanity Fair profile of Love, in the months leading up to the birth of their daughter Frances Bean. Then, there was a custody battle with Child Protective Services, and Cobain donned a homemade T-shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone that read “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.” Nirvana also appeared for the first time on Saturday Night Live. Earlier that day in New York, the band did a session with photographer Michael Lavine, and Cobain shot up beforehand. Some of the photos show him nodding out.
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I remember my brother Nik searching feverishly for anyone who might have a tape of that SNL performance. We were teenage American army brats living in a very recently post-Cold War Germany, and the only way we were able to watch most American television was via VHS tapes in an underground of American TV-starved army brats. There was always some kid with stateside grandparents or an uncle or a cousin generous enough to copy an MTV segment or hours of sitcoms and then ship the bootleg off to the brat’s APO box. It didn’t take long for Nik to find that SNL tape only because Nirvanamania had, over the course of that past year or so, hit our army base just as hard as it had the entirety of America. We took the bus home after school, popped the tape into the VCR, and watched as Kurt Cobain appeared with ripped jeans and hair dyed with strawberry Kool-Aid, delivering some kind of televised revolution.
We also bought Incesticide as soon as it came out in the lead-up to that Christmas of ’92, and blasted it on our headphones all the way to Garmisch for our family’s annual ski vacation, in part as a means of survival. Our dad had been an early adopter of the mixtape, and had developed the annoying habit of playing tape after tape of ’50s and ’60s rock ‘n’ roll, quizzing us on the artist, title, and year of every song. Born in 1947, he had grown up in Minneapolis with three older brothers who were greasers, just like in The Outsiders, and who were very hip to the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. Being there, witnessing that moment, had had a profound effect on my dad’s worldview.
And although Nik and I had been bitten by the Nirvana bug, I’m not sure we realized then, riding in the family van towards the German Alps, that we were privy via the blaring of “Aneurysm” in our headphones to a revolutionary chapter in the continued history of rock ‘n’ roll—and maybe its last. Come on over, do the twist, ahhha / Overdo it and have a fit, ahhhhha…
I think about that a lot in writing about ’90s music, and in contemplating that the music industry began to arrange itself around a defined line—Before, and then After, Nirvana. Was it easy to see then that that band would have this lore now? In the 2019 forward to his bestselling Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven, Charles Cross ponders this, too. “I think I perhaps naïvely felt that another band fronted by a future rock legend would come along, just as Nirvana had, and rewrite the rules of rock ’n’ roll, and maybe kick out something as memorable as ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ he writes. “But within the genre of rock ’n’ roll in my record collection, that hasn’t happened.”
He speculates that recent shifts in technology (streaming services) are mostly to blame, both in terms of how an artist goes about developing their sound, and in how listeners come to discover new music. “[Kurt’s] record collection only consisted of about 200 discs by 1991, and it was shaped by the randomness of what albums were cheap at whatever thrift store or garage sale he walked by,” Cross writes. “He made a mixtape for a friend in the early Nirvana days that contained the hardcore group Redd Kross and pop rock from the Bay City Rollers… It just doesn’t make sense, but then in some ways it makes perfect sense if you listen to the music of Nirvana. Not having Spotify, in a counterintuitive way, likely helped Kurt to focus on the ideas he would steal, or morph into his own style.”
Cross concludes that, also, even if there were a band who developed a wild new iteration of rock ‘n’ roll, listeners don’t have the attention span anymore to fall deeply in love with the next Nirvana. Cobain’s hero Frances McKee of the Vaselines echoed that sentiment in a 2017 lecture at the University of Glasgow: “There’s a paradox with music now. There’s more music now than ever. And yet I don’t think people consume it in the way. We would listen to a record and you would know that record inside out. Now, there’s just a sort of glut of music—nobody really pays enough attention. It’s here today, it’s gone the next day. There’s just so much that people have Attention Deficit Disorder just trying to pay attention to it.”
Although it’s still considered a lesser Nirvana album among the behemoths Bleach, Nevermind, and In Utero (1993), Incesticide was key to cementing Nirvana as a uniquely special band, to developing its lore even as Cobain tried desperately to dispel it. By introducing fans to rough recordings from the band’s pre-fame days (“Aero-Zeppelin,” “Mexican Seafood,” and “Hairspray Queen” were around at the time of Nirvana’s first-ever gig, a house party in the redneck town of Raymond, WA), it filled in Nirvana’s backstory, and further established Cobain as Gen X’s rock star—the Anti-Rock Star—with unwashed hair, thrift-store sweaters and homemade T-shirts, and a soft spot for unknown garage-style bands like the Vaselines, who he celebrated with not one—but two—covers on Incesticide. A synthesis of outsider art, mixtape, and DIY fanzine, the album crystallized the band’s very distinct punk-rock aesthetic and ethos.
Incesticide’s cover features a disconcerting original painting by Cobain—a baby with a broken head clinging to an ashen alien-like figure, who clings to a pair of poppies. Like the vinyl records Cobain had grown up with, Incesticide is divided into Side A and Side B, initially intended as a “girl side” and a “boy side.” Side A contains pop-y, more twee and childlike tracks in the vein of Cobain’s beloved K Records (he had gotten a tattoo of the K shield to remind him to remain childlike), while Side B contains nastier, more dissonant punk rock.
Ironically, I tended to like the “boy side,” with its thrashers like “Beeswax” and “Downer,” while my brother Nik was obsessed with the “girl side,” with its earworm Devo and Vaselines covers. His favorite song, though, was “Sliver,” about a kid who’s stuck being babysat by his grandparents (“Grandma take me home / Grandma take me home”). It reminded us of the times we were alone with our very rural-Minnesota grandparents on our mom’s side, our grandfather making ignorant racist comments at the TV any time MTV came on. (Needless to say, we never asked those grandparents to copy anything for us on VHS.)
The album kicks off with “Dive,” a classic grunge track with sludgy guitars, drawn-out vocal melodies, and muddy atmosphere that inevitably now conjures images of ’90s stagediving. “Dive, dive, dive, dive in meeeeee,” Cobain sings, an invitation to fully lose oneself. (Though he also sings, with more than a hint of sarcasm, “Pick me, pick me.”) “Dive” and the following song, “Sliver,” originally made up the A-side and B-side of a Sub Pop single in the pre-Nevermind days. It was meant to be a preview of their new, poppier aesthetic. “Sliver,” with its hook-y, over-the-top poppiness, is likely why Cobain referred to Nirvana as the “’90s version of Cheap Trick or The Knack.” With its childlike grandma-and-grandpa lament, it’s also gloriously kitschy in the vein of K Records artists.
The pounding yet melodic “Stain” first appeared on the Sub Pop Blew EP and features a bit of Cobain’s I Hate Myself and I Want To Die (the working title of In Utero) attitude. “I’m a stain, I’m a stain, I’m a stain,” he repeats over and over. Cobain was clinically depressed and taking drugs, including heroin, before outsized fame and—it should be noted—before he met Courtney Love. “A big ‘fuck you’ to those of you who have the audacity to claim that I’m so naive and stupid that I would allow myself to be taken advantage of and manipulated,” he wrote in the liner notes, defending his wife.
“Been A Son,” from a BBC radio session, is a propellant, twirling pop ballad to feminism, empathizing with a girl whose parents think she should have been born a son, who, no matter what she does, can’t seem do anything right. “Turnaround” is a grinding, pleasantly discordant take on Devo’s beeping, very electronic-sounding original. “Molly’s Lips” and “Son of A Gun” are sped-up, pop-punk versions of two of the Vaselines’ now most popular songs. I really didn’t like these versions when I first heard Incesticide, and especially after I heard the originals, which I loved. But one day in college after a long Saturday of swimming in the river, I got into my friend Johnny’s car as “Molly’s Lips” came on his mix tape and heard the song completely anew (I now like both it and Nirvana’s “Son of A Gun”). “(New Wave) Polly,” a punkified version of the anti-rape Nirvana original, is the final song in this cluster of mostly covers that Nirvana recorded with the legendary John Peel while the band was on tour in the UK in 1990.
“Beeswax” is groaning and driving, and full of violent sexual imagery, whereby Cobain seems to lament being born a man. Though he was one of the good ones and had no need to feel shame, he sings about castration, about getting spayed. (He also sang about being neutered and spayed in Nevermind’s “On A Plain”). The song sits, upon first glance, in stark contrast to another Side B/”Boy Side” song, the cock-rocker “Aero-Zeppelin” full of dramatic metal riffs, but “Aero-Zeppelin” was made to purposely poke fun at, well, cock rock.
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“Downer” is grinding and thrash-y, perfect for some headbanging. “Mexican Seafood” is full of guttural grunts and gross lyrics about fungus, yeast infections, vomit, cum, cloudy pus, and diarrhea. “It only hurts when I pee / It only hurts when I sing,” Cobain croaks. “Hairspray Queen” features jagged guitars and screeching vocals—a sublimely strange ode to big hair. (After Nirvana’s first gig at the party in Raymond, a permed blonde followed Cobain out to the band’s van and asked if he had written the song about her, on the spot).
“Big Long Now” is grungy and meandering, a song that searches and explores. And the final track, “Aneurysm,” is one of Nirvana’s finest—probably my all-time favorite Nirvana song—that unwittingly, or perhaps cynically, pays ode to Nirvana’s place in the pantheon of youth-driven rock ‘n’ roll. “Come on over, do the twist / Overdo it, have a fit,” Cobain sings in his now signature buzz-saw style, punctuated in the song’s middle by a primal scream.
At the conclusion of Incesticide’s liner notes, Cobain made a sober request of fans: “If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records.” After a year of whirlwind and cannibalistic fame, Incesticide was Nirvana taking control and calling the shots.
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