Nirvana still feels eerily powerful, cathartic, and prescient. Here’s our ranking of every one of their songs, from worst to best
Krist Novoselic, Kurt Cobain, and Dave Grohl. Photo: Stephen Sweet/Shutterstock In November 1988, Seattle’s Sub Pop label inaugurated its seven-inch-vinyl-only Singles Club with the debut single by a new, unheard-of band hailing from the logging purgatory of Aberdeen, Washington.
Teenage angst paid off well, as Kurt Cobain once humblebragged, but we fans received something in return, something that it took decades for many of us to fully appreciate. Tucked away in Journals, Kurt Cobain wrote a letter to his ex-girlfriend Tobi Vail about how he perceived his band in the American cultural landscape.
When it came time for a clutch of PNW bands to pay tribute to Sage in the form of the 1992 four-by-seven-inch boxed-set comp Eight Songs for Greg Sage and the Wipers, Nirvana was onboard . They had recently covered Sage’s “D-7” for a John Peel Session and were going to just submit that, but due to licensing entanglements, the band decided to tear through another Wipers song instead.
On the didactic Bosch-scape “Lake of Fire,” his voice soon embodies and howls along with these damned souls frying in hell. The subtle finger-picking ditty “Plateau” is a skewed musing about the afterlife, with Cobain’s murmurs as uncertain as the song itself. And then there’s the pompous, narcissistic bore at the center of “Oh Me” who formulates infinity and stores it deep inside himself. Leave it to Cobain to plumb these depths and find the dissatisfaction stored within.
Nirvana’s buzz-saw pop-punk cover of the Vaselines’ first single, “Son of a Gun,” captures the group’s giddiness, with Grohl’s boisterous attack basically throttling the song. They similarly capture the unbridled breathlessness of love and infatuation on “Molly’s Lips,” about the Scottish actress Molly Weir. Sweetest and most bittersweet of the three covers is “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam,” which gives the briefest of glimpses into where Nirvana might have gone after In Utero .
It’s a faithful cover, yet Nirvana’s version subtly but emphatically changes the song’s emphasis. “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. “You have this great searching, this great need to find out who you really are.
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