No need to apologise

Nirvana - All Apologies



I last remember listening to this song as a fourteen or fifteen year old, when everyone else in the world was also listening to Nirvana - Kurt Cobain had just offed himself and, in typical fashion, was being hailed as nothing less than a combination of John Lennon, Nelson Mandela and Bob Cratchit. After a few months of listening to nothing but Nirvana and their heroin-and-corduroy slacker ilk (Alice In Chains, Soundgarden etc), I shrugged it off and went in search of something a little less moribund.

Strangely, a few weeks ago I listened to Alice in Chains' Sap and Unplugged albums and they were actually quite good. My suprise was reinforced through relistening to this song. I was pretty suprised to see it on this list, as it's not only, as I expected, a rallying cry for disaffected teenagers. It's a really good song. This is the coruscating, visceral howl of a pretty pissed off and tortured artist.

We all know the Kurt Cobain story - successful band, heroin, crazy wife, depression, shotgun. But some of the music is also suprising. All Apologies is a far more mature expression of pain and anger than Nevermind was. Where Nevermind comes across as the output of a songwriter who wrote good, catchy songs with shit lyrics, All Apologies doesn't necessarily abandon the lyrical formula, but it tempers it into something that is a little more than rhyming non-sequiturs. While some of the lyrics are nothing more than lyrical tchotchkes, picked out of a hat at random and howled into a microphone, some of the lyrics actually make a little bit of sense.

Musically, the formula is instantly recognisable - melodic intro, verse, chorus, verse. Repeat ad nauseum. Cheap Trick with louder guitars, as Cobain once described his band. The guitar work is pretty basic, to be honest - buy a cheap guitar, run it through a tube amp cranked to 10 and you won't sound markedly different. Actually learning to play it is pretty optional. It's not for nothing that the first song a generation of guitarists learned was a Nirvana song. In terms of the rhythm section, Kris(t) Novoselic's personality is a perfect metaphor for Novoselic's bass playing - largely anonymous. But Dave "AIDS denialist" Grohl's drumming is pretty good, despite coming from a despicable, ignorant human being.

Let's just say that the world would be a better place if Cobain had shot Grohl instead.

Finally, let's see how Cobain looks on the Rock Nutter Scale (tm):

Weird History?
Not really. He was a disaffected teen. Who wasn't?

Prison?
He was arrested for beating up Courtney Love, which is almost understandable, given how unpleasant she is (the beating up, that is) and for some minor infringements over the years. Half a point, because he was never actually sentenced to a prison term.

Wild Behaviour?
He married Courtney Love. That should be enough.

Pseudonym?
Kurt Cobain's almost strange enough, but it's not a pseudonym. No points.

Drugs?
You name it, Cobain smoked it, snorted it or shot it up over the course of his life.

A strong showing from the man from Aberdeen, Washington, but not good enough to best the charming misanthropists at the top of the scale.

Verdict: All good, bar Dave Grohl

Tomorrow: George Harrison - My Sweet Lord