Nirvana
In Utero
Geffen
Has there ever been a rock star more obsessed with pregnancy, birth and babies than Kurt Cobain? Even the most passing acquaintance with Nevermind, Nirvana's second album, answers that question. The infamous front cover depicting a naked baby swimming after a dollar bill caused a fuss in America - not for its cute portrait of capitalist seduction, but because it showed the new-born's penis.
Cobain's lyrics too were filled with musings on our origins. Infancy provided Cobain with an image of innocence's perfect but all-too-temporary dominion. Take the lightly cynical opening of Drain You: 'One baby to another says/I'm lucky to have met you/I don't care what you think/Unless it's about me.'
Cobain's journals, published in 2002, suggested this imagery wasn't so much metaphorical as obsessive: the Robert Crumb-esque comic strip Mr Moustache depicts a foetus bursting from its mother's womb to murder its macho father. Aged seven when his parents divorced, Cobain was fixated on childhood as a place of comfort and impending horror.
As its title suggests, In Utero, Nirvana's glorious but harrowing third and final album, threw all these associations into a melting pot. Meaning 'embryonic state' (perhaps a nod to the primitive aggression of the music within), In Utero is at times sweetly melodic (Heart-Shaped Box, All Apologies, Dumb), furiously discordant (Milk It, Tourette's, Scentless Apprentice) and occasionally both at the same time: Rape Me, Very Ape.
Images from childhood abound. Quoting Jane's Addiction, Serve the Servant wails: 'I tried hard to have a father/But instead I had a dad.' On In Utero, Cobain's fragile faith in pure innocence has been eroded. Instead he sees guilt, decay and death waiting to happen. This is expressed with skin-crawling concision on Scentless Apprentice, which was inspired by Patrick Suskind's novel, Perfume: 'Every wet nurse refused to feed him/Electrolytes smell like semen.' Sex, birth and maternal rejection in two lines: Cobain had clearly been supplementing Suskind with plenty of William Burroughs.