Kurt Cobain was not one for unpicking his own lyrics, often bemused at attempts from fans, writers and commentators to try and find some deep significance in Nirvana songs. The more famous the band had become, Cobain ventured, the more he’d noticed that people wanted there to be a heavy meaning to his songs when sometimes there wasn’t.
“People expect more of a thematic angle with our music, they always want to read into it,” he stated in a 1993 interview. “Before I was just using pieces of poetry, just garbage, stuff that would spew out of me at the time and a lot of times when I would write lyrics, it would be at the last second because I’m lazy. Then I find myself having to come up with explanations for it and I thought I’d prevent that this time and actually have an explanation for some of the songs at least.”
But in the same interview, conducted by MuchMusic’s Erica Ehm, Cobain spoke about one song that was deliberately about something. Ehm opens the chat with an unexpected query about whether the Nirvana frontman had a favourite book and he immediately begins rhapsodising about Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer, the 1985 novel by German writer Patrick Süskind.
“I’ve read Perfume about ten times,” he began, “and I can’t stop reading it. It’s something that’s stationary in my pocket all the time. It doesn’t leave me and every time I’m bored, if I’m on an airplane or something, I’ll read it over and over again, cos I’m a hypochondriac, it affects me, makes me want to cut my nose off.”
“It’s about this perfume apprentice in France at the turn of the century,” he continued. “He’s disgusted, basically, with all humans and he can’t get away from any of them so he goes on this trek, this walk of death, he goes into the rural areas and only travels by night and every time he smells human, like a fire far away, he’ll get really disgusted and hide and he tries to stay away from people, I kind of relate to that…”
“I used that very story in Scentless Apprentice. It’s really one of the first times I’ve ever used an actual story as an example of a song. I’ve always tried to stay away from that but now I’m running out of ideas more and more, I tend to that.”
Scentless Apprentice was the second track on Nirvana’s final album In Utero and the only song on the record for which each member received a writing credit – the song’s incessant guitar riff was penned by Dave Grohl. Watch a raucous live take below:
