Living in the Shadow of Death and Listening to In Utero

It is 2014, and the brother of my girlfriend is doing weed dabs upstairs while blaring “Rape Me” on repeat. Their mom is downstairs smoking a cigarette on the couch, and I’ve got the stench of burning incense sticks from a hippie store mall kiosk lodged in every nook and cranny of my body. There’s a fight happening in the football field parking lot across the street while the varsity team runs the second of their two-a-day practices. My girlfriend and I just got to third base for the first time but now she is packing for a two-week vacation in Maryland and wants to break up. Her brother hates my guts and today—of all fucking days—I am wearing a Kurt Cobain shirt under my flannel. Whether or not the “You’re gonna stink and burn” thundering down through the ceiling is meant for me, I’m not quite certain. But I am certain that this, among all other things, is where I will finally die.

I don’t remember when I actually discovered Nirvana. They were before my time; Nevermind came out seven years before I was born. I suppose I came to them like any other Zoomer might have: falling down a YouTube rabbit hole in 2009 until I happened upon the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” music video and became equally haunted and mystified by grunge altogether. Actually, I think my first introduction to the band came via one of those 2000s VH1 specials—likely the special they did on the greatest songs of the 1990s. If I’m remembering correctly (I am), “Smells Like Teen Spirit” clocked in at #1, ahead of Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and Whitney Houston. Not to sound jaded about the instant gratification of online listicles (I write enough of them to get a pass, regardless), but there was just something so personal and intimate and exhilarating about watching a two-hour television special where a washed-up music network talked to aged-out rock stars about 20-year-old songs—and to do it in a countdown ranking style, no less.

In high school, I’d go to Hot Topic for their graphic T-shirt wall, not for their massive collection of assorted spiked belts and diet goth wardrobes and cartoon keychains. We’ve all had a phase like that, where every top in our wardrobe was screen-printed with the face of a musician we no longer love. I spent every cent I ever earned on Nirvana shirts, specifically—and, at one point, I think I had nearly 10 in my closet rotation. My favorite piece used to be a very retro-inspired shirt with a grainy picture of Kurt Cobain during the MTV Unplugged performance on the front of it. I wish I still had it, to be honest. When I combed through my profile pictures album on Facebook, I found at least five different Nirvana shirts—including a homemade one, where I wrote “with the lights out, it’s less dangerous” on a Hanes white tee with a black Sharpie marker.

My best friend when I was a teenager, Steven, used to look a lot like Kurt—at least to me. Everyone else would probably disagree. But he had the long blonde hair and the subdued, gentle attitude hidden behind a facade of despondency. We’d spend every class period playing a game we made up: taking turns writing band names on a notebook page or a paper bag textbook cover until we couldn’t think of any more. Sometimes, we’d try to draw their logos from memory; Nirvana’s smiley face was always the easiest to recreate. He was the first person to know I was queer, and he never admonished me for it. Whenever he said “Mitchell, quit being gay” when I’d start another argument about why Paul was the best Beatle, it was in an earnest way from a place of love—and I liked that. He made me feel like the “Everyone is gay” lyric in “All Apologies” could have been true. Maybe it was.

We cycled through numerous obsessions together: obscure B-movies playing on Turner Classic Movies at 2 AM; gospelizing the catalog of Bob Dylan; trying to get every person in our high school to watch Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up; repeating Mitch Hedberg’s stand-up comedy. But we had a particular shared affinity for Nirvana and, specifically, for their third album In Utero. I remember Steven could play “All Apologies” on guitar really wonderfully and, despite his best efforts to make his singing as angelic as possible, it always came out just as gritty and scarred as Kurt’s. It was a token of friendship that would probably look like a fleeting, insignificant moment to everyone else. But, to me, it was an extension of love I shared with the only person who ever let me be myself—which meant just existing without boasting a hyper-masculine heterosexuality into casual conversation. We could talk about flower imagery and mental illness and abuse openly; could fall asleep watching Barbarella in a backyard gazebo while talking about big-city dreams of becoming Hollywood big shots, about finally, someday, being happy.

I’ve never officially come out, nor do I have any interest in doing so. I grew up in a rural town that didn’t care much for guys who didn’t practice the convocation of being sex-hungry douchebags (the “I’m not like them, but I can pretend” line in “Dumb” sits perfectly here, unfortunately); when I got to college, I ended up in a friend group that was queer as all get-out and I just sort of fell onto that beaten path without having to make some grand extension of worthiness or validity. I was accepted and loved without a doubt and, when you live amongst a community like that for three or four years and share meals and secrets and copies of the Communist Manifesto and playlists and acid tabs, it’s easy to forget just how easy it was to make it there in the first place. Now, as an adult who pays rent, has a job and mountains of debt and is far removed from the melodrama of undergrad, I just exist and I write about what I am and who I like and where I’m going without considering whether or not a piece of me must remain hidden. I suppose I picked some of that up from Kurt, as I remember getting particularly emotional seeing him play a gig in a dress—and giving positively no fucks about it—for the first time. That was revelatory for me, especially when I would test-drive wearing skirts some years later in the comfort of a dorm room. I imagine I subconsciously pulled that attitude into my own bravery. I wish I’d put some similar courage into loving and caring for my body once my immune system started to corrode after starting hormone therapy.

When I think about In Utero, I think about the anatomical angel on its cover—a mannequin of which would, with outspread wings, become a staple on stage during Nirvana’s tour for the album in late-1993, most famously during their Live and Loud performance just weeks before Christmas. That anatomical angel pulled something out of me. I’d gone through one of those eras where I was a tween knocking on the door of puberty and fully obsessed with picture books about the body and its organs, muscles, nerves and bones. I remember doing that very universal thing where I most certainly ogled at the pictures of dicks and tits for much, much too long behind a locked bedroom door and underneath three layers of blankets.

But, as somebody who has seen dozens of doctors and spent a good chunk of my life in clinics and therapy sessions, there’s always an obsession with the body and how it ticks and turns—especially if you’re living in one that doesn’t quite work the way the manual intended. When I started hormone therapy at 15 and found my new life under the grip of needles to be maddening and isolating, I finally got what Kurt was singing about on “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle”—especially the whole “I miss the comfort in being sad” thing. Life has become a cycle of being queer and then being queer and alone and then being queer and alone and sick; when syringe caps start breaking off in your belly fat or you start losing hair or your teeth become more brittle with every dose of testosterone or you have to hide your medication from extended loved ones and partners, misanthropy suddenly feels like an Eden.

Kurt had wanted to call the album I Hate Myself and I Want to Die, which was a phrase he’d written in his journals in 1992 and one I have certainly made personal in my lifetime. It was, once, a response to the plague of “How are you doing?” questions that followed him everywhere. The title was a joke, of course, but one that did—unintentionally or not—reflect how his teenage angst became transposed into rock star angst. Kurt’s face was everywhere, on magazines, at award shows, on MTV, in music videos. The public had much scrutiny to unload on his wife and Hole bandleader Courtney Love—so much so that he penned the now-infamous bridge of “Rape Me” two years after he initially wrote the damn melody, as a means of articulating how he feared tabloid criticisms would affect his livelihood, Courtney’s livelihood and the livelihood of their young daughter Frances Bean. I Hate Myself and I Want to Die would have made for an apt title in 1993, if only because it was the only phrase that could make sense of the confluence of anatomical doggerel and wounds of the titanic expectations placed upon Nirvana—especially Kurt—after the massive, breakout success of Nevermind.

From a musical standpoint, it doesn’t feel particularly edgy to think that the abrasive, brash and complicated stylings of In Utero are better than the grunge tracks of Nevermind that were fitted with muted stylings of pop perfection. That is not to say that I have always been on the correct side of this opinion; I, like many others and VH1, thought that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was the greatest song ever made once upon a time. But there’s a reason that, when I played “Tourette’s” in my mother’s car one afternoon 10 years ago, she immediately turned it off and decreed that I could never play Nirvana on her stereo again: In Utero was never meant to be played by the faint of heart; it was written for the fudge-packin’, crack-smokin’, Satan-worshippin’ motherfuckers of this world—and straight-laced parents from Rust Belt suburbia be damned, In Utero was a godsend for a chubby little queer spitfuck like me. It was an ugly, aggro-art rock masterpiece that didn’t dare to mix preciousness and masochism, something I had to quickly learn how to do myself after starting hormone therapy.

In Utero is a document of sickness and disease, be it literally or metaphorically (though Kurt was adamant about the impersonal nature of it all, that whatever parts of the record seemed intimate and familiar to his own publicized life were purely coincidental). Before becoming ill for a lifetime with Celiac at age 13 and watching my immune system erode soon after, I hadn’t found much of a connection with the album. I wasn’t in a relationship with anyone, so the “I’ve been drawn into your magnet tar pit trap, I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black” lines in “Heart-Shaped Box” didn’t register much resonance, though I’m sure I’d hoped it would someday. It wasn’t until I’d eat Subway sandwiches and writhe on the bathroom floor for hours—or be ferociously sick and feverish for weeks or months on end with mysterious, undiagnosable viruses—that I’d begun to understand where In Utero’s tonics of health class textbook imagery and callous, immolating poetics might have come from, regardless of whether or not Kurt ever admitted anything about their origins.

When I was in my girlfriend’s bedroom eight years ago and was certain that my life was over, the shadow of death stretched barely an inch back then. Its net casts wide and densely nowadays, as I think about dying all of the time. I tell my therapist I’m not thinking about dying in an active, suicidal type of way, though—that it’s more about looking at the idea of living 20 more years and not seeing a continuum that is healthy, realistic or all that feasible. Just yesterday, I wrote about how The National’s new record is perfect for my life at this instant, which is a routine of my days being relegated to couch-bound rest or laborious aches and exhaustion that make even taking my dog to the bathroom feel like an insurmountable challenge. A grifter replied to my tweet about the review and said “Yeah, the National kind of suck now, and maybe you should leave your house once in a while.” The idea of turning 45 years old feels extra improbable when the world isn’t yet built to even care for 25-year-old me. Every door frame is misshapen, yet I’m expected to fit through them all.

That is why, perhaps, the most tragic part of my love affair with In Utero is that I have become a living embodiment of the song “Pennyroyal Tea.” When I am sick, I play Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man. Cohen was like therapy, like medicine—just as he had been for Kurt during depressive spells or stints of illness. I have kyphosis in my spine, which makes my back curve inwards and my posture look hunch like an arch; Kurt wrote the song about his longtime struggles with chronic stomach pain (which were caused by his own scoliosis); I’ve dealt with much of the same since getting diagnosed with Celiac disease 12 years ago. Pennyroyal tea—also known as, in Kurt’s own words, an “herbal abortive”—is a cleanser for the soul, for the unwanted pieces of ourselves. “All in all is all we are,” yada. Living with chronic illness is, in some ways, like being dead before you are done living. I’m sure Kurt felt that, and maybe you have, too, but I still don’t know who or what decides which of us get all of the luck and which of us don’t. It’s one thing to hear someone sing about small towns or mental illness or heartbreak and think “Yes, I am relating to this, that is so me”; it’s incredibly damning and brutal to hear a portrait of your survival sung by someone who couldn’t endure his own.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.