Penn: Morning Album Reviews — Nirvana, and Nosferatu (Finale Part three, day one) (Patreon)

When El and I went to see A Complete Unknown, we did it as a double feature date night. I opened last week by reviewing the first of the two so, there really was only one way to open this last week of reviews.

Nosferatu, 2024 film

What is it with Eggers and birds, man?

Perfect for: Eggers doing Nosferatu

1/17 Nirvana’s 1993 In Utero

Today, we get to look at trans icon Kurt Cobain. Now, there are those who passionately contend that Cobain was a trans woman. There are, in fact, pretty compelling arguments for it, but as it was never a thing he made a move on or spoke about in those terms in life, nor is it a thing I’ve seen those close to him saying about him after his death, I’m going to go with he/him pronouns for this review.

But, like… they actually really are compelling arguments that go beyond his “transgressive” crossdressing and into things like the fact that when asked if he had problems in high school with “people thinking that [he] was gay,” he responded, that yeah, “I even thought that I was gay. I thought that might be the solution to my problem.” Cobain continues in that interview to talk about only having girl friends, aside from one gay boy he was disallowed to see by his homophobic mother. “It was real devastating because finally I found a male friend who I actually hugged and was affectionate to,” he said. He was isolated, and felt “so different,” which is not in itself evidence of anything—there are plenty of things that make teens outcasts—but the “I’m not gay, but…” is a regularly returning theme for him, and that search for “what’s wrong” is going to be a familiar one to a lot of trans folk.

And it’s not like he didn’t say shit like “I definitely feel closer to the feminine side of the human being than I do the male,” or have multiple journal entries that reference having or growing breasts. One, an entry about sexual dysfunction stemming from what he deems a loss of imagination, but which reads more like stress-induced intrusive thoughts, opens with the positively perplexing “I am a male. age 23 and I’m Lactating. my breasts have never been so sore not even after receiving [scribble] Titty twisters from bully-school mates. They had hair down there long before I stopped playing with dolls.” He ends by declaring, “I’m seriously afraid to touch myself”—again not conclusive evidence or anything, but that shape of fear is also going to be a familiar one for a lot of trans and otherwise queer folk.

All that said, I’m not here to make the case that Cobain was a trans woman. But that’s okay, I don’t need him to have been trans to declare him a trans icon. All I need for that is grunge.

I was a grunge kid in the late 90s/early 00s, but in some key ways, only by osmosis. Thinking back on it, I probably could have gotten an In Utero CD past my parents—probably—but I knew better than to push on too many things, so I never tried. There was a penis on the cover of Nevermind, you know? And it was boy music, or something; asking had the potential to go bad in ways I was not prepared for.

But the stoner kids would play music on the cigarette break that administration thought of as “lunch,” and one of them had Nirvana CDs. It was loud, into guitars, and angsty. I was also loud, into guitars, and angsty—we were a match made in heaven. (And one of the stoner kids was a boy I’d been crushing on since I was 9, so, not gonna lie, that helped.) Not to mention that grunge fashion, which hadn’t really moved all that much from it’s punk origins, was a gift to a self-closeted trans boy. It had androgynous silhouettes, a certain air of “fuck off and leave me alone,” and, most importantly, was un-censorable on an item-by-item basis. I can’t have this flannel shirt? Really?

But Cobain was particularly interesting to me. Even if I didn’t get to MTV until well after he had passed, they were still playing Nirvana videos. There was something so soft about his face, about his voice, about the deliberate way he moved. Maybe it was just the debilitating depression that we both clearly had, but his was a masculinity I felt like I could achieve, and I wanted it. I haven’t identified myself as ‘grunge,’ in years, but as I let more and more punk slip back into my wardrobe you can see the marks Cobain left on my sense of style. I’d argue that there’s a whole generation of trans-mascs that, instead of going all in on Steven Universe, just quietly tucked Kurt Cobain into our back pockets for a rainy day. 

Which is absolutely hilarious, because on the other side of the aisle El was turned off by grunge at large because it was too hyper masculine. And, you know, I can’t really argue with that. By in large the grunge kids I knew were boys, and groups of teenage boys are going to have the problems they have. But, in practice, it was a softer group than the Red Hot Chili Peppers crowd, you know? (Then again, El comments that it “says something, whether about our high school social dynamics or about how much attention we paid to masculinity I don’t know, that I am bemused by the idea of these being two separate groups.”)

So, yeah, if you were turned off by the crowd too, want to give this trans-masc icon another try, but are only going to listen to one Nirvana album, this is your pick. It is a better realized, more interesting record than Nevermind, and like... you already know the hits anyway. But you’ve still got a choice to make!

See, In Utero was originally recorded and produced by Steve "If you take a good drummer and put him in front of a drum kit that sounds good acoustically and just record it, you've done your job" Albini, who, as his middle name suggests, is known for his raw sound. He felt that Nevermind had been too “radio-friendly.” (“That is not, in my opinion, very flattering to a rock band,” he explained.) However it turns out Geffen Records thought that "radio-friendly" rock bands were very flattering to their quarterly profits and, in direct defiance to the terms of Albini’s contract, had R.E.M. producer Scott Litt remix the singles for the original album's release.

Everyone was very dramatic about this, of course. It sounds like Geffen never wanted to work with Albini in the first place, but also they were just... kinda shit to their musicians. They’re the same label that sued Neil Young for not making records that were Neil Youngy enough, y’know? Anyway, if you want to hear Albini’s mixes of "Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies," you can find those, along with his "taking my toys and going home" 2013 remix of the whole record in which he cuts the cello out of “Dumb”, for some reason. That said, it’s not a wholly bad re-mix of the album; it’s the one we own on vinyl, actually, though that’s largely by accident. But he’s done something pretty interesting with it.

For a sense of what’s changed over the three versions, let’s look at “Heart-Shaped Box.” In its original Albini mix—the one that didn’t make it to the record—you have a clean vocal, harsh crescendos, and the very full sound that one can expect of Albini’s work. The version that went on the record is , obviously, more compressed (too compressed, imo, but I’m listening to these back to back), but the really interesting difference is that Cobain’s vocal has been tracked, and with a deep enough reverb applied that it almost sounds like an echo rather than the harmony line it is. For Albini’s 2013 mix he kept that vocal harmony, but cleaned out the reverb. It’s probably my favorite of the three, but whichever one you go with, you’re still listening to “Heart-Shaped Box,” so you’re having a good time anyway.

Perfect for: "Of course, they want another Nevermind, but I'd rather die than do that. This is exactly the kind of record I would buy as a fan, that I would enjoy owning."