Nirvana only made three albums before the death of founding frontman Kurt Cobain in 1994, but they are all iconic. One of those albums, however, was the “uncomfortable soundtrack” of their rise to fame, according to drummer Dave Grohl.

Back in 2023, Grohl, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, and late producer Steve Albini sat down with Conan O’Brien to talk about their journey from small-time band to full-blown rock stars by the time their third album, In Utero (which Albini produced), was released in 1993.

The conversation started with Conan speaking briefly about his own experience in the early 90s. In a short time, he went from a young TV comedy writer to hosting his own late-night show. In response, Grohl offered, “That’s similar to the Nirvana experience, I would imagine.”

Kurt Cobain died by suicide less than a year after ‘In Utero’ was released

“You know, at the time, when the band became popular in 1991, we were so young,” Grohl explained. “I think I was 21 or 22 [looks at Krist], and you might have been 25 or something, but we were kids.”

“When you talk about the amount of time that’s gone by, to me it’s not even so much about the years. It’s about the experiences that just kind of led one after another,” Grohl continued. “Going from three kids that were basically living or touring out of a van to then becoming a huge band,” he confessed, “and then in In Utero, becoming the uncomfortable soundtrack to that transition.”

“By 1992, 1993, we were living in a different world than we were just 16 months before,” the Foo Fighters frontman added.

Conan then dug a little deeper into the Nirvana story. “I was thinking about it today, and I was thinking the only way that you can understand the making of In Utero is to understand where you were at that time. The only way to understand that is to start with Nevermind.”

In 1991, Geffen Records released Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind. Produced by the band and Butch Vig, Conan recalled that the album “had modest expectations by the record label,” recalling, “I think they were going to be very happy if you sold 250,000 units.”

“They printed 50,000 units of the CDs,” Novoselic chimed in. Conan added, “Thinking, ‘That should do it, and if we have to make more, we will.’”

All three of Nirvana’s albums are in the top 10 best-selling grunge albums

The Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend host then shared a fascinating story he’d heard that sums up the unfathomable popularity of Nevermind. “I talked to someone who was working at Geffen at the time. They said when Nevermind hit and started to blow up, and then really blow up, at one point, they had to stop making and manufacturing all of the other CDs for the other artists on their label and turn them all over to making Nevermind.

“Which sounds like something that just doesn’t happen. It was completely unprecedented,” he added. “So that’s the good news, but with that comes all kinds of bulls***.” Watch the full interview below:

Kurt Cobain remains a tragically fascinating individual even more than 30 years since his death. Watching and reading old interviews can give fans a glimpse into who he was, especially young fans who may have just started getting into Nirvana. Beyond listening to the music to feel close to him, there’s a different level of understanding that comes from hearing an artist directly talk about their art and their life.

In a 1993 interview with Jon Savage, Cobain parted the curtain on self discovery. He shared a story of how he learned where his family came from, which ignited a sort of spirituality in him.

“I’ve never really known my ancestry,” he said at the time. “I didn’t even know until this year that the name Cobain was Irish. I found out through different phone books throughout America, I couldn’t find any Cobains at all. So I started calling Coburns. And I found this one lady in San Francisco and she had been researching out family history, and it came from County Cork.”

This discovery led to an epiphany for Kurt Cobain, as the band had toured Ireland that year. He continued, “Which was a weird coincidence because when we toured we played in Cork, and the entire day I walked around in a daze.”

For Cobain, being in Cork seemingly unlocked a deep-seated part of his identity. “I’d never felt so spiritual in my life,” he said. “I was almost in tears the whole day, it was the weirdest thing.”

Kurt Cobain Also Found His Identity in Punk Music

Kurt Cobain spoke vulnerably for a moment about his parents’ divorce, which impacted him throughout his life but especially in high school. He didn’t have many male friends at school, so he hung around with the girls a lot. This perspective made him realize that women are generally oppressed in society, but also in music.

“I listened to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, and I really did enjoy some of the melodies they’d written,” said Cobain. “[But] it took me so many years to realize that a lot of it had to do with sexism … and I was just starting to understand what was pissing me off so much those last couple years of high school. And then punk rock was exposed.”

Discovering punk rock was a turning point for Kurt Cobain. “Then it all came together,” he explained. “It just fit together like a puzzle.”

Punk music “expressed the way I felt socially and politically,” said Cobain. “Just everything. The anger that I felt, the alienation.”

Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage

The anniversaries keep piling up as the years tick by. In 2024, it was 30 years since Kurt Cobain’s death by suicide. In 2026, it will be 35 years since the release of Nevermind. That makes me feel both old, although I was only 12 then, and sad, as I don’t think there’s been a rock band to rival Nirvana since then. (I say rock band, to distinguish it from heavy metal, which keeps rolling on as a genre). Nirvana’s passion, intensity, hooks, honesty, and energy were stupendous.

In many ways, Kurt Cobain was the last great rock star. However, this means to place him in the traditional sense, as part of the Classic Rock Canon, up there with Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Chuck Berry, Janis Joplin, Joe Strummer, Angus Young – all the acts venerated by tedious retrospectives like Ultimate Classic Rock and Mojo. In a sense, this is true – Nirvana were a fantastic rock band. Yet, there’s more to it than that. Unlike the others, Kurt Cobain despised the essence of rock music and actively sought to destroy it.

Rock music’s hegemony as the main cultural force in Western youth died, not with Kurt Cobain, but following his trashing, sarcastic mocking, and inversion of the fundamentals upon which rock was based. Once deconstructed, no one has ever been able to put them back together without irony. Straightforward rock has since then diverged into harmless, insipid craft (sometimes known as “mortgage rock”), anti-charisma nerd rock (Radiohead, Weezer, Modest Mouse, etc.), nostalgia acts (the Strokes, White Stripes, etc.) or metal; no-one has been able to pull off the swagger necessary for full throttle rock music since.

Nirvana’s Power and Legacy

Nirvana combined an incendiary musical force with a progressive philosophy, a mocking, ironic communicative style, and fragmented lyrics that seemed to sum up Generation X. Their songs were catchy as hell while they did it. It’s easy to be loud; not so easy to sound absolutely combustible and have the verse-chorus tunefulness of the Beatles or the Knack. Songs like “Breed”, “Territorial Pissings” and (of course) “Smells Like Teen Spirit” weren’t emasculated power ballads, but nor were they lumpen thrash metal. They made you feel alive and potent, just like the Beatles’ “She Loves You” and the Clash’s “White Riot” did.

Nirvana’s music videos similarly attest to their power and anarchic lack of care for their well-being: “Lithium” with Kurt Cobain running into and bouncing off a bank of speakers and Krist’s shaggy dog leaping; the self-mockery of the “In Bloom” video, where they styled themselves as 1950s pop stars, and that astonishing scene of Kurt Cobain lashing out at the meaty bouncer who punched him in Kevin Kerslake‘s 1994 documentary, “Live! Tonight! Sold Out!”.

Like most rock stars, Kurt Cobain was a student of rock music. His 2002 book Journals illustrates how he thought about music, endlessly compiling lists of his favourites and organizing his ideas of what moved him. However, unlike almost every other rock musician (except, interestingly, John Lennon and John Lydon), he despised rock music’s posturing machismo and mocked its fundamental assumptions.

Rock music, while written and performed by outsiders and wannabes, is music that almost by definition seeks to convert others. It is expansive, unifying, and all-embracing. Its basis is on driving rhythm, riffs, and energy, making it easily translatable across nations and cultures: everyone can join in. At its best, as seen in bands like Queen, Led Zeppelin, U2, and AC/DC, it is utterly transcendent, unifying audience, artist, and music in an exchange of energy that goes beyond the individual. Think of Freddie Mercury holding 72,000 people in the palm of his hand at Live Aid, or of U2’s jaw-dropping “Zoo TV” spectacle (surely the greatest stage show ever), or of the Beatles performing “Hey Jude” on the David Frost Sessions, as the audience joins during the magnificent singalong coda. It’s a unifying force. 

Kurt Cobain hated that. More than anyone else, perhaps, he personified music journalist Ellen Willis’ definition of punk as “anti-art art made by anti-people populists”. He loved music that transcended (the band’s name is Nirvana), but he was at heart a cultural elitist who sneered at meathead rock fans and those who failed to grasp the concept of irony. American rock music is usually about earnestness; hence, Bruce Springsteen, with his honest workingman schtick, and all his subsequent rock ‘n’ roll acolytes like Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, and even glam metal band Bon Jovi.

Kurt Cobain was ironic, able to shift personas at a whim. He gleefully disrupted the expectations of “Headbanger’s Ball” on MTV by wearing a ball gown, and he liked to portray himself as bisexual. Little wonder then that Nirvana covered a song by David Bowie, the master of masks, on their final Unplugged show. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, give a man a mask and he will show his real self.

The Traditional Rock Star Myth 

Kurt Cobain despised the masculine ethos of rock music. This masculine code appears in many ways, from the gang of brothers concept of the band to the strutting sexuality of the music to the iconography of guns and violence to the music videos with women as objects. (While Rob Reiner’s 1984 mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap, deliciously satirised many of these elements, it did so within the context of rock, in straight-faced deadpan; the fake band protested rock’s stupidities, rather than undermining the foundations. Spinal Tap songs are actually very accomplished.)

The amplified, distorted electric guitar, rock’s essential musical ingredient, is also designed for masculine appeal, with its energy and transgressive distortion. It is the sound of boundaries being broken, of aggression, of violence, of primal spirits being unleashed. Pretty, it ain’t. This is not to suggest that rock music, or the sound of the electric guitar, does not appeal to women – obviously, that would be absurd and overlook many women-led rock and punk bands. Still, the preponderant audience for rock music is male, often adolescent. Perhaps the KLF‘s Bill Drummond expressed it best:

The sleeping Dionysus in all us young tender white males understood the clarion call. This clarion call grew and grew, went out around the world. Echoes. Echoes of echoes answering back from continent to continent, from year to year, from generation to generation. Gangs of young men went out into the world armed only with the buzzing, howling and chiming of single-coil and Humbucker pick-ups and the clatter of drums, screaming their war cries and moaning their laments…

Technical prowess tried to hold us – the hordes – at bay. But through all that, Dionysus staggered on, leering and lurching. He was on the loose for the first time in almost one thousand years. He had been banished since the last Viking raids, since the old gods, the Norse gods, the Olympian gods and the Celtic gods, banished but not killed, just locked deep in our souls […] Once again the white boy can rape and pillage, lie and lick, lust and kick, swagger and swear across the known and unknown universe, the chains of Christian doctrine smashed on a pagan altar. [source forthcoming]

The Masculine Rock Machine: Imagery and Industry

Rock music at its emotional roots is a pagan riot, a Dionysian excess. That’s why it’s so extraordinarily exciting. It says: You can do anything you want, right now. Can you think of anything more exciting to a 16-year-old, hormone-addled boy?

Similarly, the rock music machine is dominated by men. Most journalists, liggers, A&R men, producers, and record execs are male. The culture that developed around rock – its commercial exploitation, the industry players, its marketing – is self-reinforcingly masculine, even macho. One can see this with female rock musicians who are peers to Nirvana – they were either marketed as sexual fantasies (Lita Ford of the Runaways) or as one of the guys (Joan Jett): either way, according to a masculine perspective.

Female acts which would not play along with this, such as Patti Smith or the Slits, never gained a mass audience – or perhaps more accurately were never marketed to a mass audience. (Alanis Morissette was perhaps the first to break out of that grim box, but she came from a tradition of women singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, packaged in fuzzy 1990s guitars and songs co-written by Glen Ballard, a Los Angeles pro who had worked with Michael Jackson and Wilson Phillips. “Hold On”? Yeah, that was him. 

Finally, the imagery of rock, with its conflation of guns, guitars and penises, were clearly macho. If the 1980s were a decade of the heroic protagonist, this was as true in music as in films. There is surely a parallel between the heroic action heroes in Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Jean-Claude Van Damme and the heroic front-men postures of 1980s rock music. You see this in Tony Scott’s action film Top Gun (1986) and Christopher Cain’s 1988 western, soundtracked by Bon Jovi, Young Guns, in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky III (1982, the first of the franchise where Rocky is a heroic, unreal figure, and the first with a rock soundtrack), and in bands like Dio, Motley Crue, Ratt, Poison, and so on, even into absurd power metal bands like Manowar and Krokus.

The emotional range in such films and music is one of triumph, the exaltation of male desire and satisfaction, and an unalloyed emotion signalled in vast gestures. The symbolism is of guns, guitars, and swords (i.e., penises), castles, towers, dragons, and monsters (life’s hardships and trials), motorbikes and “steeds” (empowerment), and women as objects (juvenile sexuality). As imagery, these depictions of masculinity are simplistic, sure, but they work.

By the mid-1980s, however, what had started as Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin‘s “golden god” preening style had become a desperate cliché, with “hair metal” (i.e., mainstream rock) frontmen like Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil, Van Halen’s David Lee Roth, Poison’s Bret Michaels, Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider (perhaps more ironically), and W.A.S.P.’s Blackie Lawless influencing endless derivative bands. The frontman’s style was a hypersexualised masculinity, a strutting egotism that might be a knowing performance (Bret Michaels won an edition of Celebrity Apprentice in 2009, for example), but which became as codified as WWF wrestling with its dastardly “heels” and heroic “faces”.

Nirvana Deconstructs Rock Masculinity

Nirvana turned all this on its head. They were disruptive. Their early music was as angry and abrasive as any punk band—often more so—but from the start, their lyrical preoccupations were completely antithetical to the prevailing rock ideology. Their approach to their audience and music was equally as oppositional, not only to the mainstream but to the prevalent rock culture, which by then had become so ossified as to be barely countercultural.

For instance, Nirvana’s first album, 1989’s Bleach, explicitly mocks the macho figure in “Mr. Moustache”, while Kurt Cobain mocks himself relentlessly – no braggadocio or masculine heroics here. He declares endlessly that he’s “a negative creep”, presents the woman as stronger than him in “About A Girl”, and mocks the in-crowd in “School”. Has any other rock singer portrayed himself as being orally raped, as with “Floyd the Barber”? (“Floyd breathes hard, I hear a zip / Pee-pee pressed against my lips”).

This sense of self-loathing, self-mockery, and alienation is directly linked to punk. It’s been said that US punk was “making up in alienated wise-assism what it lacks in [UK punk’s] shit-smearing belligerence”. There’s a touch of both in Bleach, but mostly the former, as Kurt Cobain refuses to posture as the macho frontman. Instead, he plays the victim, the servant, the supplicant, the “negative creep”. As the music in Bleach tends towards (as Allmusic has it) “grinding sub-metallic riffing that has little power”, there’s no real drama. It’s just aggression pointed at the self rather than others, which is of no great merit.

Nevermind (1991) elevates beyond Bleach in songwriting craft, sonically, dynamically, politically, and self-dramatisation. Nirvana no longer sounds aimlessly angry; every song has a point and a perspective, as Kurt Cobain aligns his songwriting to his beliefs and hobbyhorses. The power and freedom of punk, Women’s Liberation, the freedom of the 1960s, the intoxicating power of love, the stupidity of the macho figure (again), alienation, depression and low-esteem: these all wind their way through the songs, sometimes clearly (as in “Polly”), sometimes fragmented (as in “Come As You Are” and “Territorial Pissings”). Throughout, Kurt Cobain takes clear potshots at the macho posturing of rock, projects himself again as weak and alienated, and rejects the idea of rock as all-embracing.

He mocks “the one / Who likes all our pretty songs” but who “knows not what it means” in “In Bloom” – a nervy move for a band predicted to sell about 50,000 copies of their second album. Nirvana’s anti-populist elitism comes directly from punk, which presented as a movement for suburban white kids but actually involved urban intellectuals and aesthetes. (John Lydon’s disdain for the mohawk-wearing multitudes being a case in point).

Meanwhile, Kurt Cobain disavows the gun-as-penis symbolism of rock (“And I swear that I don’t have a gun”) in “Come As You Are”. He remarkably illustrates the self-deceptions of a rapist in “Polly” (in a move fully equal to Philip Larkin’s poem, “Deceptions” from 1955’s The Less Deceived). He portrays himself as a penniless hobo in the mournful “Something In the Way”, where “Underneath the bridge”, his “tarp has sprung a leak”, and he’s “living off of grass / And the drippings from my ceiling”. If Pearl Jam wrote “Even Flow” as a classic rock song empathising with a homeless man, Nirvana put themselves in his place. Alienation becomes identification.

Indeed, Nirvana didn’t just play louder or angrier than the previous bands. They had the guts to mock them. Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic kissed each other onstage, challenging the notion that masculinity means machismo. They wore dresses and bras and smeared makeup, not as shock tactics, but as challenges to the rigid gender codes that had turned rock into a playground for entitled bullies. Nirvana publicly supported pro-choice causes, performed at benefits for rape crisis centres, and spoke out against homophobia and gun violence, in an era when most rock stars shrugged off politics.

Nirvana’s form of rebellion was different: it was self-aware, humane, and deliberately subversive. They sought to tear apart the macho myth from inside, showing that rage and tenderness could coexist, that vulnerability could be louder than violence. Sadly, that came at a significant emotional cost.

Nirvana as Freedom and Prison

To Kurt Cobain, punk rock meant freedom. It wasn’t just a liberation from social bonds, expectations, and family history, but a sense of a utopia. This euphoric, liberating sense can be found in the best of punk rock (like “White Riot” by the Clash, “I Feel Alright” by the Damned, and “Search and Destroy” by the Stooges), and repeatedly comes through their music, from the convulsing thrust of “Breed” to the inverted anthems of “Territorial Pissings” and “Scentless Apprentice”. It wasn’t transcendence but transgression.

The simplified structures of Nevermind (“Kurt said our songs should be like nursery rhymes”, Dave Grohl notes in the 2005 Classic Albums: Nevermind television documentary) give Nirvana songs sharpened outlines to break, and to break through. Punk wasn’t about escaping life; it was about ripping open the surface of it, showing that violence, sadness, and need could be screamed back into something close to joy.

That utopian desire suggested a need that could never be met in the real world. Thus, Kurt Cobain’s wish for opiate oblivion. (Krist Novoselic, however, seems to appreciate the Nichiren injunction that “faith divorced from daily life, from the realities of society, is an escape from reality and is not true faith at all”, and thus remains politically active.) Kurt Cobain claimed to have had a chronic stomach issue, but every addict creates reasons for their continued drug abuse.

Yet he could not accept reality itself—mundane, disappointing, morally compromised. Punk offered an imagined escape, but no music, no movement, could fully heal the gap between the purity he longed for and the world as it actually was. Heroin wasn’t just pain relief; it was a way of stepping sideways out of the betrayal of hope. For Kurt Cobain, Nirvana wasn’t an escape but a prison.

So, if Nevermind was a sonic embrace as much as a cultural refusal, In Utero (1993) was an attempt at exorcism. Rarely have internal demons been so dramatically confronted. Whether parenthood, marriage, success, mental health, physical fragility, or simple screaming discontent, the songs suggest a man’s head boiling with angst and rage and sheer unhappiness. (Whereas the move towards a lighter tone from Bleach to Nevermind suggested a man happier in his own skin). With “All Apologies”, you felt a sense of finality, a man who had written himself into a corner. And so it proved.

Aftermath: Rock in the Ruins

Kurt Cobain’s death wasn’t just the loss of a singular artist but the implosion of a cultural architecture. Once held together by swagger, sincerity, and an almost mythological masculinity, rock’s structure collapsed under the weight of his mockery and self-destruction. In the years since, no one has rebuilt it without it looking like a parody.

You can’t do the rock god thing anymore without a wink. The masculine bravado that once drove stadiums into rapture now reads like costume drama. The moment you strut, someone’s already memeing it. The very concept of sincerity in rock has been hollowed out—Cobain made sure of that. When he sang “Man, I swear that I don’t have a gun”, he wasn’t just rejecting violence; he was stripping rock of its phallic bravado. He didn’t hand rock music to the next generation; he left it in pieces, dared them to make something honest from the ruins, and walked away.

Since then, rock music has either retreated into nostalgia, drowned in irony (remember the Darkness?), hidden behind obscurity, or hardened into metal. Oddly enough, arena-sized sincerity lives in pop, in Taylor Swift’s confessions or Beyoncé’s empowerment arcs. Meanwhile, rock recycles itself through TikTok-friendly garage bands or algorithmic pastiche. It’s not that no one can’t play guitar anymore, it’s that no one dares to mean it.

The more profound loss is that no one has since been as open as Kurt Cobain. Not emotionally, not artistically, not spiritually. He wore his alienation like a badge and a wound. He could be crass, self-destructive, and elitist, sure, but his interviews are testament to a man with little artifice. Most of today’s artists are calculated, press-trained, and platform-managed. So, too rock, which once roared with the sound of revolt, now emotes inanely through stylists and PR. We’re left with echoes.

Kurt Cobain wasn’t just the last great rock star; he was its final exorcist. Since then, no one has found a way to scream without sounding silly, and no one has picked up the mask without laughing.