![]() ![]() Cobain might be pointing the finger at a specific person here, but he’s willing to happily move on from what seems to be a relatively petty dispute. That first demo, which appeared on the album’s 20th-anniversary reissue, is an acoustic cut that takes inspiration from the Beatles at their most cheerful, aptly described by Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman as “transmuting the song’s overarching sense of resignation into bright-eyed, fresh-start optimism.” The lyrics are even more simplistic than those that appear in the final version, with Cobain singing: “You stole things from me/ All apologies/ I stole things from you/ All of us stand accused”. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the song inadvertently took on a new meaning as the band’s popularity began to skyrocket, which can be traced in the many mutations that appeared throughout its lifetime. As far as we know, Cobain didn’t even want the song to sound ominous, but genuinely calm – “peaceful, happy, comfort – just happy happiness” was how he described it to Michael Azerrad in the 1993 biography Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. He dedicated the song to Courtney Love and their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, explaining that “the words don’t really fit in relation to us… the feeling does, but not the lyrics.” And though the lyrics were indeed quite different, the lines that are now seen as referring to his fame and his tumultuous marriage were still there – either he was, as many of his most ardent followers would have it, capable of magically predicting the future, or that wasn’t at all the intended meaning. ‘All Apologies’ was reportedly first written as early as 1990 and recorded for the first time by Craig Montgomery at Music Source Studios in Seattle, Washington on January 1st, 1991, seven months before Nevermind was even released, and a whole year before Cobain and Courtney Love were married. Both were guilty of the same crime: building a false perception of him based on some narrative he wasn’t in control of, but could at least toy with in the form of a pointedly silly song.Īs reasonable as that interpretation may sound, the history of the song also renders it a somewhat implausible one. He opens the song with the rhetorical question “What else should I be?” before rhyming “What else could I say?” with the infamous “Everyone is gay”, mocking not just those who were quick to take offense at his every word, but also those who praised it as deeply profound and somehow revelatory. Accompanied by a listlessly upbeat melody, Cobain issues a fake apology to all those who have formed multiple, sometimes conflicting expectations of him. ![]() In a more overt manner, ‘All Apologies’ presents itself partly as a sardonic response to Cobain’s newfound fame and the scrutiny that came with it – which, of course, is often seen as shaping the conditions that led to his death. Despite being coated in layers of sarcasm, it seems impossible not to view the apologetic tone of lyrics like “everything’s my fault” and “I’ll take all the blame” as a premonition of Cobain’s suicide.īut there’s a lot to unpack behind the song’s deceptively simple formula. But another seemingly no less viable theory is that Cobain infused part of his soul into the song, which would explain its placement as the 12th and final track on the band’s last studio effort, In Utero. Though the popular narrative that the album served as a kind of rock n’ roll suicide has since been challenged by critics who were able to separate Cobain’s music from its mournful context by pointing to the raw vitality of the album’s sound, it’s still difficult to make that same argument for ‘All Apologies’, an eerily poignant masterpiece that’s driven by an all-consuming sense of resignation and existential ennui. Perhaps music theory alone can adequately explain why the song is so hauntingly potent – Kurt Cobain did in fact have an unlikely penchant for pop melodies, a reflection of some of the less-than-apparent mainstream influences that permeate his music. Dave Grohl said of the song in a 2005 interview with Harp: “I remember hearing it and thinking, ‘God, this guy has such a beautiful sense of melody, I can’t believe he’s screaming all the time.'” Maybe that’s just me, but I can’t be the only one who finds himself humming that song on an irregular but oddly constant basis – that almost spectral pervasiveness is practically embedded into its musical DNA, inhabiting some sort of shared space in our collective conscience. ![]() Though, to this day, the opening riffs of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ or ‘Come As You Are’ are arguably more ubiquitous in terms of radio play, ‘All Apologies’ has an altogether different quality about it, a kind of mystical languor that seeks to permanently etch itself into the back of your brain. Few melodic lines in the history of popular music are as omnipresent as that of Nirvana’s 1993 single ‘All Apologies’.
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