Nirvana’s meteoric rise to fame brought both opportunities and challenges for Kurt Cobain. While he appreciated reaching a wider audience, he grappled with the notion of selling out and maintaining his independence as a rock musician. Cobain’s introspective struggles were reflected in his music, including the song ‘I Hate Myself and I Want To Die’, where he perhaps pushed boundaries too far in expressing his inner turmoil.
Before looking at the back half of Nirvana’s career, what was so wrong with them hitting the big time to begin with? Despite being known as one of the biggest groups in the world without having to compromise their vision, Cobain was badmouthing the success of Nevermind from the minute it was released, thinking it sounded closer to a hair metal record.
Now that he was sharing the spotlight with the flavours of the day like Guns N’ Roses, Cobain could have cared less about his celebrity. While he couldn’t do anything about Nirvana reaching the top of the charts, his next goal would be to make the kind of record that the fairweather friends would hate to hear from them.
Ducking into the studio with noted producer Steve Albini, In Utero would be one of the most caustic records of the 1990s. Although there were still some melodic touches on songs like ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, Cobain intended everything to sound more raw than before, lashing out at those who put him on a pedestal.
After mulling over different album titles during the session, Cobain had initially wanted to name the record after ‘I Hate Myself and Want To Die’. Part noise experiment and part radio-rock jam, much of the track is typical of the In Utero sessions, as Cobain intentionally tries to sabotage any hit potential that the song might have with glaring blasts of noise.
Given his reputation as a depressed loner, Cobain eventually renamed the album and scrubbed the song from the record, later recalling, “It was totally satirical, making fun of ourselves. I thought it was a funny title. I wanted it to be the title for the album for a long time, but I knew the majority wouldn’t get it.”
The phrase would also be a regular part of Cobain’s vocabulary, being the kind of cheeky response he would give to everyone who asked how he was doing these days. Even though the song would eventually see a release on the soundtrack to Beavis and Butthead, Cobain’s sarcastic title would become all too literal when he was found in his home in 1994 dead of a shotgun wound.
The piece would also serve as inspiration for the next generation of rockstars, with Noel Gallagher eventually writing the Oasis song ‘Live Forever’ as a way to show the optimistic side of life compared to what Cobain was saying. While ‘I Hate Myself and Want To Die’ may have been intended as a joke, the next few years of Nirvana’s tenure saw Cobain inadvertently taking those words to heart.
