‘Come As You Are’ is still the ultimate send-off anthem

Every day is the anniversary of something or other Kurt Cobain did. A song anybody the least bit alternative recognises is a certain number of years old, or a memorable live performance is. A photo capturing his trademark transience … for a moment assumes solid form, and configures itself onto the calendar date like a scrabble tile. 

It’s not difficult to understand why. When I first began to deep-dive down the Nirvana catalog, in upper secondary school, I was prone to losing myself in troughs of depressive silence. I filled those holes with the chords and wails of Nevermind: an album I’m physically and intellectually incapable of tiring of, for Cobain’s preternatural bent as the ultimate melancholic instrument.

If rock in general had a way of washing across the senses, there was a manner in which grunge lingered there, sweetly — like volcano lava on a hapless island, if there is any sweet, sticky, serotonin-triggering quality to volcano lava. You get the sense, listening to the lyrics, watching any one of countless documentaries, seeing Cobain play live, that he wrote feelings down more than anything. Once all the electronics had rendered a sort of magnetic field around him, he seems to have just flung everything as far as he could; and, again I approximate, with an acute awareness that he couldn’t live the way he did forever. 

I’m able to speak with some comfort about Nevermind as a collection of songs, but the feat is not all that impressive. The whole disc is made of what became MTV ‘standards’, tunes elbowed onto the fringes of the mainstream by an iconic appearance on MTV Unplugged. Nirvana songs, really Cobain reaching out as if from the ether, come to me gaseously. When they do I’m almost always looking for reasons to try again, and their importance is magnified in a way that doesn’t compute with any innocent bystanders in my vicinity. It’s like listening to the Atlantic Ocean through a seashell. 

On ‘Dive’, from 1992’s Insecticide, Cobain sings “Dive/ Dive/ Dive/ in meeee/” to produce a chorus that is both a death pact with his listener and also a rousing war cry. His gravelly voice is the sound of anguish and anger, of pain and violence, of both vengeance and surrender. Every Nirvana song, and I wonder if the band ever felt this way in the moment, feels like a song about the end.

‘Come As You Are’ is the one jam I can count on to help me crash my system, to help me reboot. This past week I spent a moment or three looking for a satisfactory annotation — one that attempts to dissect the song’s meaning the way we do poems. For some reason, we don’t allow our favourite music the privilege of re- and misinterpretation. A fascinating experiment over at Pitchfork is affording critics the chance, years later, to revisit their review scores, which says such timely things about how our attitudes towards art evolve over time. (A similar exercise on The Ringer’s podcast network revisits Oscar seasons past, and redistributes all the gongs with considerable care.) It’s funny to see how a song, book, or movie can mean one thing inside the thunderstorm of the zeitgeist, and then quite another several years later — when a few more life and societal experiences have sheened our perspective. 

Come As You Are isn’t a better song or a worse one. It’s still a perfect eulogy to how much larger than life Cobain really was, in refusing to participate on terms besides musical ones. 

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This is such an awesome example of a rock song in which the bass guitar shines, its blunt edge able to slice and then pollute a room with its despondency. (Google any live performance of ‘Come As You Are’, and you’ll shudder at the ripple of recognition it immediately sent through a crowd.) That guitar is the sound of a dormant evil, a jangle you’d soothe Dracula to sleep with around 5 AM. Cobain’s titular entry, “Come/As you are,” in turn cuts across the chord with zero fuss, the synchronicity so perfect it throbs like a Sunday afternoon headache. 

“Come as you are/ As you were/As I want you to be/”

If you live to be, say, 75, which version of you walks into the afterlife? This line has always conjured the visual in me of a soul approaching death’s throne, for an afterlife ticket, without having decided which version of itself should get to exist again, experience the great beyond. Cobain acts as a sort of administrative assistant, and assures said soul it doesn’t matter. Death is not nearly as judgmental as life has been. 

“/As a friend/ as a known enemy/”

The dialogue Cobain simulates could be between himself and death. He could be grappling with the idea that dying will offer greater peace than any available on earth (death as friend); and yet, classically, death is also the midnight clock we spend all our lives evading (known enemy). At which we throw all the money in the world, and all the health insurance, and all the hope. Cobain IRL: “Just because I say ‘I’ in a song, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s me.”

“Take your time/ Hurry up/ Choice is yours, don’t be late/”

Once more I wish to make explicitly clear that Cobain might not have meant any of this when he wrote the song — but this what I hear. You can either embrace the inevitable conclusion of your life, or you can resist it ’til the bitter end. The phrasing ‘don’t be late’ suggests there is an appointed hour; ‘choice is yours’ implies we have a lot more agency than we realise, in whether (or when) to travel.

“Take a rest / As a friend / As a known memory/”

This re-enforces the idea that death actually comes in peace — to give you a break from what might not have been a fantastic life. If you are to do so as a ‘memory’, then nothing and no one that has afflicted you can disturb the process.

“/Memoryyy — ah/Memoryyy — ah/ Memoryyy — ah/”

I only found out this week that Cobain isn’t singing ‘Memory’ as he bridges into the hook. He’s singing ‘Memoria’, which underlines the song’s status as something of an ode. The band plays the perfect loop as Cobain sings away, as though the soul in question is lingering in limbo, waiting to hear its final destination. 

“Come/ Doused in mud/ Soaked in bleach/ As I want you to be/”

Cobain talked about the song empathising with the idea that life forces you “to be someone you don’t want to be,” and most analyses gather it’s an overall reference to heroin. This calculation ignores a little bit Cobain’s attempt to enlarge the effects of drugs on his mind and body: to communicate his resulting helplessness. 

“As a trend/ As a friend/ As a known memory/“

Are all our lives but passing trends? Relevant while we’re alive — yesterday’s hashtag when we’re not?

“Well I swear that I/ Don’t have a gun/ No, I don’t have a gun/ No, I don’t/ Have a gun/”

I don’t quite know what to make of this lyric. I interpret the entire song as a ‘dialogue’, even though for the most part I figure ‘death’ is doing most of the talking. But this line sounds like the surrender a human life makes when it’s done trying to kick free of mortality’s grip. It’s Cobain himself raising his hands, accepting the jig is up, before he plays the song’s transcendent solo.

The Transylvanian lullaby finally gives way to what, for me, is the most vital shred of guitar I’ve heard in a rock song. This solo is the missing piece. It parks the rocket ship. It drowns the set in its sorrows. It gnashes its teeth one last time. It lets Cobain’s voice rest. 

For the rest of the song, an entire minute more, Cobain only repeats ‘Memoria’ and his refrain of weaponlessness; as if to reiterate that despite all the noise, he only ever came in peace.