The record was replete with references to babies, childbirth, and
reproduction (the album's very title means "in the womb"), witch hunts,
the loss of privacy, illness and disease, and ambivalence about fame.
The songs expressed a heartfelt anguish that would later cause some to
interpret the entire album as a cry for help, but even at the time of
its release In Utero could easily be read as an album focused on
physical and spiritual sickness. Rather than being overwhelmed by
circumstances, however, Cobain's songs on In Utero show him - for the
most part - still able and willing to fight back. As such, among
Nirvana's recorded efforts, it stands as Cobain's most personal work.
Instead of sticking to the "grunge pop" formula that made Nevermind so
palatable to the mainstream, with In Utero Nirvana chose instead to
challenge their audience, producing an album that truly matched Kurt
Cobain's vision of what he had always wanted the band to sound like.
Gillian G. Gaar is the author of She's a Rebel: The History of Women in
Rock'n'Roll and Rebels With a Cause: The Story of Green Day. She
served as project consultant on the Nirvana box set With the Lights
Out, and was an editorial assistant on Krist Noveselic's book Of
Grunge and Government: Let's Fix This Broken Democracy.
33 1/3 is a new series of short books about critically acclaimed and
much-loved albums of the last 40 years. Focusing on one album rather
than an artist's entire output, the books dispense with the standard
biographical background that fans know already, and cut to the heart of
the music on each album. The authors provide fresh, original
perspectives - often through their access to and relationships with the
key figures involved in the recording of these albums. By turns
obsessive, passionate, creative, and informed, the books in this series
demonstrate many different ways of writing about music.
