It was the year Cobain wore a “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone and a hand-drawn Flipper tee on “SNL.” By the end of 1992, he wanted to call the next Nirvana LP I Hate Myself and I Want to Die, which had become his standard response when asked, “How you doing?” The press tortured the Cobains in the months leading up to the birth of their daughter then followed a custody battle with Child Protective Services. It arrived at the end of a batshit year for Cobain and Courtney Love, who were married that February, just over a month after Nevermind hit its zenith, knocking Michael Jackson out of the No.1 spot on the Billboard charts. Incesticide embodies the free space of punk more than any Nirvana album: part outsider visual art, part punk fanzine, thrillingly raw. Allegedly the band only put it out because Cobain got to make the devastating cover painting and pen the thousand-word essay for its legendary liner notes, which were an indictment of toxic masculinity, a corrective of the exploitative media, and an ode to the underground. The band’s label, DGC, didn’t intend to promote Incesticide much, clearly considering it a low-stakes time-buying placeholder. Incesticide is raw sparks to Nevermind’s pop explosion, collecting Peel Sessions, covers, demos, four different drummers, vocal sounds like dying feral animals, unabashed feminism, and yeah, a devil-horn-saluting cock-rocker called “Aero Zeppelin.” It’s an unlikely appendage to the globe-smashing Nevermind: Instead of rushing out another LP to further propel Nirvana to the extreme edges of perilous fame, they slid their fans a mixtape. Incesticide was released on December 15, 1992, a year and three months after Nirvana-Cobain, fellow Aberdeen weirdo Krist Novoselic, and ex-hardcore kid Dave Grohl-became one of the biggest bands on Earth ever. Cobain’s voice became a friend in the heads of lonely people on difficult terms with society everywhere, screaming but also subliminally whispering you are not alone. It is a Walkman that is a portal to some semi-universal misfit energy across time and space, an invitation to smoke weed as far away from the human race as you can manage on a Wednesday, the combustion that occurs when sequestered pain is finally unleashed. A Nirvana song is a reality in which you never fell off your skateboard. It is an excavation of all the frustration below a quietly jaded heart. A Nirvana song is a coming-of-age line in the sand endlessly redrawn. At any time, any age, it is possible to feel utterly disconnected, misunderstood, maladjusted, an alien dropped to Earth, suspicious, sullen, hands in pocket, headphones on: Nirvana. It hums in the background of life, flavored by the sour taste of knowing that things are mostly unfair. We call that teen angst, but it is not only for teenagers. “You’re in high school again.” Hell on Earth is not to come. “No recess,” Cobain convulsed on “School,” from 1989 Sub Pop debut Bleach. Sex Pistols said “no future” but for Nirvana things were worse. Nirvana’s beautiful melodies made ugliness a virtue. Negativity became a genre, a frisson of excitement, and an odd comfort. No band before or since has made contempt so catchy, disenchantment so explosive, or disaffection so affecting. Siphoning colossal power out of classic rock and delivering it back to the disempowered, Nirvana voiced the precise moment at which innocence is revealed to be merely a myth. Nirvana spent seven tortuous years and three hard-candied albums bottling the feeling of first seeing that this world is bullshit.
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