All in All is All We Are: The Two Sides of “All Apologies”
November 1, 2019 marked the 25th anniversary of Nirvana’s iconic performance on MTV Unplugged. If you enjoy this story, donations to my Venmo (@Erin Lyndal Martin) would be so appreciated.
I can still remember the evening news broadcast where they announced that Kurt Cobain was dead. Dan Rather gave the news, and then a clip from Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged broadcast played. In that clip, you could hear a snippet of “All Apologies.” It was what they used in all the news stories. I was 12 at the time, and for a while it was all I had heard of Nirvana. As I came of age, I reckoned with the silencing of the man who’d given a voice to my generation.
It’s tempting to interpret Unplugged’s “All Apologies” as a suicide note. Cobain’s voice has that palpable ache to it, and the stripped-down arrangement just magnifies the angst within. Then there are the lyrics: “What else could I write? / I don’t have the right. / What else should I be? / All apologies.”
Cobain was an icon and the voice of the whole grunge movement. He was also the gatekeeper for concepts of authenticity that defined the early 90’s, and he constantly struggled with the pressure of it all. He openly claimed Nirvana had sold out by making Nevermind and remarked that he just wanted to make music for serious fans, not casual listeners. But there he was, thrust into fame he never wanted, the beacon in a movement whose sincerity he doubted. Of course he wondered if he had the right to speak for so many. And of course he wondered how he could ever step out of his own shadow — what else could he be, indeed?
As a teenager I answered that question by working backwards through who he had been. As I listened to In Utero, I was struck at how the album version of “All Apologies” felt like a very different song. In the Unplugged version, all I heard was an unanswerable whine. The studio version, so full of sonic layers and ambience, gave my ears other places to go. The verses build up and then the chorus explodes. Listening to that version, “All Apologies” sounds less like a suicide note and more like a piece of 90’s zeitgeist. In Utero was released the same year as Beck’s “Loser” and just one year after Radiohead’s “Creep.” It was a badge of honor to hate yourself in a lot of 90’s music, and certainly not all those artists were forecasting their own suicides.
While the Unplugged performance of “All Apologies” was often used to showcase Cobain’s hopelessness, the album version shows there’s more to the song. In Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, Cobain described the song to Michael Azerrad as “pure happy happiness.” He said he had dedicated the song to his wife, Courtney Love, and his daughter, Frances Bean Cobain. He commented that the lyrics don’t match the sentiment he has for them, but the feeling behind them does. Over and over, Cobain’s own remarks about songwriting attest that he’d jot down lyrics in the last few minutes before recording. His music was never about making sense of the literal lyrics, and it’s a mistake to seek understanding through one performance of one song.
Cobain screams throughout the album version of “All Apologies,” as he does through many Nirvana songs. But for someone who was always screaming, he had an impressive range of emotions. The screaming on the album version is different from the Unplugged version. While the Unplugged performance is mostly shot through with tiredness, The In Utero version captures the omnipresent duality of experience. The sunburn and the freezer burn coexist. In the verses, Cobain’s voice circles the repeated riff. The verses become an oppressive space where only lackadaisical resignation lives. And then in the chorus, Cobain’s screams find escape velocity, and there’s this moment where he has a chance before falling back into the riff.
Nirvana’s appearance on MTV Unplugged is immortal for good reason. The clip from “All Apologies” they used on news broadcasts was a helpful soundbyte for the uninitiated. It was certainly the most poignant clip they could have shown. Cobain never cared much for the Unplugged performance of that song, though, and only agreed to the video because he had been too busy to film a studio video. He had been talking to the comedian Bobcat Goldthwait (who had opened for Nirvana) about making a video where he played Lee Harvey Oswald throwing pies at Kennedy, played by a bandmate. If that video had happened instead of the Unplugged performance, mass media would have surely scrambled to find something appropriate to share.
The audio recording of MTV Unplugged was released seven months after Cobain’s death. The time capsule meant to contain Nirvana was wholly antithetical to their aesthetic, and recording the show was largely horrible for the band. Cobain was withdrawing from drugs during rehearsal and at one point refused to play. He insisted on using an amplifier with his acoustic guitar and thereby breaking the show’s whole premise. He didn’t play the band’s hits, including only one single “Come As You Are” (“All Apologies” had not been released as a single yet). The album was also heavy with covers, including songs by the Meat Puppets, David Bowie, and Leadbelly. Unplugged was never a show for the Kurt Cobains of the world. It was better suited for Eric Clapton who racked up Grammys for his performance there, including a “Best Rock Song” award he ironically beat out Nirvana for.
But whether or not Cobain would admit it, Unplugged opened the door for Nirvana to perform in ways they might never have otherwise. The film crew, the acoustic guitars, the expectations around set lists were all incompatible with the way Cobain worked. Ironically, those very elements ended up revealing the way he worked, which involved using defiance to achieve brilliant results.
Cobain would never have chosen that live video of “All Apologies” to be his swan song. But he would have been hard-pressed to make a better selection. Not just because that performance of “All Apologies” is so raw and haunting. In retrospect, he seems to be saying he’s sorry he’ll be remembered this way, the achiness overshadowing the “pure happy happiness” of the version that came before.
This piece was originally commissioned for an art exhibit by Michael Matewauk.
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