Like the prelude to life, a protective time-space tunnel that separates us, that is, from contact with the harshness of existence, the complexity of the world, and contradictions; it is placed in a moment before (almost) without time and place, without stimuli in a dimension where everything is softened, knocked, and almost completely devoid of consciousness: "In Utero," precisely.
Quite superfluous, in my opinion, "to read" the overly explicit/enigmatic title by exploring its psychoanalytic undercurrents: the connections to a broader context are already there and quite clear: the aesthetics of Pink Floyd's "comfortably numb" memory codified to the literary by D. Coupland's "Generation X," "a latere" compared to the youthful and musical languages structured in the Seattle Scene, where, on the level of traceable sediment of meaning, one can grasp the aspiration to eclipses or erasure of identity ("X as anonymous, non-existent…”), as well as the response to the sharp contradictions of life, to the encounter/clash with a too complex world in which one does not recognize oneself is indeed sleep ("to sleep... to die") and the positioning in an unidentified nor traceable "elsewhere" (the desert).
In this sense, the title of the third album of new songs (excluding the collection “Incesticide”) sounds more like a longing in resonance with Roger Waters’ "pleasant unconsciousness" rather than an invitation to grasp endless double meanings. Musically speaking, it has been said that Nirvana, despite being "ultimately the greatest rock band of Seattle" (Claudio Sorge), had the merit of projecting the musical code of "grunge" and the Seattle scene on a (media and commercially) planetary scale, other groups being the true "pioneers of the genre": the mono-dimensional garage-fuzz of Mudhoney and the "expanded" noise-core beyond the limits of song structure-form of the Melvins, being indeed traceable in albums such as “You’re Living All Over Me” and “Green Mind” by Dinosaur Jr, (geographically unrelated to this creative hub) the most distant precursors of these musics.
Nirvana is credited with the merit, in that amalgam of hard rock, punk, and psychedelia known as “Grunge rock,” of having managed to fuse the sound inflections of punk and the instrumental geometry of hard rock with an extraordinary melodic intuition, and having led their rock to the highest levels of lyricism. “In Utero” is, in its way, a sort of concluding manifesto if not of the entire grunge epic, at least of the Seattle scene. Darker, denser, and more intricate compared to the music of the album where they achieved the perfect communicative synthesis and immediate impact (“Nevermind”), contrary to what one might think, these songs make it possible in a more fluid and free way to express more fully the narrative and poetic aspect of the author’s emotions and worldview. "Mannerist" in the noblest and highest sense of the term (i.e., devoid of the negative connotations that have marked decades of art history), this album stages existential paintings, similarly to the aforementioned movement, defined as a "prefiguration of contemporary man's anxiety" but transposed into the sound and vocal dimension, the expressive tension is so intense and powerful as not to be "enclosed" in the too narrow space offered by song-theater, resulting in opaque and intricate sounds, syncopated percussion, and deliberately "awkward" singing which, despite its lyricism, are in my view the perfect sound transposition.
“Heart Shaped Box,” lead single of the album, then reveals with the usual immediacy the poetic theme underlying the whole work, and also what is the true focal point of the work: pop. Intended as expressive urgency, dramatic "staging of the unresolved knots of everyday life," to use the words of Fabio de Luca, in that sort of "parallel universe" that is music, beyond the various subsets, genres, and related languages. To quote another passage from the same article (cited at the end) about a mid-60s band, the Ronettes, and a song "Be My Baby," the journalist states "in that moment of hesitation before the chorus, one perceives all the anguish, latent as it may be but still tangible, that has always characterized everything related to the pop concept."
In this sense, "All Apologies" appears as an ironic anthem where the macro-social cosmos is "borrowed" to represent the typically adolescent microcosm, "Serve The Servants" perhaps sounds like the most disenchanted and lucidly self-aware of the episodes of the work (“adolescent anger has served me well, now I’m old and tired"), while it is the most discussed piece of the entire collection to unconsciously reveal the entire meaning of Kurt Cobain’s work: "Rape Me," that is "make me feel something truly worth feeling, that shakes my world to its foundations, that has the same desperate certainty and strength of the chorus of Be My Baby” (Fabio de Luca); in this track, and in the words that are part of it, we can find (it’s just my point of view) the ultimate meaning of this "existential manifesto" of Kurt Cobain: desperate and extreme attempt to escape the pain of unsettling questions, existential in that the microcosm of adolescent imagination actually “covers” much greater and deeper anxieties and fragilities, this is the most central episode of “In Utero.” Last musical-only reference to "Scentless Apprentice," ideal bridge between the vaguely “industrial-rock” and “punk-core” cadences of “Bleach” and the expressive linearity of “In Bloom,” in my opinion one of the best tracks on the album.
Someone then pointed out that "the same melancholy that pervaded Kurt Cobain’s mind is rather similar to that expressed in Italy by Lucio Battisti." I feel (still within the limits of my point of view) to share this stance. Quite unlikely that Dave Grohl, Kris Novoselic, and Kurt Cobain ever got their hands on records like “Il Nostro Caro Angelo” or “Pensieri e Parole”... of elective affinities, then, one can (if desired) speak, that is, accidental and not intended, but even in the rather bold parallelism, perhaps acceptable. The elements are there and seem to make Battisti closer to the leader of this rock group, which will almost certainly go down in Music History without qualification, than to the sometimes desperate melancholy of Nick Drake or the sophisticated Poetry in music of Van Morrison.
Beyond judgments (like the writer’s), of which time will be the judge, the traces left by the flow of emotions remain indelible, of which this work is absolutely and densely crossed.
Reference: F. De Luca “Amore, Rock e Spazio dell’ Illusione,” Rumore, April 1996
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