Nirvana
Singles

THE REVIEW

I have a passion for the b-sides of the artists I love the most: in this way, I have often discovered true goldmines. I had already written about the enormous (both qualitatively and quantitatively) material that the recklessness of Blur had relegated to mere b-sides when any sane group would have lived off them for decades. The Nirvana could not be missing, with their singles, their b-sides, and their rarities extracted from various publications, official and unofficial.

"With The Lights Out" was a good retrospective box set, perhaps a bit too dispersive: from the three discs and a DVD of published material, they could have easily pulled out a double album, maybe priced as a single, and it would have been an excellent "Incesticide 2", and not a "Cash Cow", as Cobain would have wanted to call "Incesticide" at the time, "oh well, whatever, nevermind".. What I wanted to emphasize and what really matters, in the end, are the emotions I feel every time I play pieces like "Even In His Youth", "Sappy", "Clean Up Before She Comes", true and proper precious gems, incomprehensibly kept hidden from the majority. There's the grunge of "I Hate Myself And I Want To Die" and "Curmudgeon", the obsession of "Moist Vagina" and the tranquility of "Marigold", the only song solely signed by Grohl in the Nirvana catalog, not to mention the splendid covers of Velvet Underground ("Here She Comes Now"), Wipers ("D-7" and "Return Of The Rat") and Leadbelly, the bluesman much loved by Cobain ("Ain't It A Shame", "They Hung Him On A Cross" and "Grey Goose").

And there's his fury of a wounded beast, sometimes lucid ("Taken Eastern Song", "Oh, The Guilt"), sometimes blurred ("If You Must"), sometimes totally blind ("Anorexorcist", "Mrs Butterworth"): always and consistently shocking.

I don't know what Cobain would have done with or without Nirvana: the famous project with Stipe of R.E.M.? A work on wild experimentation becoming "almost psychedelic but with a stronger structure"? A final acoustic album in the style of "Unplugged In New York"? Then I listen to the splendid "You Know You're Right", the last recorded song, and I understand the total futility of asking so many questions: the answer is there, in the alternation between calm and storm, in the liberating screams of an extremely alive and restless author, in the brilliant compositional instinct of one of the most beautiful souls that rock has ever given us.