100 Songs: "Aneurysm" (Nirvana)

Last night, while I was trying to fall asleep I was listening to this podcast of a public radio rock talk show.  In their show intro, they play a series of clips from a bunch of different songs, and wouldn't you know that first goddamned bit played is the exact same lick from "Tangerine" that I was writing about yesterday.  I decided to take the Band's advice from "Acadian Driftwood" and "call it an omen/point you where you're goin'", and waited for the next clue from my apparent new spirit guides, two middle-aged music critics from Chicago.  I got my new direction when they began discussing the new trend of Gen-X alternative acts playing nostalgia shows (like how Sonic Youth and Liz Phair began doing shows playing their classic albums all the way through), and one of the hosts mentioned Kurt Cobain's mocking of nostalgia- in particular when he screams "Haight" (as in Haight Ashbury) on "Heart Shaped Box".  I knew then what song I had to no next.

I've written here about Nirvana, and Kurt Cobain in particular, and I don't want to repeat (or contradict) myself.  But I will (once again) mention just how important Nirvana was to me back in my young and formative years.  In middle school I had three cds that I played more than any others- Pearl Jam's 10, that red Beatles 2 disc "best of 1962-66) that could almost certainly have fitted on one disc but the label wanted twice as much money, and Nevermind.  I don't think I would have heard "Aneurysm" until after Cobain's death- the only other Nirvana album I had in middle school was a cassette of In Utero.  (Actually, it's entirely possible that part of my love for the song comes from how relatively recently I discovered it.  It's not tied to memories of being in middle school and playing hockey on my Genesis while listening to, say, "Drain You".  No matter how many times I listen to it, my ears for it are still fresher than they are for "Heart Shaped Box" or "All Apologies".  Which isn't to say anything against those songs, just... nevermind.)

Lyrically, the song is pretty simple.  There are only six different lines in the entire song- a four line verse, a one line chorus, repeated 8 times, the verse again, the chorus repeated another 8 times, and then a final line repeated 10 times.  The first line of the song, "Come on over and do the Twist" is filled with the same sneering disdain for previous generations as Krist Novoselic's screech of the chorus of "Get Together" at the beginning of "Territorial Pissings"or Cobain's "new complaint" for Haight-Ashbury in "Heart Shaped Box".  The fourth line, "Love you so much it makes me sick" feels so much like a line about Courtney Love that I'm almost skeptical if it can be- Cobain was never the most confessional song writer, and I'm not sure that time table fits.  The demo of the song (found in the box set) is from 1/1/91, and while Kurt had met Courtney about a year earlier, they didn't become a couple until November of '91.  Nevertheless, the line, with it's Sid & Nancy vibe (and don't forget that Courtney was IN that movie about another self-destructive rock couple, an irony of some kind) is haunting.  But it's the chorus of "Beat me out of me" repeated a total of sixteen times through the song that makes the song.  Is the line a cry for help of sorts, an attempt to find salvation through self-destruction (to have all of the things that make you you beaten out of you?)  Or is it ironic?  The band's call-and-response "Beat Up" after each howl of the line suggest a certain detachment, but Cobain's rising shriek after the second part raises the stakes.  The final line "She keeps it pumping straight to my heart", repeated ten times is cryptic, the banal observation would be that the "she" is Courtney and the "it" is heroin, but that's too glib.  If the "it" is merely blood, it would suggest that she (whoever she is, if she even exists) is keeping him alive, despite his desire to have himself beaten out of himself.  

There are three official versions of the song- the 1/1/91 demo from the box set, the BBC session, from Radio One on 11/9/91, and the live version on the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah album, recorded at Del Mar Fairground in California on 12/28/91.  The versions are all similar.  The live cut is played a little faster, and lacks the band's "Beat Up" response in the chorus", but otherwise they all feature the same early clean guitar riff suddenly becoming a giant distorted riff before turning into the simple guitar riff that plays for the rest of the song, instantly recognizable as Cobain's.  

In the box set liner notes, Craig Montgomery, who produced the demo session from 1/1/91 in Seattle, observes:

"They had been playing "Aneurysm" live a lot, and it was really huge with the tom fills and the vocals and the way the guitar goes from clean to dirty.  What I was trying to get was the huge-osity of a live show.  Kurt's ability to scream like that was always otherworldly to me."

To be fair, if he hadn't mentioned the name of the song, it would probably be hard to identify which song he was talking about.  The song actually feels like a kind of distilled "Teen Spirit" to me, cutting down the "quiet" parts to focus just on the "loud", and stripping down the lyrics to just a series of complaints of boredom and angst and fury so undirected that it finally settles in on itself.  This might be why the song was passed over for Nevermind, if it was ever even considered for the album.  It was certainly finished before the album was recorded, and it's certainly a more memorable song than, say "Stay Away" or "Drain You".  But now, it seems to me that it fits better stuck at the end of Incesticide, a sort of summation of everything that band had done before the shift that came with In Utero.  The Beatles said that in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.  Nirvana just howls and begs to "beat me out of me".  That seems to work.