In Bloom continues to resonate with musicians. “In Bloom was an amazingly hooky song when that chorus comes in.” A little over a year, they reunited with Vig at Sound City in Los Angeles, where the Nevermind version was recorded. “They still had the punk attitude, but they were really really hooky songs,” he said. ![]() Vig realised immediately that the band had undergone a change since recording their debut album, Bleach. Nirvana first recorded the song in April 1990, at Smart Studios in Wisconsin, with Butch Vig producing – that version eventually emerged on a Sub Pop video compilation the following year. The earliest versions of In Bloom, he said, sounded like the hardcore punk band Bad Brains, before it was slowed down. I think back now and go, ‘Yeah, maybe that was an influence,’” bassist Krist Novoselic told Rolling Stone in 2002. “That tape was always getting played, turned over and over again. Nirvana had been hammering a C90 in their touring van on one side was the Swiss extreme metal pioneers Celtic Frost, on the other was the New Jersey powerpop band the Smithereens. In Bloom began as a markedly different song to the one that emerged with the release of Nevermind on 24 September, 1991. I’ve always associated the song with Rape Me. “I assumed it was directed towards the fans who would show up at concerts with signs saying Evenflow on one side and Rape Me – I think – on the other: the fans who did not understand there was a point of difference between Nirvana and other Seattle bands or media representations of grunge. “I always assumed it was written about the distance Kurt felt from his fans, as well,” says writer Everett True, a friend and frequent interviewer of Cobain. It’s what gives them a livelihood, but it’s also what confines and suffocates them. It’s not that they don’t want to be admired and recognised – rare is the artist who craves obscurity – but more that once their image is formed in the public mind it becomes a straitjacket, or an iron lung, as Thom Yorke put it. The great unspoken fact of music is how uncomfortable musicians get with their audiences. And who thought: who are these people? Why are they following me? “He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs,” sang Kurt Cobain, “and he likes to sing along / And he likes to shoot his gun / But he don’t know what it means / When I say …” In Bloom, from Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind, is a song by someone who’s come to represent something he doesn’t recognise someone who looked at his audience and saw it changing from a small coterie of the Seattle underground to beefy guys who liked to mosh, who loved that Nirvana kicked ass, and who five years earlier would have been bellowing along to Mötley Crüe. It’s optimistic.T he lyrics couldn’t be more plain. In the song, it’s the same venue, band and crowd-but the perspective has shifted. We can safely assume that Simpson was one of those stupid teenagers who sang along to Nirvana songs, having no idea what they were actually about. In fact, this version is certainly a tribute and perhaps a thank you to Cobain. But, in Simpson’s version of “In Bloom,” homage is definitely being paid to the isolated ’90s grungster who originally wrote the song. (Gasp) Some Nirvana purists are not entertained by this. Simpson takes a song about alienation in a crowd and weaves it into a love song. It completely changes the meaning of the song. There’s that somewhat psychedelic slide guitar and the fool changes the lyrics (?). ![]() When Sturgill Simpson covers In Bloom on his album, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, the song is reworked, slowed down. Or put another way, less Black Flag and more “The Iggy Pop/Aerosmith-type songwriting,” as Cobain described it and admitted to imitating on Nevermind. Like Cobain, their songwriting is a collage-style tableau of words with apparent influence from the Dada and Surrealist art movements. In an interview with Melody Maker, Cobain admitted that his songwriting was inspired by the ’80s alternative rock, namely, The Pixies. ![]() Cross made in his biography on Cobain, which reasoned that “In Bloom” is a “thinly disguised portrait of Cobain’s friend Dylan Carlson.” Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad recognizes this as implicitly ironic because, “The tune is so catchy that millions of people actually do sing along to it.” There’s also another argument, which Charles R. The song was, apparently, written to address, or poke fun at, the people outside the underground music scene who started coming to Nirvana shows after their first studio album. ![]() “In Bloom” is just the sort of Cobain song where the point is missed when a meaning is distilled.
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