“Come as You Are” is one of four chart-topping, career-defining singles from Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind. The grunge pioneers released the track as the second single from the record in March 1992. And while it didn’t quite reach the same level of universal ubiquity as the album’s lead single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, “Come as You Are” has built quite the legacy of its own.
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Songwriting milestones, near-miss lawsuits, memorials, a potential foreshadowing of a worldwide tragedy: the story of “Come as You Are” goes far deeper than a successful hit on the Billboard Alternative Airplay charts.
Nirvana’s 1992 Single Marked a Notable Change in Kurt Cobain’s Songwriting
Nevermind was only Nirvana’s second album, but the differences in Kurt Cobain’s songwriting in the band’s debut album, Bleach, and their sophomore follow-up were already significant. “Come as You Are” marked not only a turning point in Cobain’s lyrical style but also his perspective on the outside world in general.
“The lines in the song are really contradictory,” Cobain once explained, per Jim Berkenstadt’s book, Nevermind: Nirvana. “They’re just kind of confusing, I guess. It’s just about people and what they’re expected to act like.”
In a separate interview, Cobain discussed how he managed expectations. “I always knew to question things,” he said. “All my life, I never believed most things I read in history books, and a lot of things I learned in school. But now I’ve found I don’t have the right to make a judgment on someone based on something I’ve read. I don’t have the right to judge anything. That’s the lesson I’ve learned.”
While some macabre-minded Nirvana listeners have attempted to place subconscious meaning behind Cobain’s lyrics, “I don’t have a gun,” music critic Mark Deming argues that the Nirvana frontman’s suicide three years later was nothing more than a tragic coincidence. In this instance, Deming posits that Cobain was telling his listeners that he wasn’t targeting them individually. He was merely calling out the hypocrisy and paradoxical nature of the world at large.
Still, some lyrics did seem to have a direct correlation to Cobain’s personal struggles at the time, including his h***** addiction. The lines “come doused in mud, soaked in bleach” alluded to an HIV-prevention public service announcement the City of Seattle coined to get addicts to sterilize muddy needles in bleach.
The Far-Reaching Legacy of “Come as You Are”
Nirvana’s 1991 Nevermind track (and 1992 single), “Come as You Are”, continued to grow its legacy well beyond the group’s tenure as a band. After the English post-punk band Killing Joke threatened to sue Nirvana for copyright infringement over the song’s main riff, the grunge track joined an unlucky Rolodex of artists who have fought over whether an idea was truly their own or not. The lawsuit never came to fruition, with Killing Joke citing personal and financial reasons for not filing.
“Come as You Are” nearly became synonymous with drug rehabilitation at the University of Washington after Nirvana’s record label, Sub Pop, approached the institution about establishing an addiction treatment center under the song’s name. This, too, never came to fruition due to a lack of funding.
Finally, in 2005, the small city of Aberdeen, Washington, inextricably linked itself to Nirvana’s early 1990s song by erecting a new welcome sign on the edge of town that reads, “Welcome to Aberdeen: Come As You Are.”
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” might be the more successful and far-reaching track off Nirvana’s 1991 album, Nevermind, based on chart performance and sales figures alone. But one can’t discredit the legacy of the album’s second single, either.
Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
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