Harsher In Hindsight / Nirvana

• Kurt Cobain's suicide makes some Nirvana material uncomfortable.
  • "Come as You Are" from Nevermind has the chorus, "And I swear that I don't have a gun/No I don't have a gun/No I don't have a gun." Cobain killed himself by shooting himself in the head. At least one DJ, shortly after Kurt's suicide, quipped, "Well, you lied, Kurt. You did have a gun".
  • He also wrote "I'd rather be dead than cool" in "Stay Away".
  • The first verse of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" begins with the line "Load up on guns".
  • One of the band's last songs recorded (featured as a bonus track in the deluxe edition of In Utero) is called "I Hate Myself and Want to Die," though the lyrics have nothing to do with it. This song was reportedly named after the phrase Cobain liked to use whenever people asked him "How are you?" because he hated that question, at least according to an interview Cobain gave Rolling Stone in January 1994. When Kurt died, a projected single release for the song was immediately shelved, though the B-Side had already been released a year before on the Beavis and Butt-Head Experience album.
  • "Lithium"'s bridge has Kurt singing "I X it/you", followed by "I'm not gonna crack." He did.
  • When Cobain was 15, he made a short film entitled, "Kurt Commits Bloody Suicide".
  • One photo of the band has Kurt holding a shotgun in his mouth.
  • After River Phoenix's sudden death in October 1993, Cobain dedicated performances of "Jesus Don't Want Me For a Sunbeam" to Phoenix (among other stars who died young), during Nirvana's last shows from November 1993 through February 1994, only months before Cobain himself died.
  • An interview with Cobain turned to the subject of school shootings, and Cobain said that if he ever felt inclined to do such a thing, he'd most likely kill himself to prevent him from hurting anyone. While It Makes Sense in Context and probably even came off as reassuring at the time, it's still a pretty chilling sentence to read.
  • From "Dumb": "The day is done/But I'm having fun."
  • From "Milk It": "Look on the bright side, suicide".
  • The final song on In Utero, "All Apologies," was played heavily on the radio in the weeks after Cobain's death. It sounds a lot like a suicide note or a self-eulogy, including these lyric:
    In the sun
    In the sun I feel as one
    In the sun, in the sun
    Married
    Buried
  • The stage at Nirvana's iconic MTV Unplugged performance was decorated with lilies and black candles, "like a funeral," at Kurt's suggestion.
  • Speaking of the MTV Unplugged performance, the cover of "The Man Who Sold the World" has the line "I must have died alone a long, long time ago." Note that this is changed from the original line, "We must have died alone."
• The song "Polly", which is about a man raping a girl. The first instance of this comes from the fact that two men raped a woman while singing the song to her, which horrified Kurt upon learning of the incident. The second instance of this is the rape and murder of Polly Klass.
• The opening line of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" being "Load up on guns" while the music video takes place at a high school pep rally took on a much more uncomfortable light after Columbine and subsequent high profile school shootings, particularly in the late 2010s-early 2020s.

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