A sigh before Kurt Cobain entered the eternal hunting grounds, in April 1994,he gave us the phenomenal Nirvana song ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, a pistil with atreacherous lyrics.
Sasha Van Der SpeetenSeptember 17, 202203:00
In the 1990s, few rock stars wallowed in ambiguity as sardonically as KurtCobain. But he left little doubt about ‘Heart-Shaped Box’: for the mostsuccessful single from Nirvana’s third and final album in Utero he got hisinspiration from a documentary about children with cancer. “Every time I thinkabout it, I get sadder than I’ve ever been,” Cobain said in Michael Azerrad’sCome As You Are biography. It would be the lyric “I wish I could eat yourcancer when you turn black” explain. In addition, the American grunge singerclaimed, the chorus “Hey! / Wait! / I ‘ve got a new complaint!” refer to theblunt way the media treated him.
That could all be fine, the biographer Gillian G. Gaar thought in her analysis_in Utero_ a booklet from the renowned 33 1/3 series, “but the song is moreabout the physical and emotional dependence that is inherent in romanticrelationships.” The imagery is especially striking. Cobain sings aboutcarnivorous orchids and an umbilical cord, “mostly feminine symbols thatharbor potential danger and that generate a fear that properly equatesintimacy with a suffocating claustrophobia”.
Are you now spontaneously thinking of Courtney Love? Cobain’s widow, who isalso the frontwoman of the band Hole, was the only mortal to attend the birthof ‘Heart-Shaped Box’. Her bereaved husband is said to have written the songin 1992 when he and she had moved into a house in the Hollywood Hills, morespecifically “in a built-in closet where I heard him play the basic riff,” shesaid in a statement. Rolling Stone. “I asked him if I could have that rifffor one of my own songs. He just said _ ‘fuck you!’_ and shut the closetdoor.”
Does ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ shed light on the turbulent relationship between Loveand Cobain, the Sid and Nancy of the nineties? We know that Love once giftedhim a heart-shaped perfumed box that contained a decapitated porcelain doll,rose petals, a mini teacup and some sea shells. What about “I wish I couldeat your cancer when you turn black”? Is that lurid lyric “one of the mostcomplicated routes any songwriter has ever taken to say you love someone,” asNirvana biographer Charles R. Cross suspects? To eat your lover’s illness tosave her from evil? Or save the _ ‘cancer’ and the ‘ pisces’_ from the texton the constellations of Cobain and Love?
Abortion
The well-thought-out text somewhat reflects the difficult creation of thesong. When Cobain showed the demo for ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ to his comrades DaveGrohl and Krist Novoselic, they came up with little more than a lot of ragingnoise. Ironically, bassist Novoselic later complained during the recordingthat Cobain’s atonal guitar solo sounded “like an abortion slamming to thefloor.” Appropriate, since Cobain sings the song from the point of view of anaborted fetus who wants to crawl back into its mother’s womb.
The final note is – how could it be otherwise? — for Courtney Love. “You doknow that ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ is about my vagina, right?” she tweeted in 2012after Lana Del Rey covered the song. “Come on guys: “Throw your umbilicalnoose so I can climb right back”? uh…? I came up with a lot of thosecomparisons myself. So the next time you sing that song, think about my