"Having to resort to writing something like this is so embarrassing." The story behind the extremely controversial Nirvana song that almost got them banned and made a US President smash up his own daughter's CD

Nirvana outside their trailer gurning at the camera in 1992

(Image credit: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic via Getty)

Nirvana may have a back catalogue filled with iconic anthems, but there is only one track that has the distinction of being both the final single released before Kurt Cobain’s death and the most controversial song the band ever recorded. Tied to both tragedy and outrage, equally haunting and misunderstood and capable of inspiring the future President of the United States of America to burst into a violent rage, perhaps nothing sums up Nirvana’s final act more than Rape Me.

The impact of Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind was so seismic that it had turned a small Seattle punk band into the biggest and most talked about musical artist on the planet. It was not a situation that the members of Nirvana themselves took well. Suddenly inhabiting the mainstream pop world, with all of the gossip and scrutiny that brought with it, Nirvana, and Kurt in particular, quickly started to unravel.

"By 1992, 1993, we were living in a totally different world to the one we were in just 16 months before.” Drummer Dave Grohl said on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend Podcast in 2023.

"That time between Nevermind and when Kurt died, what happened in that time felt like ten years," continued bassist Krist Novoselic. “It was just so intense."

By 1993, we were living in a totally different world to the one we were in just 16 months before
Dave Grohl

Under the microscope of celebrity gossip columns and salacious whisperings of his drug use, Cobain became increasingly withdrawn and resentful.

“No magazine has any ethics at all,” he angrily claimed in a 1993 interview with Edgar Klusener. “There isn’t any mainstream magazine that would stop a good story. They wanna sell magazines; they’re in the entertainment business. My attitude has really changed over the last couple of years, mainly due to the amount of crap that has been written about us.”

Case in point: in August 1992, in what should have been one of the highlights of their career, Nirvana’s headlining performance at Reading Festival was overshadowed by the constant chatter that Kurt had overdosed backstage and that the band wouldn’t be playing that evening. He mocked the rumours by arriving onstage in a wheelchair, slowly getting up to sing a few bars of Bette Midler’s The Rose and theatrically throwing himself to the floor.

Intro/Breed - Nirvana (Live at Reading - England, 1992)(4K 60 FPS) - YouTube

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Kurt had begun writing material for what would become Nevermind’s follow up as early as the mixing stage of that album, and his distain at the position he was starting to find himself in would quickly start to seep into the songs he was writing. One of his first new compositions was Rape Me.

With the lyrics to previous Nirvana songs having been frustratingly misinterpreted by some commentators, In Bloom and Polly being two of the most notable, Kurt decided to make his new song as direct and free of metaphor as possible.

Cobain described Rape Me as being “an anti - let me repeat that - anti-rape song” to MTV in 1993. He added: “I got tired of people trying to put too much meaning into my lyrics. It’s not making sense, you know, so I decided to be really blunt.”

It was obvious that this had all come from a place of deep frustration, powered by having to continually defend and spell out his own work.

“Having to resort to doing something like writing Rape Me is so embarrassing,” he said to Much Magazine in 1993. “People didn’t understand it when we wrote songs like About a Girl or Polly, and having to explain that and having misunderstanding about that...I decided to write Rape Me in a way that was so blunt and obvious that no one could deny it, you know? No one could read it any other way.”

Unfortunately, people still did.

I got tired of people trying to put too much meaning into my lyrics

When MTV booked Nirvana to play their Video Music Awards show on September 9 1992, they did so expecting the band to play their big hit, Smells Like Teen Spirit. Nirvana, though, were in no mood to play the mainstream game, informing MTV they would be playing a brand-new song. That song was Rape Me.

This led to a furious back and forth between the network and the band. As detailed in Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg's book Serving the Servant, it’s believed that MTV network head Judy McGrath was concerned the song would “make it seem like MTV was normalising rape”. Goldberg called her to assure her of Kurt’s “commitment to feminism” and explain the song was “an anti-rape song, like Polly on Nevermind." But McGrath refused to budge.

Finally, a compromise was found, where Nirvana would play their upcoming single Lithium at the show. Still, such was Cobain’s mindset at the time, when Nirvana went live on the broadcast, he teased out a few bars of Rape Me, allegedly leading to frantic MTV producers nearly cutting to a commercial break, before abruptly stopping and performing Lithium in full.

Kurt Cobain singing onstage in 1992 — (Image credit: Frank Micelotta/Getty Images)

In the fall-out, there were rumours that MTV threatened to pull all videos by artists on Nirvana’s record label Geffen and fire their friend Amy Finnerty, who worked at the network.

The intense scrutiny the band were under didn’t subside by the time their third and final album In Utero was released in September 1993. The record showcased an angrier, harsher, more nihilistic Nirvana, with cult underground producer Steve Albini giving it a raw, unpolished sound. It felt like a middle finger to the entire music industry.

Only on an album that abrasive could a song like Rape Me, with its brutally forthright lyrical content and ragged, broken approximation of the ...Teen Spirit riff, be considered as a single. But considered it was; released as a double A-side with the far more sombre All Apologies on December 6 1993, it entered the UK singles chart at number 32 and went on to be certified Platinum in the US with sales of over a million.

Nirvana - Rape Me (Visualizer) - YouTube

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Despite Cobain’s insistence that Rape Me’s lyrical content couldn’t possibly be misinterpreted, the instant backlash proved him wrong. NME grumbled of the “moral dubiousness about wielding the words ‘RAPE ME!’ to In Utero’s best sing-along chorus”, while US supermarket chains refused to stock In Utero due to the song, leading to copies having to be re-labelled with the name Waif Me.

Decades later, Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of George W. Bush, would recall that her future president father was so incensed by hearing her play the song that he smashed up her copy of In Utero.

“There was a really bad song on it,” she said on the NBC show Today with Hoda and Jenna in 2019. “My dad heard me playing it on my little discman or CD player. He broke the CD over his leg. He was never mad like that, but this particular song really encourages... you know... I mean to hear your little daughter listen to it...”

My dad broke the CD over his leg
Jenna Bush Hager

Cobain himself clearly found the whole furore exhausting, sighing to Much Magazine: “It’s my way of, in a sarcastic way almost, saying ‘How obvious do we have to be?'”

The controversy was far from the only thing that Cobain had to deal with in this period, as the clamour for scandal, hearsay and muckraking intensified around the Nirvana frontman and his family.

Four months after Rape Me’s release and the pearl-clutching it inspired, Cobain tragically took his own life. It meant that Rape Me had the honour of being both the most contentious song of his career, as well as being the final single released in his lifetime. Fitting, in a way; much like its creator, Rape Me is a song that is thought-provoking, fearless, often misunderstood and retains its classic status to this very day.

Stephen joined the Louder team as a co-host of the Metal Hammer Podcast in late 2011, eventually becoming a regular contributor to the magazine. He has since written hundreds of articles for Metal Hammer, Classic Rock and Louder, specialising in punk, hardcore and 90s metal. He also presents the Trve. Cvlt. Pop! podcast with Gaz Jones and makes regular appearances on the Bangers And Most podcast.

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