For the main YMMV page for Nirvana, go here.
- Gateway Series: To Alternative Rock in general. It's probable that the massively noisy In Utero would have flopped hard if it wasn't for this moderately noisy album.
- Harsher in Hindsight:
- The line, "I'd rather be dead than cool," in "Stay Away". Cobain's dislike of being a rock star was one of the reasons for his suicide.
- Similarly, the lines "And I swear that I don't have a gun / No, I don't have a gun..." from "Come As You Are" are a lot worse after Cobain Ate His Gun to commit suicide.
- And of course, this line in "Smells Like Teen Spirit": "Our little group has always been / And always will until the end." Who knew that end was less than three years away?
- Misaimed Fandom:
- To Cobain's irritation, the album became popular with the kind of clueless jocks he used to hate at high school—exactly the kind of people he derided in the song "In Bloom". Even worse were a bunch of rapists who sang "Polly" while doing their horrible deed, who he condemned as "wastes of sperm and eggs" in the liner notes of Incesticide.
- Likewise, "In Bloom" is about thugs who like Nirvana's music, but stand for everything Kurt hated. He also expressed a fear of the image of a yuppie singing along to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in his BMW—something that is very likely reality as music from The '90s slides into the various "Oldies" and "Classic Hits" radio stations.
- Refrain from Assuming: "Come As You Are" is not called "Don't Have a Gun" or "Memoria". Likewise, "Smells Like Teen Sprit" is not called "Entertain Us", "Hello", or "How Low", and "Lithium" is not called "I'm So Happy" or "Yeah!"
- Sequel Displacement: A lot of people think Nevermind is Nirvana's debut.
- Suspiciously Similar Song:
- The main riff in "Breed" sounds a lot like Link Wray's "Run Chicken Run," and also like the bassline in Wipers' "Potential Suicide."
- The riff in "Smells Like Teen Spirit" smells like that of Boston's "More Than a Feeling", but Kurt actually admitted that the song was heavily influenced by The Pixies, specifically "Debaser".
- The guitar riff throughout "Come As You Are" sounds like that in Killing Joke's "Eighties", to the point where Nirvana were reportedly brought to court over it.
