Over the two years of music revolution that the band Nirvana's breakthrough album Nevermind ignited, its singer-songwriter-guitarist Kurt Cobain festered. Launched by Nevermind from the underground scene to the mainstream center stage he had opposed for a lifetime, Cobain could not reconcile himself with his new celebrity. A nonconformist and discontented poet at heart, Cobain could only watch in impotence as Nevermind was warped and clichéd in the mainstream microwave. The wearied voice of “the slacker generation” resented, on top of his doting masses, the intense searchlight on his skeletons-- his parents' divorce, his chronic drug abuse, and his controversial wife. To add insult to injury, the underground from which he sprung accused him of selling out his values to become a marketable product. How else, many of his kindred spirits intimated, had he come to dominate the radio?
In retaliation, Cobain set out to make a booming
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To clothe the rough-edged criticism underneath, the album blended the aggression of the Seattle punk scene with the rough edges of garage band roots while toning down the experimental pop sound. Fusing pop and punk had been daring in Nevermind, but by then Kurt Cobain had witnessed it misappropriated into fashion for the jocks and frat boys he loathed. As a rebuff to the demands of some abominable fans, In Utero reacted against the slick angst of its predecessor. To divest Nirvana from the polish of radio-friendly Nevermind, the decision was made to hire Steve Albini, an anti-major label punk producer. Albini, in all of his prickly glory, was their man, who Nirvana's drummer Dave Grohl reflected “really prides himself on being the biggest dick you ever met in your life and he does a good job of it” (Beaumont 32). The connection to such an anti-establishment figure pronounced their mutual ideological stance against the mainstream that Nirvana had just