"25 years ago today, on September 21, 1993, Nirvana released its third and last studio album, In Utero..."

"... the defiantly raw and noisy follow-up to Nevermind, their much slicker breakthrough album... And if you really want to feel old, think about this: In Utero is an older album today than the Beatles' White Album was on the day In Utero was released!"

Writes my son John on Facebook, with audio and commentary on various album cuts. [ADDED: Also presented in blog form, here, where it's easier to read and enjoy.] Example:

“Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” is one of my favorite Nirvana songs, with manically oscillating guitar noise over relentlessly thumping drums. Most of the song is not quite “radio friendly,” but it gets most melodic in the bridge, with Kurt Cobain offering uncharacteristically straightforward advice: “Hate, hate your enemies/Save, save your friends/Find, find your place/Speak, speak the truth.”

As I wrote in the comments over there:

“Hate, hate your enemies/Save, save your friends...” made me think of a book I just read, which identified that sort of thinking as one of the "three great untruths" that are ruining the American mind...

The book is "The Coddling of the American Mind," which identifies "The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People." From Chapter 3 of the book:

The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently. We are all descended from people who belonged to groups that were consistently better at winning that competition. Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict. When the “tribe switch” is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves. A basic principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds,” which is a useful trick for a group gearing up for a battle between “us” and “them.” In tribal mode, we seem to go blind to arguments and information that challenge our team’s narrative. Merging with the group in this way is deeply pleasurable—as you can see from the pseudotribal as you can see from the pseudotribal antics that accompany college football games.

But being prepared for tribalism doesn’t mean we have to live in tribal ways....

It's not easy to forget that Kurt Cobain committed suicide, but, reading those lyrics, I feel that it's worth reminding you that he shot himself to death less than a year after writing that.  It's hard to know, reading lyrics, whether the writer is speaking in his own voice or inhabiting a persona whose views he hates. Lyrics Genius, annotating those lyrics, says:

Kurt Cobain was not about forgiving one’s enemies. In his personal journal, he wrote:

John Lennon has been my idol all my life but he’s dead wrong about revolution… find a representative of gluttony or oppression and blow the motherfuckers [sic] head off."

And then he blew his own head off, and somebody else blew out John Lennon's heart.

ADDED: Perhaps the Cobain suicide expressed the terrifying old realization: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

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