Breed

An early Nirvana song about being trapped in middle-class America, this was a song the band developed during live performances in 1989 when they toured Europe with their Sup Pop labelmates TAD. In our interview with Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt, he explained that this song was "hypnotic," and a stylistic breakthrough for the band. "Audiences would become ecstatic," Pavitt said. "They were experiencing Nirvana. And when you're experiencing really good, primal rock n roll, you break into a trance."

Kurt Cobain wrote this when he was first starting to more deeply explore his songwriting talent, and he had begun to write about the people around him. The original version was recorded at Smart Studios with Butch Vig, and it was the most complex song of the session: it began under the title "Immodium" - named after a friend's diarrhea medicine, yet there is very little in the version recorded at Smart to connect it with the medicine. Kurt instead used the title to suggest the running-on of the mouth. It was much more complex than much of Nirvana's early material, each chorus beginning and ending with the line "she said," implying that the song was meant to capture spoken dialogue, which is often overlooked.

The band Otep did a cover of this song on their 2007 album The Ascension. They also made a video for the cover with the lead singer dressed up as a housewife, referring to being trapped in your home and being bossed around by "the man." In our interview with the group's lead singer Otep Shamaya, she explained that Nirvana inspired her band to take on the occasional cover song, since Nirvana's renditions of songs by the Meat Puppets and David Bowie were so powerful.