School

Kurt Cobain wrote this about how he saw the Grunge scene in Washington like the cliques at a school. "You're in high school again," he sings.

A seminal period for Nirvana was their 1989 tour of Europe with their Sub Pop labelmates TAD. "School" was the first song in their set, and as Sup Pop co-founder Bruce Pavitt recalls, by the end of the tour Kurt Cobain would "look out in the audience and all he could see were the kind of people who used to beat him up at school." This was telling, and it led to songs like "In Bloom" where Cobain was singing derisively about the very people who were enjoying his songs. It also showed just how exhausted and disenchanted Cobain had become even before Nirvana signed with Geffen Records and released Nevermind.

Cobain dealt with bullying a lot as a kid, but by the time he got to high school, no one bothered with him because he was so withdrawn. "I was so antisocial that I was almost insane," he told Guitar World. "I felt so different and so crazy that people just left me alone. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had voted me Most Likely To Kill Everyone At A High School Dance."