Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana in the Shards of Incesticide

by Nick Soulsby

In 1992, fresh from the colossal success of Nevermind, Nirvana
released Incesticide. To some this odd little album was just a
loose collection of B-sides and outtakes cobbled together to cash
in on the band's newfound fame. But to many others it offered
a truer reflection of Nirvana — a glimpse into the dark soul of a
band reclaiming its punk roots.

This isn’t another biography of Kurt Cobain or a story book about
how a band from Seattle changed music in the 1990s. Instead,
through the dark slivers of Incesticide, Nirvana’s most neglected
release, this work penetrates the surface drama of the band's
career to dissect the tightly bound ideas that unite their songs.

On the twentieth anniversary of Incesticide's release, this
extraordinary book reveals the hidden structures and meanings
threaded through some of the most important rock music ever made.

Design and cover artwork by Maureen Johnson. Cover photo by Nick Soulsby.

Genres: Music

323 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 9, 2012

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a deep Dive, Dive, Dive, Dive-in Nirvana. Great book focused primarily on Cobain's songwriting. Deeply researched. Traces the history of the songs. Makes the case for the importance of the less well-known and under promoted Incesticide release.

[Bert · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're a Nirvana fan, I cannot recommend this enough. Not only does it focus on one of the band's least discussed releases, Incesticide , it does so with remarkable depth and insight. Most music books fail to live up to the task they set for themselves; this one easily lives up to it and shows the fantastic dedication and work this fan has put into it was well worth the time and effort.

I've seen some fantastic work by fans over the years: the work of the Uptown crew (in particular Per Nilsen) in the case of Prince, the astonishing achievements of the Nine Inch Nails fan community, and now this excellent book. I never would have expected to learn so much more about Nirvana and Kurt Cobain nearly two decades after this band ended.

[Grant · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hadn't thoroughly looked at Incesticide and while it's still lower on the list of my fav Nirvana albums, this book helped me appreciate it more. Much of the book, however, is a fairly dry cataloguing of facts about the band and Cobain's songwriting. These parts didn't do too much for me, although Soulsby's data mining is admirable. The parts I enjoyed had more to do with Soulsby's subjective analysis of the songs, their meanings and themes. This might not have thrilled Cobain, who often insisted that his lyrics were meaningless collages of words and nothing more. And he hated to talk about meaning, but that is a trait many artists share, so not surprising.

But whether Cobain would admit it or not, many of these songs carried meaning and interesting recurring themes. The sarcastic mocking of media (and fandom), the nature/body amalgamation, biological and familial fatalism, the strong inward focus and the conflicted desire for annihilation, all there. Nirvana was a particularly apt name for this band: "freedom from pain and suffering in the external world"... indeed, most of these songs (post 1990 at least) had a remarkable lack of focus on the external world; these were primarily inward, inner, introspective songs, Soulsby rightly points out.