Contradictions, left in the take
The riff is a murmur with a chorus pedal on it, pretty until you notice it will not resolve into comfort. Kurt Cobain sings as if he were inviting you in and warning you off in the same breath. Come as you are. Then the memory of a gun, a friend, an enemy. Come as You Are, the second single from Nevermind, is the song that proved the album was not only the one with the scream. It is quieter, wetter, and no kinder. Dave Grohl plays with a restraint that makes the chorus feel like a decision rather than an explosion. Krist Novoselic’s bass walks the contradiction without choosing a side.
Butch Vig produced the album at Sound City in Van Nuys, the room famous for a drum sound and, on this track, for a guitar that seems to have been recorded in a smaller, meaner box. Cobain’s Boss distortion and a cheap chorus did the colour. The vocal is close enough to hear the doubt in the invitation. He worried, later, about the riff’s resemblance to Killing Joke’s Eighties, a likeness he did not deny and did not happily live with. The single came out in 1992, after Smells Like Teen Spirit had already made them public property. Kevin Kerslake’s video put him in water, a baby swimming, a gun, images that the year would not be allowed to treat as only images.
The lyric’s method is the clash. Take your time. Hurry up. I don’t have a gun. The lines cancel and therefore stick. He was writing about the demand that people arrive as a type, and about his own failure to be the type, and he let the sentences argue instead of concluding. On stage the song could be heavier, the chorus a shout the record only suggests. The studio version is the one that still sounds like a hallway. You are welcome. You are not safe. Both sentences are sung in tune.
The lines are contradictory on purpose. It’s about the expectation that you’ll be one thing, and the fact that you aren’t.
(Kurt Cobain, circa 1992, in the interviews gathered by Michael Azerrad)
Nevermind swallowed the group and then the group was gone, and this track became one of the few that still functions as a greeting rather than a monument. People who cannot bear the myth can still use the riff. That is a mercy and a risk. The water in the video, the small amp, the chorus that glistens like a leak: none of it was designed as a relic. It was a single, sequenced after a bigger noise, and it turned out to be the one that whispers the actual terms.
What remains is the pedal and the refusal to pick one instruction. Come as You Are does not mean what the title promises if you stay for the verse. It means the promise is the problem. Vig kept the room dry enough to hear that. Cobain kept the contradictions in the take, which is the whole ethics of the song.
