The crass, exploitative release of Nirvana's final song.

Somewhere up in pop star heaven, wearing the same ratty cardigan that he wore on MTV Unplugged, Kurt Cobain is no doubt enjoying a last, bitter laugh over the release of a brand-new Nirvana single, "You Know You're Right." A keen student of fame, the author of endless jeremiads against the evils of the recording industry, the greatest rock star of the '90s could not help but feel satisfied by a week in which the release of Nirvana's final studio recording propelled the band's greatest-hits album to No. 3 on the Billboard charts. The release of the first new Nirvana song in almost a decade came in the same week that selections from Cobain's private notebooks and diaries were released in a lavish coffee-table book in which Kurt himself predicted the end: "And in 10 years when Nirvana becomes as memorable as Kajagoogoo," Kurt wrote in his diary, "that same very small percent will come to see us at reunion gigs sponsored by Depends diapers, bald fat still trying to RAWK at amusement parks. Saturdays: puppet show, rollercoaster & Nirvana …"

With the release of Nevermind, in 1991, Cobain had been widely acclaimed as the musical spokesman for the anger and longing of his generation—his crackling blue eyes were lit by the same alternating currents of gentleness and rage that lit up his songs. Three years later, when he blew his head off in his garage, he was clearly a world-class mess—alone, angry, depressed, suffering from constant stomach pain, sick and tired of being a rock star, furious at himself, venting his famous passive-aggressive anger on nearly everyone around him, and regularly injecting heroin. 

Unlike most post-mortem rock releases, "You Know You're Right" is not B-side material or the result of recording studio wizardry—it's a real Nirvana song that was recorded less than three months before the Cobain's famous suicide. If his life was a mess, Cobain was at the peak of his powers as a vocalist and songwriter—the most gifted and popular writer that rock music had seen since Lennon/McCartney. "You Know You're Right" is a defiant movement away from the surface softness of ballads like "Dumb" and "All Apologies" that he had written for In Utero and then recorded again—softly, with cellos—for MTV Unplugged. It was a song for the kids who grew up in places like Aberdeen, Wash., the logging town where Kurt was born—kids who slept on friends' couches, listened to Black Sabbath, and found work cleaning floors, just like Kurt did before he became famous.

The song begins with Kurt in one of his Gollum-like moods of dependence and resentment, tiptoeing around emotions that are bound to explode. "I will never follow you/ I will never bother you," the singer promises, his voice simmering with rage. As the weight of the resentment grows, his voice revs upward into the supercharged Boeing-engine whine that could channel more stress than any other sound on the planet:

I will move away from here
You won't be afraid of fear
No thought was put into this
I always knew it would come to this

In earlier versions of the song, recorded live during Nirvana's shows and sound-checks of the previous months, Cobain had used a different line for "No thought was put into this"—the memorable but very Nirvana-like one-liner "I am walking in the piss." The change made the song better. "No thought was put into this" was more subtle and offered a more direct contrast with the singer's claim to foresight; it would also sound better to executives at the commercial radio stations that had made In Utero the best-selling album in America.

Otherwise, "You Know You're Right" is not a particularly accommodating song. "Things have never been so swell/ I have never failed to feel," Cobain continued, raising the pitch of his anger even higher, ending in a drawn-out "pain" on which the band explosively freaks out, leading to the draggy, underwater chorus of "You know you're right."

Here the "you" of the song is clearly the singer himself—the "I" of the preceding couplet. But when the chorus is over, a new target comes into view. "Let's talk about someone else/ Steaming soup against her mouth" the singer suggests, his voice rising back to the same pitch where he left off before. "Nothing really bothers her/ She just wants to love herself." With guitars building to a heavy, industrial crescendo, the accumulated strain in the vocal is again released in the phrase "You know you're right." Repeated over and over again, the singer's attack on himself is now turned against a new target—his wife.

Given the available evidence, it seems fair to say "You Know You're Right" is about Courtney Love—and that the release of the song marks the beginning of yet another chapter in the ongoing negotiation between the rock star and his wife about their famous marriage. Love has helped prevent the release of "You Know You're Right" until the end of 2002—eight years after it was recorded and eight years after Nirvana's commercial peak. She also made sure to first record her own version of "You Know You're Right" with her own band, Hole—a version in which she deliberately alters the lyrics, reversing the emotional dynamics of the song.

"Let's talk about someone else," Love's version begins, repeating the lines that her husband wrote. "She just wants to love herself." But Love was much too clever a survivor to be imprisoned for long in her husband's narrative of their difficult marriage. In Love's version, Kurt Cobain wasn't going anywhere; she was the one who was leaving him—but only in Kurt's frightened, childish, insecure mind. So, she rewrites her dead husband's song: