It's okay to eat fish 'cause they don't have any feelings

Nirvana - 'Something In The Way' / 'Endless Nameless' (Nevermind - 1991)

Much like last week’s entry on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, I will start this entry on a more contemporary use of the song in question. When Matt Reeves was writing the first act of 2022’s The Batman, he used Nirvana’s ‘Something In The Way’ to connect the goth, rather than a gothic, version of Bruce Wayne, to Kurt Cobain via the Gus Van Sant film Last Days.

What the song captures about Gotham is a sense of hopelessness and dejection that oozes out of the closing track on Nevermind. Bruce Wayne in The Batman isn’t a playboy; he’s the victim of a tragedy who has had his soul ripped from the shell of his body. In the film, the song paints a picture of how down Wayne has been struck by the past 20 years as an orphan, cocooned by his family’s decaying mansion.

The same year that the trailer was released, Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, said of the song;

The line “It’s OK to eat fish cause they don’t have any feelings” — nothing else cuts me like that line. He knows it’s a lie — here’s a guy who loved turtles — but he thinks that if someone just loves him enough, then maybe, just maybe one day he will become real. It is Kurt’s “Velveteen Rabbit.” He is clawing his way out on “Something in the Way.” He’s telling himself anything just to get through.

In 1993’s biography, Come As You Are, by Michael Azerrad, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain spoke about the closing track of 1991’s Nevermind. ‘Something in the Way’ is thought by some to be autobiographical about a period of homelessness Cobain went through. Cobain said in the book that the song was;

…like if I was living under the bridge and I was dying of A.I.D.S., if I was sick and I couldn’t move and I was a total street person. That was kind of the fantasy of it.

The song was written by Kurt Cobain in 1990 and was inspired by the Young Street Bridge¹ near the Wishkah River in Washington, where Cobain would often fish as a teenager, quite often as the song describes with the rain that Seattle and the surrounding area of the Pacific Northwest is famous for dripping down from the concrete above. Some of the earliest versions of the song from 1990 were released in 2015 on the Montage of Heck documentary home recordings companion. Director Brett Morgen said it was in a medley with two other compositions that didn’t develop into full songs. Morgen has said to NME in 2015;

…almost like a rock opera, and to hear 'Something in the Way' emerge from the ashes of those other tracks was quite revealing. Kurt might've done an edit on that track, but I believe it was close to a continuous take.

When the band were in the studio with Butch Vig recording the album, the original intention was to record the song with a full band, but they couldn’t capture what they were seeking. Instead, Cobain played the song to Vig on an acoustic guitar. After setting up to record, this became the song's leaping-off point. Harmonies were added, and then Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic added drums and bass parts. The drum parts had to be very low, different to most of the percussion on the record, as the song’s mood was less loud and needed to be understated. The song also features Kirk Canning’s haunting cello.

The song is an absolute masterpiece of displaying the mantra that you don’t have to shout to be heard and should be held up as almost as key to the band’s discography as the closing track on their next album.

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If you owned a CD copy of Nevermind in the 1990s, which I did and I assume almost everyone who owned it then did after ‘Something In The Way’, you would find, after ten minutes of silence, hidden track ‘Endless, Nameless’ it was a song that was on the album and off the album before ending up as a secret track.

The audio engineer for Nevermind, Howie Weinberg, forgot to include the track ‘Endless, Nameless’ on the track listing. Cobain discovered the omission and demanded that the track be added back onto the album. However, 20,000 copies of the album had already been distributed, so the song could not be added to the normal track listing². Instead, it was included as a hidden track, placed ten minutes after the end of the final listed song. The inclusion of a hidden track on the album was reportedly inspired by The Beatles using a hidden closing track, 'Her Majesty', on Abbey Road. At the time, Geffen Records’ marketing VP, Robert Smith,³ said the hidden track was...

… kind of a joke for the band to do, as in we're not going to list it in the packaging, or mention it exists. It's for that person who plays the CD, it ends, they're walking around the house and ten minutes later... Kaboom!

"Something in the Way" was recorded during the Nevermind sessions at Sound City Studios in May 1991. Following a failed attempt at recording ‘Lithium’, The song was recorded live, with no overdubs added later. Kurt Cobain sang into a Shure SM57 microphone generally used for recording speech, not the wailing we hear from Cobain. The singer was "frustrated" and "pissed off" during the recording and smashed his guitar, which can be heard on the track around 19 and a half minutes in on CD.

Later this week, the final album from Acclaimed Music’s Top 100.

1. This location has become a memorial for Nirvana fans and is commonly decorated with tributes to the late singer.

2. As you’d expect, these 20k copies became highly sought after.

3. Not that one.