“Serve the Servants” by Nirvana

"Serve the Servants" is the first thing you hear on In Utero, Nirvana's third and final studio album, out in September 1993. Kurt Cobain wrote it in 1992 and walked it into the sessions more or less finished; of all the album's songs, it was the one the full band had never cut as a demo before the tape rolled. Steve Albini recorded it that February at Pachyderm Studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, with Cobain on guitar and vocals, Krist Novoselic on bass and Dave Grohl on drums.

It's Cobain turning the camera on himself and sneering at what he sees: the fame that came crashing down after Nevermind, his parents' divorce, and what he took as the press hounding his wife, Courtney Love. An earlier sketch, just Cobain and an acoustic guitar taped on a boombox at home, finally surfaced on the With the Lights Out box set in 2004.

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