Robbed hit of the week 10/16/23 - Nirvana's "You Know You're Right"...

 

 

"You Know You're Right" - Nirvana

from the album Nirvana (2002)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #45 (two weeks)

 

This week's "robbed hit" comes from the alternative band Nirvana, whose seminal place in the history of  rock music was cut short by the tragic loss of leader Kurt Cobain at his own hand in 1994. Later that year, the trio's performance on MTV Unplugged was released as a live album, which topped the sales chart, won a Grammy, and two of its tracks made the top-40 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 Airplay chart even though they weren't eligible at the time for the main list since they weren't released as proper "singles" - "About A Girl" (originally from their Bleach album) and a cover of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold The World". 

 

A second live album from Nirvana was released in 1996, named From The Banks of the Bloody Wishkah. From that record the song "Aneurysm" (The "B-Side" of "Smells Like Teen Spirit") was promoted to rock radio, and peaked on both the Mainstream (#11) and Alternative (#13) airplay lists. Dave Grohl would go on and formed the band Foo Fighters, who statistically outshined Nirvana on he airwaves, while Novoselic would pursue his political aspirations.

 

However, at the time of Kurt's death, they were beginning to record new music, and a song Cobain had been working on for years, "You Know You're Right", was recorded in January of 1994. Bandmates Grohl and Novoselic had recorded more tracks,  but Cobain never returned to help finish them. So the sole remainder was then post-mortem intended for a box set, but Cobain's widow Courtney Love sued the rest of the band insisting it would be on a proper single album. After years of legal entanglements, the song finally saw the light of day, as a single and as part of a single disc eponymous greatest hits set. The production from Adam Kasper (cleaning up the original from Robert Lang) puts the band in a raw and dirty atmosphere that remind me a lot of The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now", with Kurt singing to a presumed past love about leaving them alone realizing he's the toxic part of that relationship. The music video pieces together unrelated concert and other footage to make it feel like a performance, for better or worse...

While "You Know You're Right" was a huge hit on rock radio, topping both the Mainstream and Alternative Rock charts in Billboard magazine for four weeks on each, the single stalled below the Hot 100 top-40 in November of 2002. The Nirvana compilation spent a week at #3 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over a million copies.

A box set from the band, With The Lights Out, did come out a year later, featuring the original demo Cobain recorded in his house in 1993. The collection went to #19 on the Billboard 200 and went platinum (with a "million" collectively from the three discs). 

(6/10)

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Here's the original "home demo" of the track, appearing on the box set and later on the Sliver compilation...