Sometime during the months leading up to the recording sessions for Nirvana's last album, Kurt Cobain wrote a song called "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die." It was a phrase he used a lot at the time — ever since the band's Australian tour in the winter of 1992 — as a backhanded response to people who kept asking him how he was doing. Cobain thought it was so funny he wanted it to be the title of the album.

"Nothing more than a joke," Cobain said of the song and sentiment, grinning through a thick haze of cigarette smoke as we talked in a Chicago hotel room last fall. "I'm thought of as this pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic who wants to kill himself all the time. 'He isn't satisfied with anything.' And I thought it was a funny title."

Eventually, the gag wore thin. Cobain changed the title of the album first to "Verse Chorus Verse" (a dig at cookie-cutter songwriting and his own fear of the rut), then to "In Utero." He also yanked the song "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die" — a short, dour punker — from the record on the eve of release. As if to prove how little it all mattered by then, he eventually gave the song to those cartoon boobs Beavis and Butt-head; Cobain's joke ended up as the opening track on the otherwise witless LP "The Beavis and Butt-head Experience."

It now appears there is more truth in that song than Kurt Cobain ever cared to admit.

Or is there? In the wake of Cobain's tragic suicide, his Nirvana songbook rings long and loud with the clamor of dark prophecy: "You can't fire me, because I quit" ("Scentless Apprentice"); "Everything is my fault/I'll take all the blame" ("All Apologies"); "Monkey see monkey do/I don't know why I'd rather be dead than cool" ("Stay Away"); "One more special message to go/And then I'm done then I can go home" ("On a Plain").

But as a man of riffs and letters, Cobain was a sly dog who rarely stooped to the obvious. He was a master of grim metaphor and droll sarcasm who delighted in shock treatment and false trails and then obliterated his tracks with industrial-strength guitar distortion and a corrosive whine 'n' bark that rubbed even his best hook lines raw. Nothing in Cobain's music was ever quite what it initially seemed; his best-known song was named after a deodorant. And he must have had a damn good laugh over all the critics — including this one — who tripped over that self-mocking opening couplet from "Serve the Servants": "Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I'm bored and old."

Because he wasn't bored. Not by music, anyway. In his suicide note, Cobain despaired that his muse had flown south for good. Yet even during those last black days, he refused to surrender without a fight: trying to record new Nirvana demos, initiating a project with R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe.

The blood, come, phlegm and venom splattered all over Nirvana's albums, especially In Utero, were hard evidence of a young man torn by extremes — and still finding release, if not exactly sense or salvation, in the verse-chorus-verse fallout. Kurt Cobain made sure that if his life was going to end up on record, you got it as he fucking lived it.