This Nirvana Classic Was Inspired by Horror Novel That Made Kurt Cobain Want to “Cut His Nose Off”

Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain wrote most of his songs from a neutral, somewhat vague perspective, which gave his lyrics a universality that lent itself to the band’s broad commercial appeal. However, one Nirvana classic from their third and final album, In Utero, which Cobain based on a horror fantasy novel from 1985, was an exception to this “rule.”

In an interview less than a year before his tragic suicide, Cobain described the book that inspired the band’s 1993 track “Scentless Apprentice,” including why the book made Cobain want to “cut his nose off.”

Kurt Cobain’s Favorite Book in 1993

In August 1993, Kurt Cobain sat down with Erica Ehm of Much Music to discuss his life, music, and where he finds inspiration in both. The Nirvana frontman also revealed that his favorite book was Patrick Süskind’s horror novel Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders or Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Cobain estimated he read the horror fantasy novel upwards of ten times.

“It’s…just stationary in my pocket all the time,” Cobain said. “It just doesn’t leave me. Every time I’m bored, like I’m on an airplane or something, I read it over and over again. I’m a hypochondriac, and it just affects me—it makes me want to cut my nose off.”

Cobain said he found similarities between himself and the novel’s main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. “It’s about this perfume apprentice in France at the turn of the century. He’s just disgusted, basically, with all humans. He just can’t get away from humans, so he goes on this trek, this walk of death. He goes into the rural areas where there’s woods all over the place and small villages, and he only travels by night. Every time he smells a human, like a fire from a far off way, he’ll just get really disgusted and hide. He just tries to stay away from people. I can relate to that.”

Given Nirvana’s immense fame in the early 1990s, it’s unsurprising that someone as introspective and reclusive as Kurt Cobain would find solace in reading about a man who had an aversion toward other humans. When one considers his suicide less than one year later, Cobain’s favorite book and the main character’s “walk of death” becomes even more poignant.

The Nirvana Classic Inspired By This Horror Fantasy Book

Before Kurt Cobain’s death in April 1994, he wrote one of the most specific songs of his career for Nirvana’s third and final studio album, In Utero. “Scentless Apprentice” came directly from Cobain’s favorite book, Perfume. “That’s really one of the first times that I’ve ever used an actual story as… a book as an example for a song,” Cobain told Much Music in August 1993. “I’ve always tried to stay away from that, but now that I’m running out of ideas more and more, I intend to do that.”

The song is also a unique addition to Nirvana’s catalog in that it was one of the only songs where drummer Dave Grohl wrote the main guitar riff, not Cobain. “It was such a cliché grunge Tad riff that I was reluctant to even jam on it,” the Nirvana frontman told Michael Azerrad in Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. “But I decided to write a song with that just to make [Dave] feel better, to tell you the truth, and it turned out really cool.”

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