Nirvana – Come As You Are Lyrics

Cobain described the lyrics of “Come as You Are” as contradictory, and said the song was about “people and what they’re expected to act like”. Pointing to the line “Take your time, hurry up, choice is yours, don’t be late”, essayist Catherine J. Creswell writes that in Cobain’s lyrics, “[p]hrases clump into strings of empty clichés whose own ostensible meaning is forced into contradictions or simple rhyme sound”. In light of Cobain’s 1994 suicide by self-inflicted gunshot-wound, Allmusic’s Mark Deming suggests that “[h]earing Kurt Cobain sing ‘And I swear that I don’t have a gun’ gives ‘Come as You Are’ a sting it was never meant to have when [Nevermind] was first released in 1991.” Deming reasons that the “don’t have a gun” lyric is “[Cobain’s] attempt to reassure listeners that … his target is the world at large rather than the individuals in it, and that there was still room in this damaged world for everyone”.