Name: Polly: Nirvana's Darkest Song
Uploaded: 2026-02-07T17:02:59.000Z
Duration: 7 min 34 s
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Of all the dark songs by the band Nirvana, and

there are a lot to choose from, the most disturbing to me is Poly, the sixth track off their album Nevermind.

An acoustic song, a quiet song about the rape and torture of a teenage girl, told from the perspective of the rapist.

It's a hard song to talk about, harder because it's based on a real incident in 1987, Gerald Friend, after being paroled early from a similar conviction in 1960, abducted a 14 year old girl after leaving a concert, brought her back to his mobile home, and

repeatedly raped her and tortured her with a blowtorch while she was suspended from a pulley.

It's also right in the center of one of the best selling albums of the 1990s, an album that enjoyed mainstream success.

Cruelties like those detailed in Pali are so heartrending that the instinct is to turn away the truth of violence like that is easily repressed, forgotten, avoided.

In addition to exploring his own fears and anxieties in Nirvana's music, he was also a vocal feminist who repeatedly spoke out against sexism and violence against women, especially sexual violence.

It doesn't seem like much, but, you know, we raised like $50,000 for the Bosnian rape victims, you know, and

that's a lot more than we could have griping about it and talking about it in interviews and like maybe putting out a fanzine, you know, there's nothing wrong with doing stuff like that, but, you know, we're using or we're using the tools that we have.

Nirvana played that benefit concert for Bosnian rape victims.

And in the liner notes to Incesticide, Cobain instructed sexists not to buy Nirvana albums or come to the shows.

But though Cobain's views were inherently political, his genius was artistic.

And what an artist can do is different than what an activist or a politician can do.

Art, especially music, impacts us emotionally.

It strikes at the core and as a result has a unique power to expand our empathy, which is why the perspective of Polly is so shocking.

But before I get to that, let me talk a little bit about the structure of the song.

I had just turned three when Nevermind was released, but

I didn't really start listening to their music until a couple years ago.

And the two things that surprised me most were one, the poetic brilliance of Cobain, and

two, the catchiness and simplicity of the songs.

And you don't get much simpler than Pauli composed in E minor.

E minor, G, D, C for the verses, over and over again.

Then G5, B flat 5, D5, E5 for the choruses.

In the chorus, an unobtrusive bass enters on the low end.

In Cobain adds of vocal harmony on the high end.

There are no drums in the song besides one cymbal crash at the start of each chorus.

there's a bass break after the second chorus that lasts all of nine seconds before the repetitive sequence starts up again.

So Poly is basically Cobain and his guitar.

the effect of this restraint is a feeling of closeness, of intimacy and authenticity.

A feeling is heightened even further by the equipment on Poly.

Cobain played a Stella guitar bought for $30 at a pawn shop.

It barely stays in tune, he told guitar world in 92.

In fact, I have to use duct tape to hold the tuning keys in place.

The flat, plucky sound removes any polish that could mediate between and ultimately divide musician and listener.

Poly is a song designed, in other words, to give Cobain access to your head.

The question is, once he's in there, what does he do?

The surprising and profound choice Cobain makes in Pauli is to make the protagonist of the song the intimate singer, the rapist.

This becomes very clear after just the first two lines.

We are inside the mind of this vile man, carried along in the stream of his consciousness.

In each verse, he reports what's happening, happening with an amused detachment that is somehow more scary for its lack of emotion.

Cobain's vocal is aloof, yet mesmerizing.

Cobain routinely downplayed the importance of his lyrics, but don't buy it.

While it may be wrong to look for hidden meanings and things like that, his journals reveal a fascination with language and wordplay.

The chorus of Pali is made up of fragments of images and sentiments that simulate perfectly the chaotic flux of thinking.

You can see desires, regrets, cries for help, cruelty, self deception, righteousness, all momentarily bobbing to the surface.

And then the animalistic final thought dictating this man's actions.

If you're being carried along by the rapist stream of consciousness in the verses in the chorus, you're drowning in it.

Cobain forces an emotional identification with evil to stop us from suppressing this brutality, to stop us from evading it.

The problem with groups who deal with rape is that they try to educate women about how to defend themselves, cobain told NME in 91.

What really needs to be done is teaching men not to rape.

Go to the source and start there with a catchy tune and a $30 guitar.

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