Best Song Ever: Lithium - Nirvana

 "Yeah Yeah. Yeah Yeah. Yeah Yeah. Yeah Yeah. Yeah Yeah. Yeah Yeah. Yeah!"

TW: So, you can't talk about this song without talking about mental illness. Or, it seems inauthentic to do so. So, we're talking about mental illness.

So little is said, but so much is said when Kurt Cobain screams "Yeah" over and over again in Lithium. When I discovered this song on the Nevermind CD, I was blown away. It was about manic depression. It was specifically referencing taking lithium for that manic depression. My mom suffered from manic depression and was taking lithium for it and at the time as a 16 year old, I was pretty obsessed with this fact. I didn't know that other people knew what lithium was. But Kurt did. And in that I felt connected to him and this song. This song captures the extreme ups and downs of manic depression not just in the lyrics (which it does in spades), but in the flow of the song going between quiet and dirgey then loud and angry. He invokes god throughout the song as a last desperate cry for help for someone suffering from this disease. All of this just seems to capture manic depression in a nice little 3 minute pixies-punk song.

The song is technically about a man suffering from an emotional breakdown after the death of his girlfriend and he turns to religion to find peace and the ability to go on. Religion here acts as the emotional number that lithium provides the patient. Or at least according to Kurt and his biographer.

But in capturing the mental breakdown he captures the extremes of manic depression. Writing about mental illness wasn't new. Jimmy Hendrix famously said that manic depression is a frustrating mess. But this song captures the essences of manic depression. How it feels to the person experiencing it and the people around them.

Anyway, there is so much said when Kurt screams "Yeah" that brings it beyond mental illness and a nervous breakdown. That yeah is angst at its core. It's angst about something. It could be manic depression and having to take lithium. It could be feeling shunned by society. It could be lots of things that late stage teeneagers and early adults feel angst towards. But, its all captured in that "Yeah!" screamed over and over.