HBO's Succession has returned for its third season and hit the ground running. In a memorable scene in the most recent episode, "The Disruption," Nirvana's controversial song "Rape Me" was prominently featured. In an Instagram post, Kurt Cobain's widow Courtney Love says Cobain would have been "proud" of how and why the song was used.
The ongoing fight for control of aging patriarch Logan Roy's (Brian Cox) empire culminated in a shareholder meeting in last Sunday's episode. Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) took to the podium to try and calm Waystar Royco's skittish investors. The meeting was promptly interrupted by protesters, who set up multiple speakers blaring Nirvana's "Rape Me." The culprits escaped, and the meeting was roundly considered just one more PR disaster for the embattled Roy clan.
The song's use was surprising, since the band's estate is very selective about where and how their songs appear in films and TV. Very few Nirvana songs have been used in commercials or any other types of advertisements. All of these approvals go through Love, who claimed that Succession's makers "truly understood" what Cobain was "screaming his heart out" about.
The third season of Succession follows the fallout of Kendall Roy's (Jeremy Strong) decision to turn on Logan and his siblings Siobhan, Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Connor (Alan Ruck) by blowing the whistle on the company's involvement in covering up sexual assault allegations, along with implicating his own father in these coverups. "Rape Me" has one obvious meaning in this context, serving as a dark parody of the allegations against Royco. On another level, the song's presence in this scene is possibly one of the most thematically-apt uses of a song on a TV show of all time.
Succession itself is a dark-comedy satire of the Venn diagram overlay of absurdities within the business, entertainment, political, and personal lives of the unhappy, emotionally-stunted über-rich. Like the song's howling narrator, the Roy children continually compromise themselves in the name of power, money, fame, or a toxic combination of all three. "Rape Me," which appeared on 1993's angry, noisy "In Utero" album, reflects Cobain's clear ambivalence about the level of success he and his band had suddenly attained. If the Roy kids develop some kind of self-awareness over the course of Season 3, we might see some of that ambivalence shape their choices going forward.
Succession Season 3 is currently airing on HBO on Sundays, and is available to stream on HBO Max. Read Love's Instagram post about the song's use below.
