"Come As You Are" (Nirvana)

Even now, when I hear Kurt Cobain's burbling, underwater riff that opens "Come As You Are," it stirs something within me.  (Forget the fact that he subconsciously lifted it from post-punk band Killing Joke.  Besides, there were no hard feelings in the end.)  That intro reminds me of the simultaneous relief and exhilaration I felt as a teenager when there was a worthy successor to "Smells Like Teen Spirit."  It signaled that Nirvana wasn't some flash in the pan, and the over-produced schlock that had passed for rock for half a decade was finally dead.  
I just wish Cobain would have hung around a bit longer to embrace and enjoy what he'd helped create.
Over the past few days as I was poking around the internet, brushing up on the facts of "Come As You Are," it became clear that the song (like many others that Cobain wrote) is a mosaic of personal experiences—not blatantly autobiographical, but still intensely intimate.
The most enlightening thing I stumbled across was an article from early 2014 about the possible origin of the song's title.  When Cobain was in his teens, his father kicked him out of the house for bad behavior.  For a brief time, he stayed with his alcoholic mother but then took off when the two had a falling out, which rendered him effectively homeless.  Apart from occasionally crashing with friends, he spent most of his nights seeking shelter in old/abandoned buildings around his hometown of Aberdeen, WA.  According to biographer Charles R. Cross, Cobain also occasionally crashed at a flophouse in Aberdeen called The Morck Hotel, which advertised using the slogan: "Come as you are."  (By the looks of the Morck's website, it's currently going through a major renovation to become some kind of upscale boutique hotel.  Figures.)  
When I think about the lyrics of the song (which involve people contradicting themselves by saying one thing but really meaning/expecting another) in the context of Cobain's experience as a teenager, the pieces begin to fall into place.  His experience also sheds light on the use of the word memoria, which gets repeated throughout the song.  Memoria is one of the elements of the art of rhetoric.  Basically, it means recalling a bit of knowledge or experience to support your argument.  (The fact that he puts the emphasis on the wrong syllable, making the word rhyme with "diarrhea," also isn't an accident, in my opinion.)
In short, he's questioning whether you can take people's rhetoric at face value.  (Would you be inclined to believe someone who claims they don't have a gun?)
Along with that, it's about actions speaking louder than words.  Or as the late Maya Angelou put it: "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."