Kim Gordon, a founding member of the band Sonic Youth, had agreed to perform with the surviving members of Nirvana (Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and Pat Smear) as part of the ceremony for that band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. The choice to have only women stand in for Kurt Cobain felt in keeping with a band defined by inversion—a vigorous, kinetic kind of inversion, where the movement between one thing and its opposite is so dogged, and occurs at such speed, that a third, separate thing emerges from the blur. Gordon chose “Aneurysm,” not a hit but a B-side, released on the 1992 compilation “Incesticide.” Wearing a black-and-white striped minidress of the sort she favored in the early nineties, Gordon seemed to pull the song from her guts and trap it in her throat, her body switching, bouncing, and lurching to get it free. “Love you so much it makes me sick,” she spat, “Uhhhhhh-huhhhh.” Not a singer, exactly, Gordon was perhaps the only hope for a song like “Aneurysm,” which in the absence of its author requires less a vocalist than a medium for translation. One of her first appearances following her split from her husband and former bandmate, Thurston Moore, for Gordon the performance became “a four-minute-long explosion of grief,” a purge involving both “the furious sadness” of Cobain’s death, twenty years earlier, and the recent end of her nearly thirty-year marriage, her band, and whomever she was inside of both. Afterward, Gordon reports with some pride, Michael Stipe told her that her singing was “the most punk-rock thing to ever happen, or that probably ever will happen, at this event.”