It is not important if Nirvana got an advantage from the fact that they didn’t last long enough to release a bad album. We don’t know what would have happened. Maybe they would be more popular now, maybe less. It’s all speculation.
It isn’t any more fair to count hypothetical future failures against them than it is to count hypothetical future successes.
I’ll disagree again with your theory that people (other than your friends, apparently) think suicide is awesome, and therefore Nirvana must be the coolest. It is entirely unsurprising that Nirvana’s sales went up after Kurt died - the same happens for artists in a variety of mediums.
In the long run, I maintain that the suicide hurt Nirvana’s popularity and relevance.
But yeah, I think this discussion of Nirvana’s hypothetical future successes or failures if they had continued has pretty much run its course, and I don’t think it was every really relevant to the thread, as we can only go by what a band, in fact, did.
The thread itself (best band of the 90s, remember?) is a classic discussion.
I didn’t say they were my friends. I’ve got some standards. But if you didn’t know people like that in 1994 too, you must not have known many people.
Uh, yes, that’s what I’ve been saying all along. We can only judge Nirvana by the work they produced when they were an active band. They don’t get credit for what might have been, or for having a singer who died shockingly at a young age. They get credit for their songs and their albums. And looking at those songs and albums as objectively as I can, well, I don’t think they are all that great. I didn’t when they were new, and I actually think less of them now. A decade ago I was young enough that I didn’t realize that so much of what Nirvana did had already been done first and better by the Pixies or even the Stooges.
My point was never “Nirvana sucks, because their next album was sure to be rubbish!” That would be ridiculous. But if we’re talking best bands of the 1990s (not the early '90s) I just don’t think that the work they produced during their brief career was anywhere near good enough, influential enough, or innovative enough to make up for the fact that they only had two albums of new studio material in the '90s and weren’t around at all for most of the decade. Even given that I obviously don’t “get” Nirvana the way their fans do, I can’t imagine that they could reasonably be considered that good. Heck, I don’t even think bands that I like are that good.
Tool debuted, released 60% of its material, and established its fanbase all during the 1990s and you’re disqualifying them based only on the fact that they released two LPs and one EP? Nirvana, the band you agree with as being the biggest band of the nineties based, presumably on their talent in addition to their popularity, only released four LPs and one EP according to allmusic.com. Completely ignoring the album lengths and the number of tracks on each (which would probably be in Tool’s favor), that’s only 1.6 times the amount of music.
Not even double. How is it that Tool is disqualified but Nirvana slips by?
Um, okay, I was commenting on two different things. I certainly think Nirvana was the biggest band of the 90s. If you had to narrow it down to one band that changed pop music for the decade, Nirvana would be it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they were the best band at all. In fact, I’m pretty sure I considered P.J. Harvey and Pavement to be far superior in my first post.
Okay, my point about Nirvana can be boiled down thusly: You can’t talk in any depth about mainstream popular music in the 90s without talking about Nirvana. You can do so without mentioning Pearl Jam, Pavement, P.J. Harvey, Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Uncle Tupelo… Pretty much anybody. But if you’re discussing mainstream music, you can’t get around mentioning the galvanizing influence on Nirvana. That, to me, is what makes them the biggest band of the decade.
I agree. Even though I’m not a big Nirvana fan, it’s futile to try and overlook the influence they have had. Nevertheless, there are other bands who have had huge influence too: Radiohead, Massive Attack, Dr. Dre, Daft punk and more.
Remember, rock isn’t the only genre in mainstream media.
I agree with you that Nirvana was the biggest band of the 90s for the reasons stated and you will notice that in my post, I did say biggest, not best.
I still don’t see what that has to do with your disqualification of Tool for the reasons I stated though. Your reasoning was about numbers only and when the two are compared, Nirvana has less than double the amount of material that Tool produced in a similar time frame.
“Yeah, I mean, I love hip-hop and electronica, too, but the OP asked for the best band of the 1990s, so I assumed we were just talking about rock.”
Does that mean we have to limit the defintition to an ensemble of guitars, bass, drums and singing? I rather think of all music artists as bands as long as they are not solo performers (and as long as it isn’t a capella, I guess).
Well, an interview Cobain made for the French in April 1994 has surfaced. In it, he says that he was wanting to do more acoustic stuff and was thinking of quitting Nirvana to join Hole.
Does this shed any further light on the “Nirvana would have been shit” issue?
On the other hand, we may well have had shitty Cobain albums that led people to think differently of him as a musician and of Nirvana as a band. If people had thought “Cobain’s crap without Nirvana but they’re doing well without him”, it would create a school of thought that Nirvana couldn’t be the best band of the 90s because they were carrying Cobain.
This is a good point. It’s the only genre in mainstream music that I care much about, but looking back I think the reason why '90s rock seems so significant to me now is that rock since then has done nothing for me. At some point I stopped listening to new rock acts altogether, and for a long time now my “new” discoveries have all been older artists. In time, the '90s might be remembered as the decade during which rock began its slide into irrelevancy.
Rap and hip-hop may be the “new rock”, and from my overseas perspective it’s clear that these genres are having more impact on a global scale than contemporary rock. I hear “Hey Ya” literally every single time I go into Mos Burger, and all the Japanese guys I see with bleached hair look to be imitating Eminem instead of Kurt Cobain or even Justin Timberlake. I don’t know enough about that kind of music to pick out the “best of the 1990s”, but even I have some awareness of the significance of N.W.A./Dr. Dre.
Yeah, if that’s the way you swing I’m certain you’d like them, it’s a lock. Start out with ‘Fear And Whiskey,’ it’s IMHO their best record, and also credited with kick starting the alt. country scene, which therefore makes it an essential addition to every serious music collection.
Okay, I’m going to see if I can make my point on Tool and Nine Inch Nails more coherent. I’m probably only going to succeed in obfuscating it even more.
So, let’s say, theoretically, that Tool had only made a single album in the 90s. Had they done so, that album would have had to be so amazingly stellar that its greatness would singlehandedly outweigh the greatness of an artist whose catalogue was larger and more varied during the same timeframe in order to make a credible case for Tool being the best band of the decade. Basically, what I’m saying is that in order for an artist with limited releases during a particular decade to be considered the greatest of that decade, their few releases must stand head and shoulders above an artist who releases more music during said decade. And, well, I just don’t think that Opiate, Aenima and Undertow stack together to provide better music than all of P.J. Harvey’s releases.
Don’t get me wrong, though, I love both Tool and NIN. In fact, I pretty much know every note of The Fragile by heart. I just don’t think that the total of each band’s 90s music is demonstrably better than the total of, say, Pavement’s.
Lemm through my vote in the ring for **Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds ** -
1990 The Good Son
1992 Henry’s Dream
1994 Let Love In
1996 Murder Ballads
1997 The Boatman’s Call
As for the Nirvana / Pearl Jam thing.
I remember when Nevermind and **In Utero * * came out people loved them, played them a lot, but Pearl Jam connected a lot more personally. Smells like Teen Spirit was an anthem, but songs like Alive and Black where like mass confessionals whenever they came on. (At least in the circles I moved in as a teenager.)
I’d give NIN a little more credit for spanning the transitional period between Grunge and Electronica and then Nu Metal.
Most influential song of the decade? - Bring the Noise by Anthrax and Public Enemy. Laugh if you want, but this was two major bands of their respective genre (Public Enemy was still huge and Anthrax were still one of the big four metal bands.) getting together at the time, and Hip Hop and Metal fans hated each other with a passion, despite RUN-DMC & Aerosmith.)
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are great, but they’re not a band that started in the 90s. I don’t know if we ever decided whether that made a difference or not, but that’s the reason that I, personally, disqualified them.
And, come on, The Griffin, we all know that everyone has different opinions. That’s what makes discussing it fun.
