Um, much as I hate to admit it, me. I had just turned 13 when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came out, and it was a revelation. Sure Nirvana may have been derivative, but suburban teenyboppers aren’t exactly known for their deep knowledge of the underground. Rather, for me and countless others, Nirvana opened up our horizons just a little. I haven’t really listened to Nirvana in ages, lost the tapes at some point and never got around to buying their albums on CD, but I can say that their legacy to me is a willingness to go looking for new music.
As for when I heard about Cobain’s death, I really can’t believe it’s been 10 years, it feels like yesterday. I was in Quebec on a three-month exchange at the time, sitting on the couch watching tv when an announcement came on, and I was shocked.
I like Nirvana’s music, and I realized that Kurt Cobain was the engine behind it, but I also thought Krist Novoselic and, particularly, Dave Grohl were decent musicians as well. I loved Grohl’s drumming.
That said, I was in high-school when Cobain died; my senior year. My mother told me when she woke me up for school. (So it must have been the morning after they found him dead.) I remember one class in particular that day (the teacher let us do whatever we wanted - read, write, talk quietly) where I wrote a poem/song about Cobain based around a comment he made in an interview about being a hypochondriac. But I really didn’t “worship” him like many kids at the time. I’ve never been much of a fanboy when it comes to celebrities. (Granted, I did have some Nirvana posters on my walls, but I also had posters of any other bands I happened to enjoy - particularly Alice Cooper - as well as hockey posters.)
I do remember the feeling around school that day, and for some time afterwards. I can’t describe it, but there’s no doubt that Kurt Cobain had made a great emotional connection and impact on many teenagers. His suicide may have caused that connection to remain strong long after it would have faded, but we’ll never really know. But his effect did run much deeper than the typical effect most “hot now, gone tomorrow” celebrities have on people.
It’s probably too early to tell if he truly belongs alongside other cult icons like Elvis Presley or Jim Morrison, but the fact that the mainstream media has taken such as interest in the anniversary of his death bodes well. It’s one thing for him to appear on the cover of a music magazine or be spotlighted on a music channel, but when major newspapers and primetime news shows do special reports, he obviously had an impact on a wide range of the population - whether directly through music fans or indirectly through the friends and families of his fans - well, that’s another story.
This attitude suggests to me that you are not involved in the arts in any way- don’t know if that’s true, but you certainly write like you just don’t know what it’s all about. Generally speaking when someone starts a rock band because they want to be rich and famous they just ain’t ever gonna have anything other than complete crap to offer. True artists persue art for the sake of the art and are unable to find fulfillment in any other way. There are millions of folks who never make a dime in any creative field but, throughout their lives, remain involved in community theatre, or local bands, or craft fairs or whatever. They don’t start a rock band because they want to be rock stars, they start a rock band because they want to be in a rock band!, because it’s something they love, an outlet to express themselves, and it’s just plain fun!
Where did you get the idea that starting a rock band automatically leads to celebrity and fortune? I know plenty of musicians that can testify that that ain’t necessarily the case. Even a record contract, even with a major label, doesn’t guarantee much of anything.
There was no reason in the world for Cobain to have ever suspected he would have been even one thousanth as popular as he ened up being. When it happens as suddenly as it did for him, there’s no real way to prepare, then to be deified on top of it can be difficult to deal with. It’s hard to feel secure in a state of self, in one’s own personal identity, when there are millions upon millions of strangers who are constantly proclaiming you to be something you never asked to be.
So why not quit and live off the riches? The riches are not the point! The point is to make music. An artist doesn’t pursue his art because he needs the money, he persues his art because it’s his art!!! To tell a 27 year old, “That’s it, just retire. You have enough money, just sit on the couch and never do anything with the rest of your life”- this is a pretty bleak option for anybody. And of course anything that Cobain would have continued to do would have received ravenous attention, so the options must have seemed to be A) continue the work and be scrutinized every moment, or B) retire. “Quietly moving on just doin your own thing” was really never a realistic option.
Now I didn’t know Kurt Cobain. We never shared intimate secrets. I don’t know his demons or his motivations. I like to believe that someone with the positive resources that he had could have found a solution other than suicide, but I didn’t know him and can’t judge.
What I do know, however, is that “if you don’t wanna be a rock star, don’t start a rock band. I hate it when people whine about celebrity when they can easily make it go away by just quitting and living off the fortunes they’ve made” is a particularly silly thing to say.
Cobain never really moaned about the celebrity, more he was annoyed at what Geffen had turned Nirvana into, although he realised that when they signed the record deal, Geffen would HAVE to turn them, and especially him, into the T-shirt children of their generation.
I was never really a Nirvana fan, although their success really opened more doors for other great bands to get more widespread recognition.
One of the textbooks we use at my school has a lesson in it that contains a biographical article about Kurt Cobain. When I taught it a little while back, I suddenly realized that it had been nearly ten years since he died. I felt…old. Sheesh, I was a teenager then, and now it’s been a decade.
I was never a Nirvana fan, and never bought any of their albums. I didn’t change the station when they came on the radio, but I never got excited when they came on either. Yet I remember exactly what happened when I heard he had died.
I was sitting in my living room watching TV with my younger sister, when the teaser came on for the nightly news. It put up a brief, blurry shot from the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, and the announcer said “Tonight: a rock legend is dead.”
I can’t say I was shocked. Some of you may remember that not all that long before Cobain had spent several days in a drug-induced coma. I turned to my sister (who was eleven and probably couldn’t have cared less about Cobain or anything I said about him) and said, “That’s Kurt Cobain. I’ll bet it was a heroin overdose.” I immediately felt bad, and added, “That was in poor taste. I mean, I didn’t wish the man dead or anything. But it’s not really surprising either. Everyone knows he’s a heroin addict.”
What was surprising was learning, once the news came on, that it wasn’t an overdose, or an accident, but suicide. I’d always thought less of Cobain personally than I did of Nirvana as a group, because frankly I thought the man came across as kind of a jerk in interviews. He was continually putting down other musicians and bands because they weren’t as cool as him/Nirvana or because they were “sell-outs” or something. (In retrospect, it does seem like Courtney Love egged him on in this.) Shortly before his death Cobain did an interview with Rolling Stone in which he seemed sorry about talking trash about other groups in the past, but prior to that he always seemed conceited and petty to me. I’m willing to cut him a little more slack now. The circumstances of his death proved him to be a far more troubled and unhappy man than most people had guessed.
The people I’m less willing to give slack to are the ones who instantly became Nirvana fans practically before the body was cold. Now, I’m sure there must have been many people who’d honestly liked Nirvana before but didn’t realize how much they cared about the music until they knew there wouldn’t be any more. There may have been some who hadn’t had the chance to hear Nirvana’s music until the vast media attention it received upon Cobain’s death. However, I personally saw people who’d been openly dismissive of or even hostile towards Nirvana suddenly do a complete 180. I thought that was sick at the time, and I still do. The music didn’t suddenly change; the only thing that was different was that the singer was suddenly dead.
I’ve also been annoyed by the tendency of some people, fans and critics alike, to overestimate Nirvana’s importance or influence. This went on even when Cobain was alive, but I think it got worse after he died. Some have painted the entire “Seattle Scene” of the early '90s as something Nirvana deserves credit for. I’ve even heard folks dismissing all the rest of the Seattle bands as mere Nirvana rip-offs…even the ones that actually pre-dated Nirvana!
Nirvana wasn’t the first, they were just the first to become huge. Although their success unquestionably swung the spotlight over towards Seattle, there was already a thriving scene full of talented, well-established local bands before Nevermind hit the charts. Soundgarden, Alice and Chains, Pearl Jam, etc., would have done fine on their own merits with or without Nirvana’s coattails to ride on/be shoved on to. Maybe they wouldn’t have received the same level of attention they did during the Nirvana-sparked “grunge explosion”, but I don’t think any of those groups would have regretted this. Look what the pressure of that level of fame did to Cobain.
We had this discussion in a thread about the Best Bands of the 90s.
As was pointed out there, the day BEFORE Kurt Cobain killed himself, there wasn’t any sense Nirvana was the premiere rock group around; the most acclaimed band at the time was probably REM, and Pearl Jam was just as big and revered as Nirvana. The difference is that Nirvana stopped, while Pearl Jam and REM went on to make more music, and naturally went into a decline phase.
Had Cobain NOT killed himself, Nirvana would be just another major 90’s band, along with Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots… well, they were bigger than STP, but not Pearl Jam. Or if Michael Stipe had shot himself in 1994 he’d be regarded today as the greatest musical genius since John Lennon.
In the early '90s I was the import/indie/alternative buyer for a chain of record stores in the Washington DC area (hint to locals: starts with an ‘O’).
Anybody who tells you Nirvana’s influence is overstated quite simply doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Not musically, but in terms of what they did to the music business, it was a sea change. Overnight, “alternative music” became something the major labels and other mainstream music companies were not only willing but in fact desperate to get a piece of. Previously, most of the labels were happy to sign the odd “alternative” band here and there, just to give themselves a bit of street cred, but they were happy to do minimal promotion and let the album die (I’m told there was a sort of The Producers way to profit off these flop albums, but I don’t know the details or if that’s even true at all). Nevermind made them realise they could make real money off these bands. It. changed. everything. about the way they approached alternative music.
Personally, I liked the old way better, but then I’m an elitist indie snob.
I think what a lot of folks who are thinking along the “Well if you didn’t want to be famous then don’t be a fucking rock star” line of thought are missing is that the man was mentally ill. Both in the addict-sense and in the generally-mentally-unstable-sense. He felt trapped, and he felt doomed. No one ever gave a shit about him before he became famous, with the exception of some distant family members, and he craved that attention, but he felt like he’d sold himself and his band out, and that haunted him. And I do think at the end he felt trapped in his marriage to that woman he’d married because he’d thought she was punk rock, but it turned out she was just a bitch. I couldn’t agree more with the idea that he should have just quit the business, divorced, gained custody of that poor kid and gone off to live in the mountains at high altitudes or some happy bullshit. But do I think he ever would have actually done it? Nope. So once again, I don’t think he was a coward. I think he was sick, and I think he did what he, in his drug-addled mind, thought was best for everyone.
For the record, I don’t carry a picture of him around, I don’t name my pets Kurt or Cobain, nor do I have any plans to name my future children along those lines. I was obsessed at the time because, man, I was a teenager! But I’m just so very thankful that I had Kurt to be obsessed with, because it really did change my life forever and I believe make me a better person. Before Nirvana in 91, I was listening to…well, let’s just say I’m embarrassed to admit what I was listening to. After I got into Nirvana, I began listening to the Cure, King Missle, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, which eventually led me to Ween, Negativland, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and Tom Waits and the other music I listen to now. And I can honestly say that I don’t know what course my life would have taken, musically speaking, without that initial burst of “Oh my fucking god, what is this?!” that Nirvana gave me that first time I heard them on the radio. I found a craving inside myself for something loud and nasty and sad and scary, which has led me to become the scarred, pierced, tattooed, dyed, beautiful thing I am today, ten years later.
So that’s his legacy to me. Anything he left for anyone else is unimportant, as far as I’m concerned.
I hear this repeated a lot, and while Nirvana were obviously very highly influenced by the Pixies, your post isn’t completely true. The Pixies were a lot more pop (and I mean that in the good way rather than the disparaging way). Even the Pixies hardest, most visceral songs like Debaser don’t match the roar of Nirvana. There’s a similarity, sure, but let’s not denigrate Nirvana for having influences.
Nirvana completely changed the face of pop music. They may have done so by standing on the shoulders of giants, but the fact that they did is undeniable. Check out today’s chart topping acts - even the most uninspired show hints of Nirvana. Nirvana changed our view of the archetypical band.
Where the view of your average rock band was once a Stones/Zeppelin hybrid - Charismatic lead singer, blisteringly talented lead guitarist, songs about sex drugs and women. Throw in a little bit of Beatles all-for-one, greater than the sum of its parts camaraderie, and you have the essence of nearly every mainstream rock band pre Nevermind, be it Guns and Roses or Queen. Almost every popular rock band since Nirvana has followed the Nirvana blueprint. Songs are built on simple chord progressions, and are concerned more with the substance of the song than the lead musician’s abilities. That The Darkness are considered such an anomaly demonstrates this. Bands no longer sing about taking me down to Paradise City, but instead focus on personal issues - Evanescence’s metal pop angst is only popular because Nirvana did it first. The frontman is no longer the model of perfection that the Robert Plants, Mick Jaggers or Axl Roses were seen to be. Today’s frontman is flawed, insecure, and often unwilling to (be seen to) be living a life disconnected from his roots. No Crosby, Stills and Nash custom made bedsheets for the modern rock star.
Nirvana even legitimised the underground, something to which you vaguely alluded to in your post (although your holding up of RHCP as particularly unique or creative is… unusual, to say the best). Without Nirvana, punk would still be a marginalised musical form, which means that extraordinarily successful acts such as The Offspring, Green Day and Blink 182 would never have been successful.
Nirvana helped to de-masculinise the very masculine culture of rock n roll - even such dimwitted bands as Nickelback or Puddle of Mudd now sing about their inner conflict relating to sexual situations.
Basically, if you think of every popular rock band in the '90s, they were only popular because of Nirvana.
Sure, many of the bands I have listed are quite terrible, and the themes prevalent in modern music have, through repetition become as tiresome as the rock n roll cliches pre-dating Nirvana. But that’s not Nirvana’s fault. One shouldn’t blame the Beatles for the Monkees, Led Zeppelin for Guns n Roses or Black Sabbath for Poison. Nor should we blame Nirvana for Nickelback. But to deny their influence, good and bad is shortsighted and seems to betray a curious desire to unjustly erase them from rock history.
As for my own Nirvana experience, I basically started getting into pop music when I was around seven years old. My earliest memories of pop are the video for Warrant’s Cherry Pie - which I thought was pretty cool at the time. But not long after that, I saw Smells Like Teen Spirit, and I was sold. I became devoted to music, and still am. Kurt was a great songwriter, surely one of the best, and I think this is what is most often missed by those critiquing the band. That these songs held up in an acoustic setting (as heard on the Unplugged album) demonstrate that. In addition to the feeling put into Kurt’s performance, that oddly engaging mix of apathy and passion, the evisceral guitar was a great ear for melody. While I am no fan of the Beatles, Kurt Cobain was, and he certainly shared their melodic skill and presented it in such an engaging and involving way so as to, seemingly with ease combine the energy and recklessness of punk with the forthright immediacy of traditional pop.
I was going to write a big post, but gex made my points for me. A fine post!
One thing I will add is that even the rejection of the Cobain deification is, in a way, a result of his legacy. Kurt himself would have reacted like that.
I was in a car on the way to Tunica, Mississippi when I heard he was dead. We smoked a joint for him. I had a miserable time that night. I hate casinos.
gex - You responded to what I wanted to comment on. I also hear a lot of comparisons between Nirvana and the Pixies, but I honestly can’t hear it. Sure, there’s some vague similarity, but to suggest that Nirvana popularized the sound of the Pixies is hyperbole. While I find the Pixies influence from Pere Ubu pretty clear, I don’t hear the same with Nirvana and the Pixies. Nirvana’s songwriting was quite different–a bit more linear and a bit more pop. They had more in common with bands like The Melvins, with the pop songwriting sensibility of Cheap Trick. Plus, Nirvana’s tunes relied far more heavily on melody and the strength of Cobain’s voice than the Pixies. Frank Black/Black Francis was more a screamer/half-talking-half-singing type of vocalist. Cobain was almost always pure melody. Sit down at a piano: it’s easy to pluck out a melody for almost any Nirvana song. For the Pixies? Half the time there really isn’t any clear melody.
As for the rest of it, you’ve pretty much explained it pretty well, gex. (Although it still stuns me that you can’t get into the Beatles. )
While some people may have discovered Nirvana through their debut album Bleach (which I have and like), Smells Like Teen Spirit was the album that made them popular. That said, sometime after they made it big, I remember looking through an old issue of Thrasher (the skateboarding magazine) and finding a review of Bleach. I wish I still had the magazine, but the review basically said that Nirvana were nothing special - just another Seattle alternative bad (I’m not sure if they used the term “grunge”) that would never get anywhere. I was amused, to say the least.
Sure it is. And Kurt & company happily admitted that their “loud, then soft” sound was “borrowed” from the Pixies. They even joked that they didn’t know what they would do for their next record because the Pixies had stopped recording stuff for them to copy.
I hasten to add, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s no sin to have influences. Everyone does.
I just don’t want to see Cobain credited with “inventing” alternative music. He didn’t invent it, any more than Elvis invented rock and roll. And there’s a useful analog. Cobain popularized the teriffic music that had been bubbling through the underground, in the same way that Elvis popularized R’n’R.
Elvis joined the Army, Cobain offed himself. Same result, artistically.
People who think alternative music began with Nevermind are the same people who were listening to hair metal in the late 80s. If they had just flipped over to their local college radio station back then those folks would know that Nirvana just broke the dam, they didn’t fill the lake.
Cobain should certainly be credited with helping to bring alternative music to the fore. It should be remembered, though, that R.E.M. crossed that college-radio-to-pop-charts divide ahead of Nirvana. Without Nirvana, there would have been no Green Day? True. And without R.E.M., there would have been no Nirvana. It was the success of R.E.M. that allowed alternative bands like Nirvana to get signed in the first place.
I couldn’t disagree with you more. Nirvana’s music was filled with listener-friendly pop hooks. Nothing wrong with that, either. Hooks are hooks for a reason. They appeal to our sense of melodic structure. Nirvana was ear-friendly from a melodic standpoint, which is probably why they broke the dam for alternative music. The Pixies, though they had some pleasing hooks of their own, were less “pop” than Nirvana.
Actually, I would content that the (underappreciated) Pixies album Trompe Le Monde had moments to match the “roar” of Nirvana. The one-two-three punch of “Trompe Le Monde,” “Planet of Sound,” and “Alec Eiffel,” rock as hard as anything Nirvana did. This album is the only one where I hear a resemblence between Nirvana and the Pixies. Perhaps they did rip the extreme dynamic changes from the Pixies, but those were almost becoming a cliche in the 90s. Look at The Smashing Pumpkins, Pavement, or even Weezer for example of the quiet verse, loud-rockin’ chorus.
I know they freely admitted to borrowing from the Pixies – I just think Cobain’s approach to songwriting was substantially different from Francis’s. But I think we agree on that, given your observations on Nirvana and their use of melody and pop structure to be the same as mine.
No, You are the one who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Nirvana played a small role in changing the music business circa the early nineties. I was also employed at an independent record shop at this time, and I assure you this change was well on its way before Nevermind blew up. When did the Lollapalooza festival begin? And who do you think was challenging “Alternative Music” in its ascention to the throne, anyway? I’ll contend that the suckiness and irrelevance of late-era hair metal bands like Jackal and Warrant played as much of a part in the supposed “alternative music revolution” as the music of Seattle’s flannel posse. Working class white dudes have to listen to something, you know. Nirvana, STP, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains provided it to them, with no muss, no fuss. [IMHO this is some of the worst goddawful self indulgent crap ever set to music, but TEHO.]
In a nutshell, Nirvana’s musical idiom was at least 3 years late to the party (as evidenced by sales of Janes Addiction and Pixies records, not to mention the original “college band”, R.E.M). Furthermore, in 1991-92 a bunch of other bands (see above) were at least as popular as Nirvana. Nivana’s “legacy” is predicated on the fact that their leader, in a business move as shrewd as any committed by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, or Jim Morrison, took his own life in such a dramatic fashion, and at so young an age. If Eddie Vedder had blown his head off instead, we’d be hearing the same tired bullshit about Pearl Jam.
I couldn’t agree with you more. Giving someone “genius” status because they died at the the height of their career is all too easy. They just never had the chance to fade from popularity. Just like that 2Pac fellow.
In addition to Eddie Vedder I could see people giving “god” status to the likes of Axl Rose, Trent Reznor, Marilyn Manson, Eminem, Billy Jo and many others if they died at the height of their careers.
I wonder what it would have been like if Paul McCartney had been killed and John Lennon was still alive. McCartney would be a legend and Lennon would be making more crap with Yoko.
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