They found Cobain’s body on the evening of my 21st birthday. You’re now probably expecting some psuedo-poignant drivel about how this represented an end to my youth…But, nope. He wrote some pretty good songs. I saw them live before “Smells like Teen Spirit” became the greatest thing since sliced wheels, (crowd of about 700 people). Nirvana was a good band for a stretch, not a great one. Then, he was dead. I was already over it an hour later when it came time to go binge drinking like any good little just-turned-21-year-old should do.
There are very, VERY few people who I do the “dead-hero worship” thing for. Sure, I may be sad for a few minutes when I hear that Joe Strummer is dead…but I just can’t relate to the people who get so into dead musicians and cast some sort of schmaltzy revisionist thought to what they were or what they represented. Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Cobain, Brad Nowell, Shannon Hoon, Biggie, Tupac…one big FEH for all of them. Dig them a hole. Life goes on for the rest of us.
On its way? Yes. But Nevermind was the catalyst. It forced the music industry to recognise what it had stubbornly refused to do earlier. Lollapalooza (which began a couple months before Nevermind was released, incidentally) was a big success but didn’t have the same effect on the industry - live tours never do.
The fact that there were other popular “alternative” bands before Nirvana is beside the point. When one became successful, major labels would try to sign additional bands with a similar sound/image, but they still pegged “alternative” in general as a cult genre that they didn’t have to pay an awful lot of attention to. After Nevermind they started paying a hell of a lot more attention. As a buyer for my record stores, I had a close relationship with many of the record companies and I discussed this personally with a number of the people working for them. Do you think they were imagining it when all of a sudden they saw their alternative department get a lot busier after Nevermind?
Except for every indie band from Vancouver BC to Seattle to Portland.
I was in Seattle during the whole “birth of grunge” business. I never understood why Kurt was considered so high on the ladder of grunge when he wasn’t in the scene in Seattle in the first place. Personally, I consider him in the same boat as Donny Osmond or the boys from N’sync. He was propped up by the labels to sell records to the kiddies. The only difference is Kurt was primped as the anti-pop star. But, it was all pop at the end of the day.
His lyrics were not deep, in fact most were not even complete thoughts.
"What else should I be
All apologies
What else should I say
Everyone is gay
What else could I write
I don?t have the right
What else should I be
All apologies
In the sun
In the sun I feed as one
In the sun
In the sun
I?m married
Buried"
WHAT?!?!?
His lyrics stink of a guitar player filling the space for the poet/singer who hasn’t made it to band practice yet.
Personally, I think Kurt killed himself when he realized he was in the same bost as Leif Garrett. I think the label expected him to pop and knew they would cash in on it. Like said in this thread already, him blowing his brains out was the best thing that ever happened to the band. That shotgun blast secured sales for the next 20 years.
It really seems quite incomprehensible that you would say such a thing. He has held up. That we are debating him proves that. That there are TV specials dedicated to songs that he wrote proves that. Dislike him if you wish, but there is no doubt whether he will “hold up”. That’s been established.
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.
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I acknowledged that Nirvana were influenced by the Pixies. However, this does not mean that they “popularised the sound of the Pixies,” a sentiment which suggests that Nirvana had zero creative input and were little more than a clever cover band. Pulykamell’s analysis of the bands’ sounds (though in some ways very divergent to my own) portrays that. After all, similar to Nirvana’s joking about the Pixies, Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead has said that one of the reasons he stopped playing guitar after OK Computer was that he’d run out of Pixies riffs to steal. However, despite this quote, it would be incorrect to describe Radiohead as a carbon copy of the Pixies, just as it is incorrect to describe Nirvana in such a way.
I’m not doing crediting him with that, and I don’t think anyone else in this thread is. What Cobain did do was (unwittingly) invent alternative music as a commercial force. Of course there were alternative band before Nirvana. There were alternative bands before the Pixies, too. R.E.M. formed in the late '70s, for instance.
I disagree. I really like R.E.M., but their mainstream success didn’t change the industry the way Nirvana’s did. This was because their mainstream success was fundamentally different.
For a start, although they sold a lot for an alternative band, they really weren’t that successful. Document had a chart-peak of 10, and their following album, Green, peaked at no. 12. Their most successful single of the '80s (while they still represented the sound of the alternative scene; while Out of Time is a good album, it had amore commercial sound, and had a more adult, widespread appeal) was ‘Stand’, which reached no. 6. It was big, but not no.1 with a bullet type stuff.
And ‘Stand’ illustrates why Nirvana changed the music world but Nirvana did not. ‘Stand’ was a goofy pop song. It didn’t matter that it was made by an ‘alternative’ band, because Stand was the sound of R.E.M. coming to the mainstream. Nirvana were important because they brought the mainstream to the alternative. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ might have had a memorable melody, but it’s guitar blast firmly established that when we listened to that song, we were listening to it on their grounds.
Crediting R.E.M. with kicking off the commercial acceptance of alternative rock is like crediting Cliff Richard with the British Invasion. Sure, he was a British guy that found success across the pond, but that didn’t mean he deserves the credit for all the other British guys that achieved U.S. success in the '60s.
I’ve had some time to think about this, and you are right here. Nirvana, structurally and melodically were very hook-y, and conventionally pop. However, I still feel their pop was from an alternative base, and that it was a substantially different sound to the Pixies. My characterisation of the Pixies as more pop than Nirvana, I think, arose from some features of their music - for instance, all of ‘Here Comes Your Man,’ and their harmonies in other songs, etc. The Pixies are more classically indie-pop, rather than the straightforward pop that Nirvana produced.
I agree. I was mostly thinking of the Pixies’ earlier work. But wasn’t Trompe Le Monde post Nevermind? Could the Nirvana sound have perhaps influenced the Pixies to some degree?
But why deny an artist “genius” status because they died young. Kurt Cobain was a genius because of his music, not because of his premature death. I call other artists genius, independent of their pulse rate - for instance, I considered Joe Strummer a genius before he died (quite independent of some of his questionable later work, too), and still do; I consider Lou Reed a genius, Elvis Costello a genius. Why should the description of Cobain as a genius be assumed to be due to his early death, when many describe Joe Strummer in similar terms, despite his shaky output - a few good albums with the Clash, a few bad albums with the Clash, and some relatively insignificant albums post-Clash? Kurt Cobain made three outstanding albums with Nirvana, and that is more than enough to cement his place in musical history, even had he continued to live and released nothing but dreck to this day.
Kurt’s skill was his songwriting, not his lyrics. There are many great bands with terrible lyrics - New Order, for instance. These lyrics, word for word, may not be poetry, but his lyrics were powerful enough to change the subject matter of pop music since (as I’ve already shown), and powerful enough to enable a vast audience to relate to what he had to say. Your critique of all All Apologies misses the point, anyway. The words are supposed to be flippant. How can you criticise a couplet like “what else can I say/ everyone is gay” as shallow? Of course it’s shallow! That’s the point!
And unless you’re trying to cast yourself as the SDMBs answer to the Frankfurt School, your Nirvana=*NSync diatribe is entirely without merit and has no basis in reality.
R.E.M.'s surprising commercial success (surprising to record executives, anyway) allowed alternative bands to get signed to major labels. When R.E.M. jumped from the indie I.R.S. label to Warner Brothers label, they proved that alternative didn’t have to mean “not commercially viable.” Other labels began beating the bushes for the next R.E.M. and because of that, bands like Nirvana got signed in the first place.
Like I said before, had there been no R.E.M., there would be no Nirvana (or at least they wouldn’t be widely known).
gex, just out of curiosity, how old are you? Don’t mean that disrespectfully. I just think that if you had been listening to alternative music in the 80’s, you’d have a greater understanding of R.E.M.'s influence, and more respect for their place in the history of alternative music.
I’m 20. I was born the same year Murmur came out; my first exposure to R.E.M. was ‘Everybody Hurts’. I liked that and a few other songs that I subsequently heard, but I became a fan when I was 13 and heard ‘E-Bow the Letter’ (which also, incidentally, introduced me to Patti Smith). From there I discovered Lifes Rich Pageant and rapidly became acquainted with the rest of their catalogue. So, indeed, I was not around in the '80s alternative scene. However, I am aware of and do understand what was going on, and I feel that there is just as much value in my analysis from hindsight as there is in yours, which i assume is derived from actually “being there.”
And true, I may have been too hasty in dismissing R.E.M.'s industry significance (I certainly don’t deny their artistic significance, and never have. They have been hugely influential on both an independent and mainstream level, and rightly so). R.E.M. may have woken the industry up to the alternative rock scene (although other, mostly British underground bands had found success). But, I maintain there is an enormous difference between R.E.M. finding success under the major label’s terms and Nirvana, a band not expected to have any significant impact forcing the major labels to come play on their court. Both bands were influential, however, R.E.M. was the trickle that seeped through, Nirvana broke the dam.
Of course you forget the ongoing flow of bands that came before Nirvana that had the same drive and “grrrrr” and anti-pop attitude that had been slowly chipping away at the labels for years with indie record sales and listener interest.
Killing Joke, a band not unknown to Kurt, was an obvious influence to Nirvana. So much so Killing Joke took Nirvana to court for lifting the “come as you are” guitar riff from Killing jokes song “eighties”.
I think people give WAY too much credit to Nirvana just because they were in the right place at a time the music industry was lifting eyebrows to the “seattle sound” and other punk bands. I think they realized “punk” was quickly becoming a viable revenue generator. X, Husker Du, Dead Kennedys and other bands were already pushing their way into the average family home, Nirvana had an edge with pop friendly icing. Nirvana were the press darlings though that’s for sure. For two years you couldn’t flip on MTV without hearing about them. Their label must have spent a HUGE amount of money on Payola and promotions once they figured out this is what the teenie-boppers wanted.
I think it has little to do with Nirvana forcing labels into “their” court.
Opps. I don’t know what happened to the rest of my post above.
I’m not going to retype it but I’ll sum it up by saying I think the labels started really testing the waters with bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam and the high school kids ate it up -just like they do with anything released that sounds different then the normal crap the radio plays.
Anyone can be a teenie-bopper star, you just need to funding to cram it down their gullets.
I actually paid money to see this film about Kurt’s “alleged” suicide.
The director tried hard to posit the theory that Courtney Love had Kurt killed. She allegedly paid El Duce from the Mentors to do him in.
Even in his prime, El Duce was not the brightest of bulbs. When they interviewed him for this film, I was amazed he could remain upright. He was killed on the train tracks near his home before the film was completed. Again, the director attempted to insinuate that Courtney was covering her tracks and doing away with her henchman. Sadly, the thought of El Duce stumbling drunkenly oblivious over traintracks in the path of a train is very believable.
Courtney came off smelling like a rose.
Kurt was a lightning rod for a form of music that got to big for it’s britches. Nirvana put out some really good stuff, as did a lot of the grunge acts, but the record industry tried to cash in by signing just about everyone in Seattle who could play a guitar, and the fashion industy started selling ‘grunge’ clothing for huge bucks and the whole thing soon became a parody of itself.
So was their court action successful? Do Killing Joke get writing credits on Come As You Are? Or were they just trying to cash in on someone else’s success? Since I see CAYA attributed to “Cobain” and not “Killing Joke” on the most recently released Nirvana CD (best of), I’m assuming the court decided there was no plagiarism.
So what have your proved? Nothing.
It is true that some alternative bands with potentially mainstream sounds were being signed - very conservatively - in the late '80s - R.E.M., The Replacements. however, these were bands the majors thought they could shift into the mainstream. Warner must have been well chuffed when R.E.M. released Stand. Alternative music was not seen as a commercial force until Nirvana came along. Nirvana was not expected to sell in huge quantities. The labels were relying on the GnRs and the Michael Jacksons for their sales, and they expected to continue to do so. Your prejudice against Nirvana blinds you to reality.
Your kidding. Look at the sales figures. Hüsker Dü, Dead Kennedys, etc. were artistically important, and may have got some press, but they weren’t mainstream. You have no idea what “average family home” means if you think it was one in which the Dead Kennedys were played.
Yet more proof of their influence. Again, they were not expected to sell much at all.
Hey, put away the tinfoil hat and give us a cite on this. What’s that? You’re talking out your arse? Thought so.
That Killing Joke song has a similar riff, but it’s actually “Come As You Are” backwards with a couple of grace notes added. If you play bass, you’ll notice that riff is extremely easy and obvious–your hand never has to move, which for us lazy bass players means it’s irresistable. There are a couple more songs with a similar riff. IMNSHO, the suit was without merit. It would be like the Kingsmen suiing everybody that used the “Louie Louie” chord progression.
I know we’re only in April, but I will go out on a limb and say that this is THE understatement of 2004. Bookmark this thread if you’ll ever need to reference.