JCC What kind of music do you like?

I'll take Siamese Dream, Melancholy, and Adore as a perfect trilogy of albums over Nirvana's three any day.

For me though, here's where it's at:

 

yesssssssss. Britpop!

 

Nirvana's cultural impact was significant. It made us all pick up guitars back then and form bands. Before it, the glamorized LA rock of acts such as Bon Jovi and Guns n' Roses dominated radio, you had Maria Carey's vocal acrobatics, Michael Jackson, processed techno house, pseudo raps by Marky Mark and Vanilla Ice: the kind of stuff that could turn you off of music forever. Sure, there were bands like REM around, but they were called "college rock" then as that's where they mostly resided. Nirvana however dominated the mainstream. MTV suddenly had an "Alternative Nation", because "alternative" bands now could have huge hits. It sent every major label scrambling for similar acts. But Nirvana was unique, and unpredictable. Kurt Cobain looked like Brad Pitt, yet he was drawn to ugliness, decay; he was funny, rebellious, but also morose and childish; his lyrics were ambiguous yet uncomfortably direct, both bizarrely grotesque and truthful. Ultimately, Cobain had spawned so many copycats, with their posed pain and punk theatrics, that he was in danger of being lumped in with them. Then he killed himself.

 

Mogolian throat singing. I'm stone cold serious. Visceral stuff. Here's a nice example:



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I love it so much I wrote an Honours thesis on it for the Arts half of my degree. Well, more of an attack on Blair, but there's some rock in there too

 

that comparison doesn't really work for me at all. you're talking about a metal band, already immensely popular, performing an immensely popular style of music, making their most popular album by diluting their sound. that's all fine, but not what nirvana did at all. when slts broke there was nothing like it on the radio. there was no blueprint for them to follow that said "this is what you do to make grunge music more palatable". yes, nevermind was a lot more polished than bleach, and that probably did help it strike a chord with mainstream audiences but they had absolutely no way of knowing that would happen.

 

Debo - Ok but in 1992/3 you had albums like Vulgar Display of Power and ChaosAD coming out. So your points about people being turned off from music assumes the mainstream was the source of people's inspiration. The riff from Chaos AD's opening track, "Refuse/Resist", is still powerful today.

At the same time Nirvana were blowing up, Faith No More released one of the best albums of the 1990s - Angel Dust.

I realise Nirvana was a watershed in popular music, but in terms of advancing the craft of music they gave rise to bands like Bush or the ****ing Presidents of the USA (of "Peaches" and "Lump" fame). There was tonnes of amazing things going on in non-mainstream music (I mean, look at what the Brits were doing with trip hop and techno; and in 1996 you get one of the most amazing albums of all time, "Entroducing") which didn't rest upon the laurels of a man who played power chord progressions through dropped-D tuning.

tom - metal was still underground. It wasn't as underground as the Seattle scene, but it wasn't a mainstream genre until a breakthrough song awakens popular consciousness.

 

metal hadn't been underground since black sabbath. i don't even know what you're on about now ender. it's not a knock against nirvana that other people also made good albums in the 1990s.

 

It depends on whether you count metal by genre or subgenre. Thrash, what Metallica played, certainly wasn't mainstream. And of course it's no knock, but the exception I take is that so much good 90s music is utterly ignored by a band whose approach to music was done, in my view, better by their peers.

I'm putting forward, elsewhere, that the new deafheaven album is the best release of 2015. I think it's fair to conclude I don't necessarily care for hooks or simple riffs (teen spirit was great if you wanted to learn stuff like palm muting but not if you wanted to get good on guitar)

 

...and justice for all was platinum 9 weeks after its release so i'm not sure how we're defining mainstream i guess. the black album certainly got more mtv airplay and was definitely geared towards being more commercial, but they were already absolutely huge before that.

as to the rest, it just feels like you're really trying to compare apples to oranges. we're talking about nirvana's cultural impact and you're trying to compare them to underground hip hop artists and at the same time spark a discussion about their lack of musical complexity. just doesn't make a lot of sense.

 

Mate I started by saying I felt they were overrated and other Seattle bands were better. Besides thoughtless, disposable commentary from a couple of posters, there's not actually been much that's touched on that. I acknowledged, in fact, they were culturally huge by bringing the Metallica comparison in. I said that they found the most accessible sound for a genre didn't mean they were the best.

I stand by this. I personally think Billy Corgan's talent on Siamese Dream or Mellon Collie dwarfs Cobains. I personally think Soundgarden were more dynamic, interesting, progressive and challenging to convention than Nirvana were, especially since Nirvana backlashed against their own popularity with the album which is better than Nevermind but less remembered.

(harpua also disagrees with the assessment that In Utero was a backlash by Cobain - she "totally disagreed" with everything I said after all )

I mean, I could ask the same of you here tom - what specifically do you object to in what I'm saying? That Nirvana being the most popular and seminal of the lot doesn't make them the best; or that they were overrated?

 

Nirvana is kind of like the Jeff Buckly of grunge - they mourn for what could have been and, as a result, over-emphasise over what we had. I think the Live & Unplugged gig whet the appetites a little too optimistically for Nirvana's own good.

 

i guess you haven't been reading my posts? i personally disagree with your opinion of nirvana (this i've already said). my main point however has been that it's impossible to overrate their cultural impact, which allowed these other bands you mention to flourish and thrive. it's like saying "the beatles are overrated, i really like the rolling stones and the animals tho". you can think their music is overrated, but i've found that discussion of nirvana and their importance is seldom solely about their music.

in short you have terrible taste. alice in chains, seriously?

 

Uh... don't put words in my mouth, Ender. If I have to pick my favorite Nirvana album, it was Unplugged... also love Bleach. Incesticide was kind of a throwaway, in my opinion.

Anyway, I disagree about Corgan dwarfing Cobain... can't stand him. I also could never really get into Soundgarden. I don't know what it was.. they just kind of felt like more of a "buttrock" version of "grunge" (I always hated that name for the genre, by the way), same with Alice in Chains, really. I was more into Pixies and Sonic Youth... that mid-late 80s sound (as well as Joy Divsion, Siouxsie, etc, from early/mid 80s).

 

Ah ok, here we go.

Yeah, fair enough, I guess we need to segregate out the points between their music and cultural significance. Because they blew a scene open and changed the way so much sounded (I'm blaming them for Nickelback too).

Part of what I think I object to about them musically is that the notion that they are important because they tapped into an unexpressed sentiment of dissatisfaction and apathy among youth. Did they though? It's sold over 30mil copies, which doesn't really feel like people were buying it because they felt it spoke to their middle class isolation. Rather, I think they did something people hadn't heard a lot of people and it became an identity politics thing.

But in terms of who they inspire or inspired? Or their actual musicality, i.e the fundamentals in how they wrote music? Because dropped-D tuning obviously existed before them, but they were the ones who brought that sound to a lot of new ears. Same as the power-chord.

Ultimately, I kind of wonder if people would give two ****s about Nirvana if Kurt hadn't killed himself at 27. There's plenty of artists who blow up and are huge, but I mean - are they still seen in that light? KoRn's debut was a pretty big deal, and "Blind" is such a genre defining song, but who actually cares that they're still around?

(And I think that you're always going to see this diminish return of megastardom on music acts as music gets more diverse and more democratic, which is why KoRn weren't as big as Nirvana and so on).

Why the AiC hate? Dirt was amazing. And watching James Hetfield "yeah-heaaaa-ah" his way through Would? is something you have to experience, ah. "Into the flood again, ah/same old trick it was baaaaa-aaaa-aaayyyyyaaaa-cck thennn, ah/So I made a big mistaaaaaake, ah/try to see it once my waaaaaay-heeeyyyyy-heyyy-ah"

Harps you took a post with like 6 points and said "completely disagree". By failing to say anything you said everything I claimed. And **** yes Sonic Youth.

But. Buttrock?

 

this is all i'm going to respond to because it's the point that i initially took issue with. there absolutely are not "plenty" of artists who blew up and were huge in the way that nirvana blew up and were huge. that is the way that they shifted the entire industry. i don't care if you personally don't get down with their tunes, you can count the number of bands who did that on two hands.

and i was just giving you crap about alice in chains. i liked them when facelift came out and i was 16 and lived an hour from seattle. like a lot of the music of the day they were cathartic for teen angst. mudhoney was better tho.

 

oh man mudhoney!

Do you think Nirvana's impact is still there today?

 

Yes, buttrock... Def Leppard, Whitesnake, KISS, etc etc.

 

And you think Soundgarden is that?

Wow. It would be like my saying Phish are terrible. In that we've listened to enough, both, to form that view.

How a song like "Jesus Christ Pose" can be compared to anything those bands released beggars belief.

 

Tom, you're right, but they've been Che Guevara'd.
Teenagers now buy Nirvana t-shirts by the bucketloads without being hampered by any knowledge of the music it's associated with.

You don't get this from me, but from my 15-year old.

 

No, I said Soundgarden and Alice in Chains are a Buttrock version of grunge... not that they are Buttrock.

 

Speaking of butt-rock:

 

i think their cultural impact is still there, though superwatto probably has a point. i think as far as their musical influence goes, it was never that people could sound just like them and be successful. what nirvana's success said, what their influence meant, was that people could sound like whatever they want, and no matter how removed from the mainstream that was they could be successful. so yeah, i think their impact is still there.

 

Living in Seattle, I remember when the eventual grunge heavyweights were called...rock bands. *hair flip*

Also, I have Dave Grohl's autograph on a piece of thermal fax paper because without the interwebs, the highfalutin among us had our concert schedules faxed to us from radio stations. And that's the way we liked it.

 

I'll just come out and say there's a couple Foo Fighters albums I personally like better than anything Nirvana put out.
Namely, the second and the third. After that it became just more of the same.