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, so much buildup (the record seems to start three separate times before singer Kurt Cobain
even makes an entrance), that by the time the chorus is over, you can
imagine bands all over the planet reassessing their entire lives: what
do we do now? The sound of Nirvana,
pieced together out of junkyard scraps of punk, hard rock and
hook-driven pop, made everything else that was happening in rock
music—especially all those hair-metal bands—seem even more ridiculous.In hindsight, the '90s now look like the last decade when rock meant anything.
Nirvana didn't come out of nowhere in 1991. They'd already had an indie album (Bleach
)
causing a stir; they'd been rhapsodized over by the music press and
pursued by major labels. But with "Smells Like Teen Spirit," they made a
record that was, like few in pop history, a dividing line. The impact
of that track, and the second Nirvana album, Nevermind,
is summed up by an entry in The Mojo Collection, a compendium of
essential records: "It blew the '80s away," and "touched a nerve which
rock 'n 'roll had forgotten it ever possessed." And just in the nick of
time, because so much of what had been going on from around 1988 through
the top of the '90s was a rock-as-caricature (imagine music that
sounded like the mating of the Penthouse letters section and a
Victoria's Secret catalog). There were bands like Britny Fox, Bang
Tango, Vixen, Slaughter, Lord Tracy, L.A. Guns, Winger, Faster Pussycat… which meant there was no shortage of material for strippers' playlists.But, as Mickey Rourke's character Randy "The Ram" Robinson says in The Wrestler, "Then that Cobain pussy had to come in and ruin it all." Nirvana dispensed with Warrant as decisively as the Beatles made Bobby Rydell obsolete (Rydell never had another top 40 single after the winter of '64). And if you were a fan of that kind of cartoonish musical machismo, or a band in that business, you were out of luck: pack up your spandex. Nirvana was an antibiotic for the idiocy of Cherry Pie
and, much to everyone's surprise, the band helped turn rock around.
They were the big bang. Not that they were alone, or without precedent: R.E.M., Jane's Addiction, the Replacements, the Pixies, Nine Inch Nails, the Cure,
and other bands were a counterbalance to the prevailing trends in
commercial rock. But Nirvana, a scrappy band from Aberdeen, Washington,
turned out to be exactly the right band to clear the landscape. They
were the last rock band that changed the world."I'm so lonely, but that's ok"
Find, if you can, a copy of the Nirvana book of photos by Steve Gullick and Stephen Sweet, published in 2002. On pages 13 and 14 there are Sweet shots of an early (1989) London gig. They're almost abstract, so blurry that none of the band's faces are visible, but so much energy leaps off the pages, a band captured in motion, and you stare at them, trying to imagine what songs they're playing. In his introduction to the book, journalist Everett True from Melody Maker quotes Sweet as saying Cobain was "in turn full of terror and gentleness." That was what Nirvana had, that contrast. Everyone points out how the verses of Nirvana songs are relatively sedate and measured, and how the choruses come in like loud cracks of thunder, and in that dichotomy is a clue to how they affected people, especially the sensitive kids who saw in them, as they could not possibly in the preening and posturing of Poison, kindred spirits.
"I'm so lonely, but that's okay," Cobain sings on one of their defining songs, Lithium
; "I shaved my head and I'm not sad." He sings that as though to himself in a mirror, and then the hook comes crashing in, bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl just slamming away. "I like it, I'm not gonna crack/I miss you, I'm not gonna crack."
He's not? It sure sounds like he might. Kids blasting 'Nevermind' on
headphones, behind their locked bedroom doors, drowning out, or trying
to, the tense shouting of arguing parents downstairs, dreading the next
day in the cafeteria, found their band."Come as you are
," Cobain sang, "as you were, as I want you to be,"
and he sounded as unmoored as the moodiest high school sophomore.
("It's kind of confusing, I guess," Kurt confessed. "It's just about
people and what they're expected to act like.") An early, discarded
lyric for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit" went, "Who will be the king and queen of the outcasted teens?"
but the song and the band didn't need to be that explicit. It was all
in the abrasive sound, in Cobain's fragmented lyrics that he sang in the
vocal equivalent of a frantic scrawl: "And maybe I'm just to blame for all I've heard but I'm not sure." (Later, on All Apologies: "Everything's my fault, I take all the blame.")
Nirvana was never expected to be so big, so fast. 'Bleach', on Sub Pop, had gotten enough attention to get the big record companies to come a-courtin', but the prognosis at their chosen label DGC (a part of Geffen Records) was that 'Nevermind' would, and this was optimistic, sell around a quarter of a million albums, the level attained by label mates Sonic Youth. DGC initially shipped out 50,000 units or so in September 1991, a nice number for a relatively unknown band from the Northwest. But like another smudgy, startling record by a Northwest band, the Kingsmen's Louie Louie
,
"Smells Like Teen Spirit" was absolutely undeniable; you knew it was a
hit the first time you heard it, whether it was on your local college
station or on MTV or a little later, when mainstream radio caught on, or
later still, when they did it on Saturday Night Live. "Oh well, whatever, nevermind,"
that blasé shrug in the midst of the maelstrom, was the perfect rock
punchline. What records had made so much of a difference that quickly? I Want to Hold Your Hand (or Please Please Me in England)? Like a Rolling Stone?And that was the problem, for Cobain at least. When events sweep you up, it's hard to reel them in. Before 'Nevermind' was even recorded, Cobain had already written a song about his discomfort with a part of his band's growing constituency. "He's the one," he sings contemptuously on In Bloom
, "who likes all our pretty songs and he likes to sing along… but he don't know what it means."
That prescient song was about the casual, clueless fans checking them
out after 'Bleach' was released—especially the boozed-up meathead jocks
whom Cobain instinctively despised—so now multiply that by thousands and
thousands when it became cool to be a Nirvana fan, a band for the
uncool. When Nirvana became massive, huge crowds sang along to "In
Bloom," and Cobain must have looked out at the rows of people, the
newcomers and curiosity-seekers, on those festival grounds and wondered,
"Do they know what this song is about?" How strange is it that, on
'Nevermind', "In Bloom" is track two, right after "Smells Like Teen
Spirit"? It's almost as though they were predicting what that lead-off
track would do, how exponentially everything would blow up."Here we are now, entertain us"
That's a dilemma: you want your band to be popular, you want "acceptance," but at a certain point you have no control over who your audience is. There's no screening process. People will find what they want to find in your music, and your intent is, to them, irrelevant. Maybe some listeners were drawn to Nirvana because Kurt was a great singer, because they liked the aggressive crunch of Novoselic and Grohl, because their songs were, for all their celebration of pure noise, really catchy. As Everett True wrote in the Guardian, "Listen up: Cobain loved the Bay City Rollers as much as he loved the punk rock of Half Japanese and Beat Happening. He loved the chest-beating swagger of Black Flag, the cute girl pop of Shonen Knife, the hair-flailing noise of his Sub Pop contemporaries, and ABBA." And in Michael Azzarad's biography of the band, Come As You Are, you might be surprised by how many references to the Beatles there are. Cobain knew the power of the pop song—he wrote a song called Verse, Chorus, Verse
, after all—and combining that with what he gleaned from punk and classic hard rock (he also wrote a song called Aero Zeppelin), made his band a compelling synthesis."It was so fast and explosive," Cobain told David Fricke of Rolling Stone. "I didn't know how to deal with it. If there was a Rock Star 101 course, I would have liked to take it. It might have helped me." It might have, but you can't prepare for something like 'Nevermind'. All you can do is try to adjust to it. You could feel the ripple effect on the industry in what seemed like a few weeks. If you worked for a record label, the recalibration was dramatic. Flights for A&R executives were booked for Seattle (I'm one of the few who didn't make the cross-country trip; I didn't want to get there in time to find the "grunge" equivalent of Freddie and the Dreamers), distribution deals were made with hip indie labels, artist rosters were re-evaluated and vacuumed for traces of glam and glitter. It was the first "new thing" in American rock in more than a decade, and it turned out that Nirvana wasn't an isolated case. Other labels had bands who made fashion out of anti-fashion and art out of angst and could "shift units": Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots.
It was a Scene, like San Francisco in the '60s, with less paisley and more plaid, less acid and more caffeine. And it was ripe for mockery: on The Ben Stiller Show in late 1992, there was a Monkees parody called The Grungies, complete with rewritten theme song ("Here we come, just trying to compete, with all the other bands, on the Seattle street … We're the X-generation, we just like to complain") and a pretty spot-on variation on "Lithium." Cameron Crowe's second film as a director, Singles, was shot in Seattle and featured a fictional band, Citizen Dick, as well as a soundtrack
with Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden's Chris Cornell, and other NW artists (between when Singles
was shot and when it was about to be released in mid-'92, "Smells Like
Teen Spirit" had to be cut from the film because it became too
popular/pricey). It wasn't as though the "Seattle bands" (some didn't
call the city home) were similar musically—the Grateful Dead and Moby Grape
didn't sound much alike either—but they were clustered together
temperamentally and they seemed, to a greater or lesser degree,
authentic: it was a collective (and mostly humor-free) groan of
frustration and general discontent."Everything's my fault, I take all the blame."
It didn't last very long. Nirvana made only one more studio album, 1993's In Utero
; Alice in Chains's last album with lead singer Layne Staley came out in 1995; Soundgarden broke up in 1997 after the prior year's Down on the Upside. By 2000–2001, the top rock tracks were by bands like 3 Doors Down, Linkin Park, Creed, Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit, Nickelback, and Staind,
and people can make up their own minds whether that crop represented an
improvement over the hair bands of the late '80s, but however one lands
on that question, it seems beyond dispute that whatever revolution
Nirvana launched a decade earlier had fizzled out. In hindsight, the
'90s now look like the last decade when rock meant anything. The
SiriusXM channel called, appropriately, Lithium, brings that all back in
a visceral rush: you can hear why for so many people that was their
golden era, as significant as the mid-'60s were to baby boomers.
Can you picture anyone since Cobain being an emotional thread in a novel like Nick Hornby's About a Boy (the title is a gender-flip of the Nirvana song About a Girl
),
where a teenaged girl gets in trouble for wearing a Kurt Cobain
sweatshirt to school, and a man has to explain to a fatherless boy that
there isn't a football player named "Kirk O'Bane." "He wasn't able to
tell Marcus how to grow up," Hornby writes, "or how to cope with a
suicidal mother, or anything like that, but he could certainly tell him
that Kurt Cobain didn't play for Manchester United, and for a
twelve-year-old boy attending a comprehensive school at the end of 1993,
that was maybe the most important information of all."Not that there weren't, and always will be, rock bands that people connect to, for reasons smart and stupid. Grohl's band Foo Fighters soldiers on doggedly, and bands like the White Stripes, Green Day, Arcade Fire, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs come to mind. For a while there were those who pinned some rock hopes on the Strokes, except the Strokes didn't have any songs, really. The Strokes were a substitute, a newly opened bar that tries very hard to be a "dive bar," to artificially replicate an experience by digging out and hanging up some vintage neon signs for Rheingold or Schaefer beer.
We're at the point where all rock music is basically nostalgia, variations on a familiar formula.
That's what most 21st-century rock bands are doing; that's why there are articles like "if you like [name of classic rock band], here's a newish band that's sort of doing something similar." We're at the point where all rock music is basically nostalgia, variations on a familiar formula. Is it any wonder that a couple of the more accomplished, successful modern-era rock bands, Imagine Dragons and the Killers, come from Las Vegas, home of tribute acts and residencies where artists rehash former glory? Do most people even know the names Dan Reynolds or Brandon Flowers? Even good new bands, the War on Drugs, say, or fun., aren't doing anything new. The whole guitar-bass-drums set-up that's flowed through history, from Buddy Holly & the Crickets to the Beatles to the Ramones, the Who, R.E.M., U2, and Nirvana, has hit the wall. For the first time since surveys has measured these things, "rock" has fallen behind hip-hop/R&B as the most popular genre in the U.S., and "rock" primarily means classic rock from the '60s through the '80s. Sales of electric guitars are way down, and why should anyone be taken aback by that? Who from the last decade would inspire a kid to form a rock 'n' roll band?
You can see the whole, insanely brief, Nirvana story unfold, from a performance at Seattle's Paramount Theater on Halloween night 1991, when the band is just at the brink, to a great gig at the Reading Festival almost a year later (Live at Reading
is Nirvana's Live at Leeds: an indispensable document of a rock band at its apex), to their riveting Unplugged set
a year after that, each show outstanding and defining. Six months after
'Unplugged', Cobain took his life, the first casualty of his class, but
not the last. It was a doomed bunch: Cobain, Staley, Cornell, and STP's
Scott Weiland
following in the tragic tradition of self-destructive rock stars. That
means, for the Lithium generation, no cash-grabbing reunion tours, or at
least a minimum of them; don't dismiss the idea of a promoter rounding
up survivors for a Legends of Grunge Festival out in Indio, California,
some weekend before 2020, with Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters, and surviving
members of the other bands.Is it possible that Kurt Cobain was the last true "rock star"? The way that term is generally understood—someone with power, charisma, influence, notoriety, recognition outside the parameters of the fan inner-circle—no one who came up after his death qualifies except for some pop, hip-hop, and country artists. Sure, there will always be rock fans who are going to discover new bands and point to them as evidence that rock has a beating heart, but for older rock fans, those new bands are generally ones that remind them of older, better bands, and for younger fans, it must feel like digging be-bop; yeah, there's still music out there, but it doesn't drive the cultural conversation.
You hear, "There's a lot of great rock, but you have to know where to look," which is beside the point; you didn't have to look around secret corners or down obscure alleys to find Nirvana. They were just there, and they made you pay attention. How often had that happened, that the best band of their day also became the most popular? A half-dozen times, maybe? The far more likely scenario would've been that Nirvana would have been a band with a devoted cult, celebrated more in retrospect than rewarded in their time, but that's not how it turned out. Instead, they made a lot of people believe that rock had a future, and they were right. It was just way too short.
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