Here We Are Now (3 page)

Brian Eno is often credited with saying that the first Velvet Underground album sold only ten thousand copies, “but everyone who bought it formed a band.” Listening to rock radio now, two decades after Kurt's death, it sometimes feels as if Eno's paradigm could be far truer for million-copy-selling Nirvana, who possibly spawned a million bands. A wide array of acts, famous and unknown, bring the sound of Nirvana to mind, or at the very least their use of loud/soft dynamics within one song. Major-label bands who it could be argued were influenced by Nirvana include Bush, Weezer, Stone Temple Pilots, Green Day, Feeder, Blink 182, Matchbox 20, Linkin Park, Creed, the White Stripes, Three Days Grace, Puddle of Mudd, Cage the Elephant, Rise Against, A Perfect Circle, Thirty Seconds to Mars, OK Go, System of a Down, Nickelback, Muse, Evanescence, Jet, Three Doors Down, Fuel, Breaking Benjamin, and, of course, Dave Grohl's own Foo Fighters. And these are just the obvious ones, leaving out the hundreds of bands with an obvious Nirvana influence successful enough to have landed record deals, but who aren't as known.

Nevermind
transformed rock radio entirely, often making the alternative station the highest rated in a given market. In Los Angeles that was KROQ; in Seattle KNDD; in Atlanta 99X; and in Boston there were two alternative powerhouses, WFNX and WBCN, both of which played Nirvana what seemed like hourly. “Kurt had, and has, the single biggest influence on alternative rock, and certainly on alternative rock radio, of any artist of the past two decades,” Marco Collins told me. Collins should know: as a DJ at Seattle station KNDD, he was one of the first to champion “Teen Spirit,” helping break the song. “Alternative radio grew to become an actual format because of Kurt's influence. Many of the younger bands getting airplay today went to the school of Kurt and Nirvana. You almost can't overstate his influence. It is, in many ways, even bigger today than it was in the fall of 1991. That sound is everywhere.”

To understand
Nevermind
's impact, and Kurt's, you have to first remember what music was popular in the decade prior. Rock in the eighties had gone in a highly formulaic direction, dominated by soft rock ballads in which style was often put before substance. Almost every hit eighties song was about girls, cars, romance, heartbreak, and partying. Among the top ten singles of that decade were “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John, “Call Me” by Blondie, “Lady” by Kenny Rogers, “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band, “Flashdance” by Irene Cara, “Endless Love” by Diana Ross, and “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. Those well-known chestnuts now sound like they came from an entirely different planet than “Teen Spirit.”

Even looking just at the rock genre, the field was dominated by “soft” metal bands who topped the radio charts and MTV play lists from the eighties through the early nineties. Poison, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Winger, Loverboy, Twisted Sister, Guns N' Roses, and Van Halen all could “rock,” and consistently filled arenas with screaming teenage girls, but they often scored their biggest hits with ballads made into sexed-up videos. They were called “hair bands” because of their giant hairstyles, generally far bigger than the scope of their talent or critical success. Their videos became more important than their songs. Mainstream rock music was so bad in the eighties and early nineties, and so driven by image over substance, that Nirvana enjoyed what was fortuitous timing: they had something to rebel against.

Nirvana recorded
Nevermind
at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, in the spring of 1991, and the band that preceded them in the studio, with a couple days' overlap mixing in a smaller room, was perhaps the most maligned hair-metal band of all, Warrant. Warrant were best known for their cheesy, highly sexualized “Cherry Pie” video, which dominated MTV for a few months in 1990. Kurt grabbed the studio's in-house address system during the days the bands overlapped and belted that song's chorus over the studio's speakers: “She's my cherry pie!” While he was poking fun, Kurt was also putting Warrant on notice that music was shifting.
Rolling Stone
once declared that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” managed a nearly impossible task and “wiped the lingering jive of the Eighties off the pop map overnight.” It was hello Nirvana, good-bye Warrant.

Even to those who weren't fans of Nirvana, one aspect of Kurt's impact is simply that his band shifted entirely what music was on the radio or on MTV. “For those turned off by the saccharine pop and hair-metal excess topping the music charts, ‘Teen Spirit' was a godsend,” Jacob McMurray of Seattle's Experience Music Project museum told me. “Kurt's primal screams, nonlinear prose, and general disdain for the ‘meaning' behind his lyrics mirrored an angst-driven pushback.” Kurt changed the sound—and the culture—of music.

There was still manufactured pop music after Nirvana, but when Kurt sang about angst and anger, with lyrics that included “an albino, a mosquito, my libido,” he changed preconceptions about what topics a song on the radio could cover. A wider—and darker—emotional spectrum opened. Sonically, musical styles that had previously been found only in punk rock, at rock's fringes, became the dominant force. Much has been made about how Nirvana took punk rock to the masses, but Krist Novoselic told me in 1999 that that's not exactly what happened. “We didn't bring punk to the mainstream,” Krist said, “we brought the mainstream to punk.” Nirvana was not just a flash-in-the-pan band with one hit song that crossed over. Instead, the influence of the band was so great, they opened the minds and ears of the unexpected fan, and indeed the masses.

By the mid-nineties, even Warrant had shifted their music to try to sound like Nirvana.

Legacies in music are preserved not just by sales charts or radio plays but also by articles, essays, and endless lists of the “best” music compiled by critics for magazines, television shows, and websites. Within rock 'n' roll, that critical zeitgeist plays an oversize role in how a band stands in history. For example, take Big Star, who never were commercially successful, but whose critical reputation kept them touring, their albums in print, and in 2013 spawned a documentary film. Usually critics' darlings never sell well, but Nirvana are the rare case of a band that enjoyed high standing with critics
and
simultaneous runaway commercial success.

Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, and usually
Nevermind
appear on the upper reaches of virtually every critic's best-of list of the past twenty years. Both
Spin
and
Rolling Stone
named
Nevermind
the top album of the nineties. A 2000 list compiled by
Rolling Stone
and MTV of the one hundred best pop songs of all time ranked “Smells Like Teen Spirit” third, behind “Yesterday” by the Beatles and “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. In
Rolling Stone
's 2004 list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” with a slightly different set of voting critics than in 2000, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came in ninth, and it was the only song in the top ten that came out after 1971.

Critics and fans in the United Kingdom have always held Kurt in even higher esteem. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was picked by
Q
magazine's contributors as the third-best song of all time, behind only U2's “One” and Aretha Franklin's “I Say a Little Prayer” (and, surprisingly, ahead of the Beatles' “A Day in the Life,” the usual UK top choice). In 2002,
New Musical Express
ranked “Smells Like Teen Spirit” the second-greatest song ever, after only Joy Division's “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” The video to “Teen Spirit” almost always shows up in the upper reaches of any critic's list, and it was VH1's pick for the best video of the nineties.
Nevermind
gets the love from not just music magazines:
Entertainment Weekly
named the album the tenth best of all time in 2013.

These accolades go on and on, and they put Kurt and Nirvana in rarefied air. And as time goes by, the band's standing doesn't diminish, which is often the case as new talent and fresh recordings dilute the potential pool of great albums.
Nevermind
now competes with not just albums by the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, but also Adele. In several more recent polls, Nirvana have ranked higher than they did a decade ago, and significantly higher than when
Nevermind
came out in 1991.

When
Nevermind
was first released, it earned mixed reviews. Most of them were positive, but only a few were raves.
The Rocket
published one of those raves, calling the album “the kind of music that you fell in love with.” The
Boston Globe
review was on the other end of the spectrum, criticizing it as “generic pop-punk that's been done better by countless acts,” with lyrics that were “moronic ramblings by singer-lyricist Cobain, who has an idiotic tendency to sound like the Rod McKuen of hard rock.”
Rolling Stone
's review, written by former
Trouser Press
editor Ira Robbins, was favorable but far from glowing. “
Nevermind
boasts an adrenalized pop heart and incomparably superior material [to
Bleach
],” Robbins wrote.

Rolling Stone
gave
Nevermind
only three out of five stars, which translates in their rating guide to an “average” album. The review section editor assigns star ratings in
Rolling Stone,
with input from the writer. In a bit of revisionist history, the magazine has since reassigned
Nevermind
a four-star rating in its archived online copy of that original review. In other words, the same album with the same review was later assigned another star by the editors. That's the equivalent of the Michelin Guide changing the historical star rating of a restaurant from two to three stars, not for the current food but retroactively for a course served twenty years prior.

Music critics and editors, like baseball umpires, are known to blow a call (this writer included). But
Nevermind
's critical rise has gone well beyond that one additional star. In 2003
Rolling Stone
's critics and editors ranked it as the seventeenth-greatest album “of all time,” ahead of anything by Led Zeppelin, Chuck Berry, Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, the Who, or James Brown. The CD of
Nevermind
that was reviewed in 1991 plays the same music as it did in 2003, and it plays the same music today (though the 2011 reissue has slightly improved sound quality due to remastering). The music on the album didn't change, but in the passing years it somehow got better, or at least the perception of the music shifted, and the importance of the record looms larger.

And
Rolling Stone
's poll is just one of many where
Nevermind
has improved with age.
Spin
magazine's 1991 year-end list had Teenage Fanclub's
Bandwagonesque
as the top album, R.E.M.'s
Out of Time
as second, and
Nevermind
third. Nine years later
Spin
would name
Nevermind
the best album of the decade.
Rolling Stone
's 1991 year-end list also rated
Nevermind
third, after R.E.M. and U2.

Those jumps—from being a three-star album upon release, to the third best at the end of 1991, to a four-star album online by the late nineties, to the best of the decade by 1999, before vaulting to seventh-best album of
all time
a dozen years after it was first released—are the absolute proof of Kurt Cobain's enduring legacy. Those leaps in critical standings also prove that Kurt's artistic work grew in perceived significance after his death, even as the music itself didn't change. Some of that is common in rock 'n' roll and happened as well to some rock stars who died young—including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and even, recently, Amy Winehouse. Their short lives magnified their relatively small bodies of work, and they are revered in death beyond their fame in life. But even those music legends—all but Winehouse are now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—didn't enjoy the rise in reputation Kurt has experienced. Part of that is simply where Kurt appears on the continuum of rock. Kurt
followed
Jimi Hendrix, and thus Hendrix had to, at least posthumously, compete with Kurt, just as
Nevermind
now competes with Adele's
21,
in critic poll lists. There have been talented rock stars in the last twenty years, including Adele, but so far, in my opinion, none of them would win a critical cage match with Kurt if you compared their full catalog of songs. So he sits at the end of the line, for the moment.

At
The Rocket,
we too did an All Time Greatest Albums list in 1995.
Nevermind
topped that poll as well. I wrote the little piece that talked about the impact of that album back then, just a few years after it had come out. I wrote, “Though we've only had this in our lives for four short years, it has aged well. I can't imagine a time when this pure vision won't rock.”

We set the article in the same font as Nirvana's logo, and, of course, it came from the same typesetting machine. Only a graphic designer with a good eye would have noticed, or cared.

The critical standing of any piece of artistic creation rarely remains static, and Kurt's rise over the past two decades has several factors. One is the sad truth that he is dead, so no more Nirvana music is forthcoming. I've heard a lot of what is in the vaults, though not all of it. There are a few little gems here and there, and some interesting Kurt solo jams, but there is no fully conceived masterpiece I'm privy to. The rehearsal tapes are fascinating, though, and I'm sure one day there will be an album just of those recordings. Kurt's songs usually came together in little snippets, with a lyric yelled over a rehearsal, or a melody worked out in a rehearsal jam. But that work in process didn't always yield a finished, finely honed song. “You Know You're Right,” which came out on the
Nirvana
album in 2002, is the only posthumous band song I heard in the vaults that I'd rank as great. The 2013
In Utero
box had a dozen outtakes and rehearsals, but the quality of that material didn't rank with Kurt's best work, at least to my ears. There are Kurt solo songs in the vaults, and some of that will also one day probably appear on an album, but there is no full-band Nirvana Holy Grail recording waiting to be released that I know of.