Do Nirvana still matter? Bernard Zuel investigates

[KiwiCoromandel]

Were Nirvana the greatest or just another grunge band from Seattle?

Were Nirvana the most important band of the '90s?

That's a defensible argument, though not without its serious flaws. You could argue Nirvana were the most important band if you ignore Public Enemy and NWA, maybe.

The agit-prop crew from New York, after all, only reset the hip-hop world's political antennae, marking their cards as the thinkers of their generation, while Los Angeles's street-battling gangstas made the thug life the ideal life for wannabes from black suburbs to the white Midwest.

Add Run DMC to Public Enemy and NWA, and you've got the groups that took hip-hop into the mainstream, so much so that by the end of the decade, hip-hop and R&B was the most important element in pop music.

And within a few years of the new millennium, this "urban" music had such a lock on the American charts that a rock band selling enough to compete with them was newsworthy.

"Well, yes," you could say, "but Nirvana brought underground rock bands back to the charts." But Guns N' Roses, who had once been considered "underground", hadn't exactly been low profile in the years before Nirvana broke.

And after Nirvana, every me-too record company had to have their own "grunge" band. Bands that weren't grunge at all responded in their own ways to the fire and drive of Nirvana - think Radiohead for a start.

But ponder this: how many of those "underground" bands were genetically rather than circumstantially underground? Would you say now that Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots and even Silverchair - some of the bands who sold millions after Nirvana - were automatically scary to the mainstream rather than merely blocked from exposure by moribund radio and record companies?

If the underground became the overground, what happened to the mega sales for the likes of TAD or even Henry Rollins, who were making a racket, feeling angry and playing the underground circuit? Maybe they were genuinely scary and not the commercially acceptable acts the others always were.

OK, but Kurt Cobain was the spokesman for his generation, the finest songwriter of his time, surely? Bollocks to that. The "spokesman" tag is patently untrue.

That's not to say Cobain's inchoate rage and simultaneous ennui was not representative of a great many people and did not speak to many more. But let's not inflate it beyond that.

The "songwriter" tag? You're on more solid ground there. He could write some very good songs and he was getting better; he could well have ended up a serious contender.

We'll never know.

Finally, you can also argue that Cobain and Nirvana were important for the territory they marked out for others. That is: the urge to be something other than Nirvana. This urge surged in Britain during the '90s via the obvious Oasis and Blur, but also in the less flashy but possibly more important scene that coalesced around Massive Attack/Portishead /Tricky and spawned a very British melding of hip-hop, reggae and pop.

Nirvana mattered. Cobain mattered. How much depends on where you stand, what you bought and who you're listening to now.

source:AP

[Shawn]

Hmm

I was thinking about these guys this week.

It seems to me that guys my age have been slapped down by the fact that the type of music most prevalent to our youth/early-adult years is now a dead art form. We're forced to look to other avenues for satisfaction because there isn't a lot of new stuff readily available now.

:reallymad:

[CTC Command]

i have definitely taken offense over the last 10 years at the multitudinous claims that Nirvana were talentless hacks. I think Cobain's ability to turn out pop/grunge was truly inspirational, not to mention what Dave Grohl has done in the meantime since Kurt's fateful meeting with that shotgun.