I was feeling really nostalgic today for some reason. So I started watching some videos on youtube of old Nirvana stuff. There's quite a lot of stuff out there about the band and Kurt Cobain. It actually all started because I wanted to see some old Dave Grohl drum solos from back in the Nirvana days. I did find those drum solos (which were freakin' awesome). But it led me to some different interviews with the band and Kurt, along with some miscellaneous documentaries and post-suicide retrospectives.
The one thing that struck me about some of those retrospectives is they carted out a bunch of old guys and music industry execs who claimed to have "discovered" Nirvana, as if they had some special insight about them. I mean, these are old guys that are talking about how meaningful Nirvana was and all that crap.
On the one hand, I totally agree. They were a very meaningful band, but only if you were, like me, in high school or starting college. These guys in the documentaries, they didn't give a shit. They just wanted to sell records. One of them, the editor of Rolling Stone, that guy could give a fuck. Nirvana sold magazines. Period. That's the meaning they discovered in Nirvana.
It was such a load of horse shit, having grown up in the grunge era, hearing from music industry insiders talk about how much Nirvana meant to them. Like, seriously, just go fuck yourselves with that bullshit. They used this popular music style to make many millions of dollars, plain and simple.
So, I thought that I would write down a few things to clarify. Nirvana was totally influential if you were a young person at the time (not some douchebag music execs trying to cash in on a popular music style). In reflecting on it, it's hard to encapsulate what exactly it was about it that I identified with. I think it's something that young people today simply don't understand (and will never understand, quite frankly).
The music "scene" from the '80s was really different. Pop music towards the end of the '80s was completely littered with either one-hit bands, or trashy hair metal rock ballads, and some chart toppers from earlier in the decade. It wasn't stuff that really felt honest or genuine, and seemed really really commercial.... Like, really choreographed crap from the music industry (Justin Bieber, anyone?).
So then there was this other stuff that people were listening to that didn't really (at the time) get a lot of radio air play. It was mostly stuff heard on college campuses and it started trickling down to high schools and stuff. But it was music that started to do away with the then pop music conventions. The bands were singing about stuff that had meaning, stuff that wasn't so bright and cheery all the time, or just stuff that you could kind of relate to in an honest way.
This is what eventually started being called "alternative" music.
It was really popular stuff, among a certain segment of society (mostly the young people), and it wasn't anything listed on the top 40 charts. It was something else, something new and different. As this stuff called "alternative" started growing in popularity, so too did the "Seattle bands". Nobody I knew at the time was calling it "grunge". I think that came later, after people on the outside of it needed to name it something. But cutting through a lot of the other "grunge" bands was this small rock trio named Nirvana.
Sure, stuff like Pearl Jam's Ten or Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger (or AiC's Dirt) were up there on my list, but once Nevermind hit store shelves, it was like something got unleashed on the world that nobody had ever heard before. It was like a revelation that all of a sudden, music existed that I could understand and feel something about, and that spoke to me in a way that no other music did before.
Now, I know I said earlier that Nirvana was influential and all that, and they were to a great many people. But you have to realize that while they were very popular, not everybody of my generation really understood. There were just as many GnR fans out there, or Mariah Carey fans out there, as there were Nirvana fans, maybe more. Don't forget, this was still a time when "alternative" music was actually something different from what was played on most radio stations. But the music industry didn't know what to do, because the young people, their target market, wasn't really consuming the same old crap they were used to shoveling out there. Some of Nirvana's later fans, were just jocks wanting a soundtrack to thrash around with, missing the whole point of the music (and the band) entirely.
Anyway, Nirvana really started to grow in popularity, and eventually the "alternative" music became the de facto mainstream sound, and eventually things went into decline. "Grunge" bands got hugely successful (which is not necessarily why they started). Music execs whored out any band that could replicate the sound and attitude (note that I didn't say "content"). Then Kurt committed suicide (some say he was murdered... who knows, really...) and the rest, as they say, is history. It sort of bookended a time that, in retrospect, really couldn't have lasted all that long anyway. Things that burn brightest, burn quickest...
In watching all the videos today, and reflecting on my own experience at the time, it's interesting to think about what this band meant to me as a young adult of that time. The feeling of being a part of something bigger than yourself was kind of all around. Many of us could bond over the shared experience of all this new music and new ideas. It was a great time, for a short time. Sadly, the music execs got a hold of it, and it became just another category in the record store. Now music is, in many ways, completely irrelevant. It seems totally disposable, like last years iPod. Or it's just fashion, like skinny jeans and fixed-gear bikes. Sure, there's probably some obscure stuff out there that keeps a cult following. But in the end, it doesn't seem like there'll be anything for a long while that could unite and excite a generation in quite the same way.
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