1131. Nirvana / Nevermind. 1991. 5/5

Nirvana was a band that since its inception had gone through several drummers in its short existence, and had also had an extra guitarist at one point, but in essence was a two-piece with hired guns as drummers. Guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Kurt Cobain along with bass guitarist Krist Novaselic eventually brought in new drummer Dave Grohl just before the band went into the studio to write and record Nevermind, a fortuitous move for both parties as it turned out. Prior to 1991 I didn’t have a clue who Nirvana was. Most people didn’t. They had released their debut album Bleach back in 1989, but I, like I guess 90% of people who ended up buying that album, did so sometime from 1992 onwards. My introduction to the band was, as happened on a few occasions in those days, by some friends in the band I was playing in at the time saying “Have you heard this band? Check out this album. It’s insane!”, at which point they threw it on and we listened. And I can still remember my first impressions being – ‘ok… it’s raw, it’s an interesting guitar sound… the singer has a real bipolar attitude… the drummer is hitting those things REALLY HARD…. yeah, it’s ok I guess…’ So just so you know that it wasn’t something that grabbed everyone the first time they heard it. Indeed, it was really when the first single from the album took off on radio, and begun to be played every couple of hours on constant rotation, and when the video for that song was never off the air on MTV and Rage and all of the other music video shows around the world, that the album itself began to be popularised. Because it was the success of that song that really drew people to the album, and once they had been drawn into the album… they began to discover that it wasn’t just a one-hit wonder.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” was that first single. You know that. In fact it is probably embedded in your memory so hard that even if you lost all of your sense sometime down the track, you would still remember the opening few bars to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. It became the anthem of a generation – not so much mine I don’t think, but to anyone who was a teenager in 1991 and 1992 this would be the song that would remind them all so much of those years. It saturated radio and video shows. It drove the popularity of this album. This was followed by the second single “Come As You Are”, a song of a different tempo and style, which mightn’t have become the dance club anthem that the first single did, but it still proved so popular because of the drone of Cobain’s vocals over his low strung guitar. “Lithium” and “In Bloom” were the other two singles that were drawn from the album and both did good sales as well, but by this time it was more just a task of keeping the band in the headlights of the oncoming swarm as they kept coming into record stores everywhere in droves to buy the album.
Once you get past those four singles that created the hysteria of Nevermind, you come to a collection of songs that range from the rage to the sublime. Songs that are on the extreme such as “Territorial Pissings” and “Stay Away” are there for the punk rock and fast paced song lovers, whereas there are the acoustically driven quieter songs such as “Polly” and “Something in the Way” also in the mix.
What has always interested me about this album is how much some people trawl for the meanings of the words Cobain wrote in each of the songs. Well, for a start, trying to interpret what he is singing is the first problem faced with that, because Cobain was never the clearest when it came to annunciating when he was singing. Once that has been achieved (the best way it can), just reading the lyrics doesn’t always shine much light on anything. It is obvious that many of the songs had lyrics that were personal to Cobain himself, and often complained about journalists trying to interpret more from what he was singing than what he had put there, as if there was an underlying reason beneath his words.
Despite being held as a beacon of the grunge genre, Nevermind to me had more to do with punk rock than it did with any other genre at the time. It is heralded as one of the leaders of the grunge movement that had its base in the bands from Seattle. Alice in Chains had the harmony vocals and greater structure, Soundgarden was closer to heavy metal, while Nirvana channelled that punk groove for the majority of their balance.

I often ask myself the question – how much longer could this style of music have continued if Nirvana had kept going, if Cobain hadn’t offed himself and they had kept making albums. Because I’m not really sure how much versatility this band had, and of course that statement is an anomaly given the range of material in the songs here. We have seen with Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters how adaptable they have been over the last 25+ years, not just sticking to the sound that came from their first album, and indeed maturing in a billion selling way since. Did Nirvana and Kurt Cobain have that versatility? Indeed, is Nevermind still as universally loved as an album today simply because the band only released three studio albums, and didn’t have the chance to stuff it all up by creating a couple of average albums as the 90’s decade progressed into nu-metal territory. In essence, does this album have an immunity because it is surrounded by so little else from the band to compare it to? Almost everyone probably has a copy of Nevermind, but how many own copies of Bleach and In utero? I guess what I’m saying is that Nevermind has not been polluted by having material released beyond it that wasn’t up to the same standard, or was so different from the songs here that the fans who had come into the band on the back of this album left again in a hurry one or two releases later. The memories that Nevermind recall are caught in that moment of time. Does the fact that the band dissolved two and a half years after this album was released exacerbate that?

In the long run, your love or tepid acceptance of this album will depend on just where and when it entered your life. My kids are pretty much non-plussed about it. They’ll listen to it, enjoy it to some degree, but not find any of it is life changing. I still love the album, and having had it on rotation again for the past couple of weeks in preparation for this episode I have sung along in all the right places. But I know that I have also felt a need to move on to other music for a lot of that time too, in that while listening to the album two or three times was good, but that was enough. Which, is how an album from 30 years ago should be taken. But is that an indication of what I have been talking about? That beyond Nevermind, more of this would have been too much? The answer to me lies in the answer to this question – what is the better album, Nirvana’s Nevermind or Foo Fighters The Colour and the Shape? Your answer to that will decide for YOU where this album stands in the annals of music history.