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It may be 10 years since the release of Nirvana's Nevermind, but the music Kurt Cobain left behind still challenges a generation.
By GINA VIVINETTO
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 23, 2001
They say it changed pop music, and they're right. Nothing was the same after the release of Nirvana's landmark Nevermind 10 years ago this week.
So, happy anniversary, everybody. Now you know why you're seeing the late Kurt Cobain's sad mug everywhere. He's on the cover of Spin. There are big features in Rolling Stone and the New Yorker, a VH1 grunge special, even a compelling new biography, Heavier Than Heaven (Hyperion, $24.95), by veteran music writer Charles R. Cross.
I remember Nevermind. I was 20 and working as a copy clerk at this newspaper. I had heard the buzz about this exciting "grunge" trio from Seattle. I'd heard some cuts from Bleach, the band's much rougher debut. A poor English major at the University of South Florida and in a band of my own, I wrote freelance album reviews for extra dough.
I was able to sneak an advance cassette of Nevermind from a music editor. I took it home and listened to it with my mom.
From the first strains of Smells Like Teen Spirit, the album's monster hit, to the somber closer, the cello-saturated Something in the Way, the album unnerved me. Mom and I raised our eyebrows at Cobain's cryptic, muddled, befuddling lyrics. We marveled at the album's hooks -- grand, eloquent and as catchy as the Beatles, one of Cobain's musical heroes.
How was Cobain able to meld the ferocity of punk rock with the cleverness of pop like no one before him? His hushed singing on verses lured you in and made you want to decipher whatever he was saying. Then everything exploded into a fierce chorus. Quiet-brash-quiet-brash, a trademark formula picked up by dozens of rock bands to follow.
I was astonished by Nevermind's power, a passion that we hadn't been hearing in 1991's pop music, a landscape filled with Mariah Carey and Michael Bolton. The songs, especially Smells Like Teen Spirit, were filled with indictments of phonies in pop culture. Even the album's cover was a statement. It featured a baby swimming, "chasing" a dollar bill on a fish hook.
My mom and I were instant fans. We weren't alone. By Halloween of that year Nevermind went gold. Platinum two weeks later. The album reached Billboard's No. 1 in January 1992, pushing country megastar Garth Brooks and schlock rapper M.C. Hammer to spots 2 and 3. Cobain had found fame. Though he played the anti-rock star role to the hilt -- mumbling in interviews, showing up to a performance at Tower records so high on heroin he couldn't play -- it was a role he had hungered for his entire life.
"I'm going to be a superstar musician, kill myself and go out in a flame of glory," a 14-year-old Cobain told his pals, according to Cross' biography. That's exactly what happened. After years of struggling with a heroin addiction, a mysterious stomach ailment that often debilitated him and the pressures of "overnight" success, Cobain killed himself in April 1994.
"From the time Nevermind came out to the time that Kurt died -- that's not even three years," Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, who has since founded Foo Fighters, recently told Rolling Stone. "That's not enough time to get used to something that life altering."
But Nirvana's legacy includes more than a few albums of brilliant rock and the suicide of one of the generation's voices.
Cobain, a lifelong misfit himself, constantly toyed with the mainstream that now embraced him. Though he was notoriously quiet in private, he used his newfound position to make his social and political views known.
In liner notes to Incesticide, a collection of B-sides and rarities released after Nevermind, the band chastised its newfound fans, the hard rock guys and frat boys who were less than friendly to women, minorities, gays and lesbians. (Cobain was reportedly devastated when he learned several young men had chanted lyrics to Nirvana's Polly as they sexually assaulted a woman.)
The same day Nevermind reached the top of the charts, Nirvana performed on Saturday Night Live. In true punk-rock style, Cobain smashed his guitar into an amplifier. At the show's end, as SNL cast members waved goodbye to a television audience of 25-million, Cobain grabbed Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic, kissing them both square on the mouth. The trio, all heterosexual, frequently wore dresses onstage and in videos, to provoke those uncomfortable with homosexuality.
In a nod to the misfits of Generation X, or the slackers, or whatever the media dubbed us disaffected youth in the early 1990s, the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit featured a parody of high school itself, a garish pep squad of evil cheerleaders and popular kids.
Cobain showed up to a photo shoot for the cover of Rolling Stone in a homemade T-shirt that read, "Corporate magazines still suck." (Punk rockers knew this was a play on the motto of indie record label SST, "Corporate rock still sucks.")
Cobain wanted to annoy the once risky magazine that had become a comfortable staple of pop culture. Instead, Rolling Stone editors were thrilled by his "controversial" act.
The anti-rock star was now realizing he couldn't make waves, that everything he did was cool. The champion of the outcasts had become King of the In Crowd. How can you rebel when everyone wants to be like you?
Always obsessed with authenticity, Cobain grew to feel he was little more than a faker, a sentiment that permeated his rambling suicide note.
To date, Nevermind has sold 10-million copies around the world.
Back then, I gave Nevermind three out of five stars. I suggested four stars, but one of my colleagues questioned that. She had never heard of Nirvana. Who had? The lead review that week was of the new Bryan Adams album.
I was too inexperienced, not confident enough, to mouth off and stick with my gut reaction.
In my brief review, I compared Cobain to Edgar Allan Poe. I said Nevermind could have been called Nevermore, both would haunt us so.
Cobain's music grabbed a generation. Right when we needed it. In a world of bland pop without a message, without rebellion, we were starved for someone who had something to say. Was it so dissimilar from John Lennon's role as working class hero in the 1960s? Both Lennon and Cobain, who grew up torn between his divorced parents, wanted to reach the masses with their message. Both, too, retreated when the masses treated them like messiahs.
Lennon was murdered by a madman; Cobain died at his own hand. But fame, ultimately, killed them both.
With Cobain's death, Nirvana was snuffed out in its prime. We can only wonder what Cobain would be doing now, where his art would have taken him, and, us.
I'm grateful for the music Nirvana left behind; I feel ripped off there isn't more. From Cobain I learned about what we risk when we are true to ourselves, what we suffer when we say what we think, what's at stake when we no longer worry about what the important people want to hear.
I knew this 10 years ago. I know it today. That's why I'm ashamed that it has taken until now, when I have this cozy title of pop music critic, to give Nevermind the five stars it deserves.