I liked Bradford Martin's piece in Salon about what all the "Nevermind" anniversary celebrations are missing, but my favorite part was this passage:
Though "Smells Like Teen Spirit" compelled a wider circle of fans to listen, this does not necessarily add up to the "voice of a generation" mantle the popular media fastened on Cobain. It's more accurate to see his celebrity as an uncanny symbol of a vibrant minority of the era's young who considered themselves outside the mainstream.
Bingo.
If the kids I went to school with owned a copy of Nevermind,it was for the same reason they owned Appetite for Destruction or Metallica's "black album" or The Chronic: because it was what kids listened to. Then again, the kids I graduated with seemed to love the music of their parents' generation. And that seemed to mean Billy Joel and Bob Seger more than, say, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin.
Very few of us saw Nevermind as a transforming moment. I don't even think I was one of them, weird little semi-outcast that I was. Nevermind and Nirvana helped build my tastes, but so did the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magic and Pearl Jam's Ten and even the Stone Temple Pilots' Core.
Its single "Plush" was pretty inescapable in 1993, but I think one of the reasons I gravitated to them was that Scott Weiland was the first rocker I'd seen on MTV who didn't have long hair, a look I didn't want/wasn't allowed to cultivate.
And I was a few months behind on Nevermind-mania anyway. We didn't watch a lot of MTV in our house, so "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came and went without me noticing. (The first time I "heard" it was a top 40 station's parody version: sung by a Julie Andrews sound alike. Oh, T-102, you are not missed.)
The first Nirvana song I actually heard was "In Bloom," the second track from Nevermind. I can remember WHERE I was too: it was the spring of 1992, near the end of my freshman year. I was in the lockerroom, and we were getting into costume for the opening night of our school play (Brigadoon).
And it was amazing. But so was "Space Oddity" and "Under Pressure" and "Bicycle Race," all of which I heard for the first time that night.
It wasn't until the end of high school, after Kurt Cobain had died, that I got deeper into the band. I don't think it was a bandwagon thing; if anything, Nirvana was even less popular then, and the singer's suicide had made him kind of a joke among some of my peers (and to my eternal shame, I participated in some of that post-death mocking).
But by the time 1995 rolled around, Nirvana had expanded its catalogue, with another album, a collection of B-sides, and the haunting "Unplugged in New York" record. And I'd read up on the band; both Michael Azerrad's Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana and Gina Arnold's Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana showed me how the band was formed.
That reading led to the Pixies, the Pixies to Sonic Youth, Sonic Youth to Beck (so, so much more than "Loser," I'd learn)...and so on.
This isn't a unique story, I know. A lot of kids can say the same thing. Nirvana, for us, wasn't a Paul on the road to Damascus moment; it was simply the start of a journey.
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