jason from volo wrote: Tue Oct 05, 2021 9:44 pm Were they... one of the greatest ever?

No.

jason from volo wrote: Tue Oct 05, 2021 9:44 pm A good band with a career cut short?

Yes.

jason from volo wrote: Tue Oct 05, 2021 9:44 pm Okay band in the right place at the right time?

Yes.

Right place, right time, right look (Cobain--blonde, handsome, and sad), right attitude (fuck you, pay me).

Looking back, maybe the American equivalent of Radiohead, but not quite as good.

"Bleach" is still their best record.

I concur with many that Dave Grohl is a fucking amazing drummer, that much can be said. Kurt Cobain wrote really tight songs and made his guitar sound really cool. Krist played the bass guitar.

Good songs, well-played. Never crap.

Will still take In Utero out for the odd spin.

Ultimate 'gateway' band to amazing music. I bet hundreds of great bands wouldn't exist without Nirvana because the members would never have disappeared into a rabbit hole of noisy, chaotic, awesome music.

My favorite quote of that era was from a guy in the Screaming Trees, something like: "..the band was showing us all a rough mix of their new record and we all thought holy shit this is gonna be huge. This will sell 100,000 copies!"

There's a reason why it happened to Nirvana and not Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Sugar, etc. They wrote the catchiest songs and sounded fucking huge, that's it. I still listen to them sometimes, other than the songs none of us really need to hear again.

enframed wrote: Tue Oct 05, 2021 10:14 pm
Looking back, maybe the American equivalent of Radiohead, but not quite as good.

This seems a misunderstanding of what makes these respective bands tick.

Kurt fully admitted to being a Pixies rip-off band. Echo and the Bunnymen, that's a different story. But I digress.

They were at exactly the right place at exactly the right time, in terms of sound, attitude, and fashion.

Loud, catchy, piss-your-parents off guitar rock (I know my Dad hated them), they broke in at the right time when hair metal was getting stale.

I listened to their albums so many times I don't need to hear one of them front-to-back anymore, but they will never be crap, and I still like the noisier stuff on Bleach and In Utero.

When I started taking drum lessons, I was asked, "what do you want to learn how to play?" I said 'Scentless Apprentice' by Nirvana. That song is not for beginners! Gotta really work that kick drum foot.

kicker_of_elves wrote: Wed Oct 06, 2021 8:41 am Kurt fully admitted to being a Pixies rip-off band.

Sure, but an artist is their own worst evaluator, especially a self-deprecating one. "Nirvana was just a Pixies rip off" is certainly not the whole story, and borderline hot take b.s.

penningtron wrote: Wed Oct 06, 2021 9:03 am

kicker_of_elves wrote: Wed Oct 06, 2021 8:41 am Kurt fully admitted to being a Pixies rip-off band.

Sure, but an artist is their own worst evaluator, especially a self-deprecating one. "Nirvana was just a Pixies rip off" is certainly not the whole story, and borderline hot take b.s.

That's fair. Toeing the line of humble bragging? Maybe? I certainly didn't intend to boil down the Nirvana story to a stray comment repeated in a couple interviews, simply to cite Kurt's surprise at their popularity when he felt like he was liberally borrowing from the artists he admired.