Barbelith Underground > Radio & Music

Solitaire, I don't think there will be another garage band that kills the plastics. That can only happen once. That Nirvana did it was a collusion of so many factors that it's an unrepeatable act.

Nirvana was one of maybe three people/bands, ever, that Changed Everything, and I'm going with Elvis and the Beatles as the other two. So much of current American popular culture can be traced to Nirvana, for better or worse. It started small, with "Smells Like Teen Spirit", inescapable. But you could see it ramping up, with other bands getting constant airplay, television and magazines, all media, following suit. Some of it was just that the time was right - the first Lollapalooza tour had already been more successful than imagined possible when Nevermind hit radio, but Nirvana managed to be a distillation of so many different aspects of dissatisfaction. A lot of this has to do with, as Solitaire said, the fact that they were real, or seemed like it, at least. For about two years, it almost seemed like we, as an audience and buying public, were going to exercise some control over what we were fed.

In many ways, it's unfortunate that Grunge was what so many people thought they wanted at the time, but it wasn't even that. 'Grunge' was merely a way of re-allocating power, it was a word that gave some control back to the media that had held it for long, and were desperately afraid of losing it. Grunge was record companies and television quickly learning how to sell Nirvana back to their formerly docile public. After the collective shock of Kurt's suicide wore off, you could almost hear the sigh of relief, like "well, that didn't work, thank god we can go back to making money our way again." But media learned a lot from Nirvana, some of which panned out well for the public, and some not. Record companies learned enough from Nirvana to know that dangling the band's legacy in front of other acts to come would be the surest way to insure that the money stays where the labels want it to. I would be very surprised if any of the big garage/pop/punk bands since Kurt died hadn't had "you could be the next Nirvana, you know," dangled in front of them as they signed the contract that, essentially, closed off the possibility of that ever happening.

My mind still reels as I take in media today, realizing all the time how much of it is directly related to or as a result of Nirvana. In 1990 metal and punk weren't used on television and in ads. You didn't hear the Ramones all over the place -- most people still didn't know who the fucking Ramones were. People were still afraid of Ozzy. Skateboarding was never seen on ESPN. Nirvana legitimized aggression, as opposed to attitude, which is all that was popularly purveyed prior to Nirvana. They opened a certain kind of honesty for sale, and in doing so allowed it to be co-opted, leaving us now with aggression without honesty. There would be no Extreme Sports without Nirvana, and certainly no XXX. I think they even sped the mainstream acceptance of hip-hop by demonstrating that there was a shitload of cash to be made in these 'underground' affairs. The long-range, ongoing effect of one fucked-up, suicidal, charismatic kid is remarkable.