"At the time, it didn't sound like anything else around and, to my youthful ears, it wiped away all that had come before it. If this sounds a little dramatic, you have to understand that at the time Guns'N'Roses were the biggest rock band in the world. If you didn't have a hotline to the underground, and were looking for a soundtrack for your teenage rebellion, they, along with their hard-rocking peers Anthrax, Mötley Crüe and Metallica, were pretty much all that was on offer. These bands might have had the volume, but they were singing about things to which the average tortured teen could never relate. They were, for the most part, cartoon bands pedalling clichéd fantasies of sex, drugs 'n' rock'n'roll. Nevermind, in contrast, was teenage agony distilled."
—Do you remember your first Nirvana experience?
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Alternate way to phrase your question: "Are you looking for a paycheck from the increasingly scant music-writing coffers?"
@Maura Johnston It would be churlish to stick in Kurt Cobain's craw.
Hey guys do you remember the 9– ah, fuck it
At the time, Nevermind sounded like everything Butch Vig had produced for Killdozer for the previous ten years. Nevermind sounded almost exactly like Die Kreuzen's October File from 1986. Those grunge folk didn't invent the sound, they just sold it. I am so fed up with this Kurt Cobain/grunge-worship.
I was around eight, and wondered why my sister had a CD with a naked baby in a swimming pool on the cover.
Yes I do and I thought it sounded like classic rock. I still don't get what was so different about them.
@LondonLee Nirvana's cover of More Than A Feeling introduced a generation of hipsters to "irony".
I can't figure out who wrote the linked piece so I'm just going to assume it's Jon Huntsman.
Teenage agony distilled smells like Love's Baby Soft.
LOL, Metallica has never actually written a song about sex or rock and roll and the only songs they've ever written about drugs have been just-this-side-of-Nancy-Reagan cautionary. It's unclear at press time that a full three-quarters of Metallica has ever even had sex. What a ponce!
@Matt Preach
Adorable!
SLTS: In somebody's car some night around Queen and Wellington in downtown London Ontario and it came on the radio.
When they went on SNL: at a packed Double Deuce on St. Laurent in Montreal; it was on the tv behind the bar with the sound turned off.
What about the The Fucking Public Enemy? Or was It Takes a Nation of Millions just for black kids?
Nope, it was not.
@Niko Bellic : Fear of a Black Planet made this hardcore-punk-listening highschooler realize "hey, there may be something in this rap thing after all." That album is still brutal.
i never paid much attention to rap stuff, but i guess ive always been preoccupied because miuzi weighs a ton
I liked them before they sold out. What band are we discussing?
@SidAndFinancy: The Nelson Riddle Orchestra, if I'm reading my notes correctly.
@skahammer Thank you. Totally went pop with that Ronstadt album.
@SidAndFinancy: She's a blight on pop culture in general. Everything she touches.
Nope, don't remember the first time I heard any Nirvana song. In my head it feels like they kind of always existed. For me, it was side one track one of Pearl Jam's Ten that blew my 7 year old New Kids on The Block loving mind.
NIN Pretty Hate Machine didn't sound like anything I'd ever heard to my 6th grade ears.
Nirvana I liked well enough from the beginning, but I do remember MTV seemingly trying to force grunge on me. I didn't give Pearl Jam a chance for about a year because I felt MTV was just trying to annoint them a major rock band. "You HAVE to like these guys" I remember the VJ saying.
Looking back, disliking Pearl Jam because they were "too MTV" was a bit ironic.
Every generation gets the Doom Generation it deserves.
I was so confused by music around this time. Take a town in the middle of nowhere with nothing but two country music radio stations and give them MTV and a classic rock station in the same year. I was still trying to figure out the difference between Robert Plant and Geddy Lee and Nancy Wilson's voices to remember specifically where my first "Nirvana Experience" was. It was probably watching MTV, though.
(Oh, and I have that Led Zeppelin vs. Rush vs. Heart thing DOWN now)
Is this where we can talk about where we were when we found out Kurt died? Kurt Loder told me.