Reticulating Splines

Nirvana – Nevermind [1991]

(in honor of the 17th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death)

As I stated in my previous installment in this series, My Bloody Valentine was one of the first bands to inspire me to be creative with making music – they appealed to me primarily on an intellectual, artistic level. The band that got me into making music in the first place was Nirvana (and, more specifically, it was Kurt Cobain), who initially appealed to me on a more base impulse, instinctual level. There were many who influenced me, but at the age of about thirteen, there was no musical influence in my life anywhere near as prevalent or important as Nirvana, even though I was a little too young to truly be a part of the generation they helped to define and shape…when Nevermind was released, I had just turned six a couple weeks prior. My first exposure to it was during a class field trip to McCully Library (sometime after 1991 and before April 1994) where Walter, the class clown, found a cassette tape copy of it and made fun of the baby penis on the cover. He went to the length of checking it out of the library and bringing it back to the classroom, where our teacher took out a tape player the school owned and put the album on for us. I’ll never forget our collective reaction: utter confusion. We were simply too young to understand what the sound coming out of the speakers was…it may as well have been audio transmissions from an alien civilization. I knew that whatever the hell this guy was singing about and playing, though, he was certainly riled up and passionate about it.

Although I’d hear Nirvana at various other points in my life on television or through the radio, it wasn’t until a few years after Kurt Cobain’s death that I really got into their music and could declare myself a fan (super-fan would actually be a more accurate description – at one point in my teens, I was making my own band t-shirts out of plain white tees and a Sharpie, growing my hair out, and scouring thrift stores for neat, old clothes; the first two single effect pedals I owned were a Boss DS-1 and Electro-Harmonix Small Clone, the very same ones Kurt used on Nevermind and continued using up until his death). In fact, I would venture so far as to say that Kurt Cobain was the reason I picked up the guitar in the first place – if he hadn’t existed, somebody else would’ve inspired me to, but he did and I did, so that’s how that worked out. The fact that the same could be said for thousands of other kids around my age is a testament to the breadth of their influence. Nirvana songs were not only fucking great (they’ve already been described every which way as it is, so I think summarizing them as plainly as that is enough at this point), they were fucking simple. The first five songs I learned on guitar were “Polly,” “About A Girl,” “Come As You Are,” “Something In The Way,” and “Sappy,” all of them Nirvana songs and three of them being off of Nevermind. Ask anyone who plays guitar what song they learned first and chances are it’s a Nirvana song. Many people confuse the simplicity of Kurt’s songwriting craft with laziness or ineptness, but that’s missing the point entirely - the compositions were raw and stripped down, rebelling against years of glamor and soulless sheen that had infected rock music. That simplicity also lent to their almost universal appeal, allowing the band’s message of independence and spirited rebellion to get across to people of all ages and from all walks of life and making the vast & largely uncharted world of independent rock accessible to an audience that had never been exposed to it. It rang clear and true that this was music made by music lovers for music lovers.

Much has also been said about the name dropping tendencies Kurt had (indeed, he talked more about his influences than his own music), and he played the role of gatekeeper to a whole world of music I wasn’t aware existed. In the days before Napster and digital audio and peer-to-peer sharing, there was the joy of hunting down used albums in record stores, and a large majority of what I was picking up there around the age of fifteen was directly influenced by who Kurt said he listened to. And those bands got me into their influences who got me into their influences…it lead to a chain reaction a friend of mine refers to as the “six degrees of Nirvana” where I can trace any single band I listen to now (no matter how radically different from Nirvana) back to Nirvana in six moves or less.

Pre-Nirvana (they had that big of an impact on me, that I can classify certain aspects of my life in terms of pre-Nirvana and post-Nirvana), I was searching for something to help put my aimless, disaffected teen angst & anxiety in perspective and give me something to get passionate about and direct my energy toward. Musically, I really didn’t have much along that line before Nirvana (there was Nine Inch Nails, whom I really liked but always felt something important was missing from. I’d later learn it was genuine angst). Nevermind was the most accessible work of theirs with the most anthemic songs that got me listening…it’d lead to In Utero, Incesticide, and an obsessive hunting down of bootleg recordings of live performances and rare demos & outtakes that continues to this day. Nirvana helped give me an identity of sorts – I couldn’t relate to any of the typical stereotypes you’d find on a high school campus. I liked rock and roll, but I definitely didn’t see myself as a punk or metalhead or goth. I didn’t feel I had much in common with anybody, which, in retrospect, is a very common teenaged perception, but at the time, I’d never felt as alienated and confused in my life and wasn’t sure it’d get any better. If anything, I thought of myself as kind of an alien floating around just outside the sphere of humans and their conventions and just observing, looking for other aliens to connect with, and that was exactly what Kurt Cobain was and who his music spoke to. Teenage angst is often discredited as invalid and undeveloped, but it is nonetheless an awful period of life with struggles that go largely undocumented, and when an album like Nevermind comes along that captures its essence with sincerity and artistry, it’s striking enough to speak to legions and spark entire movements.

Nevermind doesn’t sound dated to me 20 years later (though the suffocating compression in the final mix often makes me opt to listen to earlier recordings and live versions of the songs), and Nirvana is rare in the sense that I like them as much as I did when I was a teenager…perhaps even more so because as I’ve aged I’ve gained a better understanding of the mechanics of their music and songwriting craft and who they were & where they were coming from. And while Nevermind can certainly be blamed for influencing a lot of really awful music (thanks largely to how well it melded different sub-genres of rock and roll with pop songwriting), it’s even more of a testament to just how influential a piece of music it was and continues to be.