Nowhere is the singer’s pain more evident than on the grating bleats of the choruses in “You Know You’re Right,” the last song the band recorded, and one that didn’t appear on any studio album. Taken as a whole, Cobain’s vocal persona is so unlike anyone else’s that it seems to locate Nirvana in a time zone all its own. 3 on the Billboard album chart and is now reissued for the first time on vinyl (33rpm and 45rpm) and in several digital formats, they sound, if not exactly dated, then very much of their moment, for two reasons.įirst, listening all these years after Cobain’s death (he died in 1994 at age 27), I’m struck by how painfully pinched his voice sounds – when, that is, he isn’t unleashing those tremendous howls that captured so much Generation X frustration and alienation. Yet, great as the songs are on the 2002 best-of compilation Nirvana, which debuted at No. This was a band whose sensibility extended from David Bowie (“The Man Who Sold the World”) to Leadbelly (“In the Pines”), and who could be as intense and convincing on an MTV Unplugged acoustic broadcast as at an arena concert.
Songs like “Lithium” and “In Bloom” had melodies that had never been heard before in any genre, and chord structures that, while adapted to some degree from progressive heavy metal, had found a new home in songs full of real passion and pain, put across with perfectly raw musicianship. The shocking thing: Paired with a rare skill at writing truly original music was an honestly agonized front man, a croaking, charismatic/anti-charismatic young singer-guitarist who screamed “I feel stupid and contagious,” moaned “I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black,” and howled “Rape me” again and again – and whose rhythm guitar playing, like Pete Townshend’s, obviated the need for a lead guitarist. It quickly dawned on me that however bitter and sour these songs were, they were also brilliant. My first thought: What’s this scream-filled take-off on “Wild Thing”?īut it wasn’t long after my first exposure to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that I was playing in another band with younger guys – and covering Nirvana. Suddenly something startling came over the jukebox.
In 1991 I was in a battered old Greenwich Village rock club (long gone now) where I’d spent so many nights in a cover band playing Beatles, classic rock, and Willie Nelson for East Village friends and tourists from Japan and Australia. The ’80s had felt like such a limp time for rock that I didn’t even recognize the change at first. But although the grunge movement spearheaded by Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl together with fellow travelers like Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Bush, and Soundgarden was artistically strong and culturally potent, it also seems to have been a last gasp before the digital revolution killed the album and audience stratification made rock superstar artists and monster hit rock songs almost impossible. More than any other band, Nirvana re-energized and reinvented rock music in the 1990s after a moribund period when I thought rock had died.