My Favorite Albums - Number 9

Nevermind - Nirvana (1991)


I was the last guy on the Nirvana bandwagon. Well, not really the last guy. I was 17 when this album first came out, and I saw the video for "Smells like Teen Spirit" on MTV and I just didn't get it. I didn't listen to music like this on the radio - although in Montgomery, Alabama, none of the radio stations were playing anything like this anyway. I didn't have a whole lot of teenage "I hate the world and everything in it" angst, and I just couldn't get where they were coming from.

Then, I remember shopping at a music store in a mall somewhere (ah, the days before the Internet), and hearing virtually the entire album on the store sound system. When it got to the intro of "Territorial Pissings" and Krist Novoselic hollers out the line from "Everybody Get Together" and then Kurt Cobain goes into a guitar riff that sounds like the guitar and amp and soundboard are held together with duck tape (and knowing what I know now, it might have been), it all made sense to me. Nirvana was the anti-John Denver. The music of the "Make Love, Not War" era - the 1960s - had devolved into the feel-good but disillusioned 1970s, which had devolved into the lightweight, synthetic 1980s. Nirvana kicked in the door to the 1990s and dethroned Michael Jackson from the top of the pop charts with an attitude that said "the world sucks, and we don't care." Nirvana almost singlehandedly destroyed hair bands like Poison and Cinderella, who suddenly looked woefully out of touch. Here was a band with no gimmick, no makeup, no costume, stringy hair, and out of tune instruments playing a style of music that was raw, angry, and yet melodic and catchy too.

Aside from the fact that the album is a milestone in rock music, it is actually an easier listen than you might expect, being the most polished and "produced" of Nirvana's albums. Many of the songs - "In Bloom," "Come as You Are," and "Lithium" come to mind - have a genuine singalong quality. There are even a couple of quieter numbers; the dark "Polly" and the emotive, autobiographical "Something in the Way," where Cobain sings about living underneath a bridge, as he did for a brief stint in Aberdeen, WA.

It's hard to listen to Nirvana today without thinking about the sorry end of Kurt Cobain, who couldn't tame the addictions and self-destructive behavior that brought about his untimely demise at the end of a shotgun in April 1994. But in this album you can hear the voice of a band that changed the music world in its prime.