Nevermind |
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Released: September 24, 1991 Peak: 12 US, 7 UK, 110 CN, 2 AU, 16 DF Sales (in millions): 11.0 US, 1.81 UK, 30.0 world (includes US and UK) Genre: rock > grunge |
Tracks:Song Title (Writers) [time] (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to charts.
Songs written by Kurt Cobain unless noted otherwise. Total Running Time: 42:38 The Players:
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Rating: 4.493 out of 5.00 (average of 29 ratings)
Quotable:“Nirvana planted the alternative flag on the Iwo Jima of American consciousness.” – Clark Speicher, The ReviewAwards:(Click on award to learn more).
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About the Album“Few albums have occupied the cultural consciousness like this one.” AZ “This is now an omni-present all-time classic” AD “and just may be compared in the same breath to albums like Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.” DV2If the sound of grunge feels overly “familiar now, it’s only because thousands of rock records that followed it were trying very hard to cop its style.” AZ When Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in 1991, it was quickly celebrated as one of the tentpole albums (along with Pearl Jam’s Ten, Alice in Chains’ Dirt, and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger) of the emerging grunge movement out of Seattle. In the decades since, it has come to be viewed as not only the grunge album, but the defining album of the 1990s. Why Nevermind Became a LandmarkNirvana was part of “a sea change in popular music as crucial as those that occurred in 1962 and 1976 (via the Beatles and punk respectively).” CM In 1977, the Sex Pistols “killed late-‘70s rock” VB with Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. However, in the 1980s, “rock and roll and its hedonistic lifestyle had mutated to a commercialized, bombastic, and frequently hollow peak.” CQ Along came Nirvana and an album “in which three punk underdogs conquered mainstream America, destroyed hair metal, and defined a generation.” EW’12 That trio of singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Dave Grohl “offered a complete reset to the idea of a rock band in the 20th century.” CQ It “served as the antidote to the musical holocaust of the ‘80s.” RV“This is hard rock as the term was understood before metal moved in – the kind of loud, slovenly, tuneful music you think no one will ever [make] again until the next time it happens, whereupon you wonder why there isn’t loads more.” RC The abum also “shifted fashion trends, put Seattle on the musical map like never before, saved Sub Pop Records, surfaced the underground, set off a major label feeding frenzy, [and] sold a bazillion T-shirts.” PM Perhaps most significantly, it “introduced the world to its (last?) big rock star.” PM Nirvana “gave alienation a face and an unforgettable voice.” VB The Voice of a GenerationKurt Cobain became the voice of a generation because his “dejected attitude spoke to a generation that felt disenfranchised and ignored by the corporate and political interests that dominated the ’80s.” CQ A review in the New York Times said the album “fits in perfectly with the directionless disaffection of the 20something generation.” CSThe album title was “a perfect summation of Nirvana’s independent, contemplative attitude while giving voice to the mass of young people around the world who felt, simply, misunderstood.” CQ As USA Today said the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” “anointed Kurt Cobain the Elvis of the grunge movement.” UT The Times review specifically commented on the album’s lead track and anthemic single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that “Nirvana knows only too well, teen spirit is routinely bottled, shrink-wrapped and sold. Mr. Cobain, acutely aware of the contradiction of operating in an industry that’s glad to turn rebellion into money.” CS After all, even the album cover features a baby swimming after a dollar bill, “perfectly encapsulating the corporate-weary tone of the music.” CS Even as “Teen Spirit” railed against the very subject it ended up representing, however, the song became the anthem for a generation. As Paste Magazine’s Ben Salmon says, even years later when someone hears “the jet-engine guitars and they’ll hear Kurt Cobain raggedly howl ‘I feel stupid and contagious’—and feel a little less alone. After everything else fades away, that will be the enduring legacy of Nirvana.” PM From Bleach to NevermindNirvana were “scrappy garageland warriors setting their sights on a land of giants.” RS After their “undistinguished 1989 debut, Bleach, [which] relied on warmed-over Seventies metal riffs,” RS Nirvana made the leap to Geffen because Cobain “wanted the group to be popular, and could see them maybe selling as many records as Sonic Youth.” AD“The production team of Butch Vig and Andy Wallace ‘tidied’ up the sound of the early Nirvana” AD while still emphasizing the “guitar-heavy blend of bubblegum punk” QM the band crafted on Bleach. “Nirvana…created precisely the sort of record…Sub Pop [strove] for with bands like Mudhoney and Tad since its inception in 1986.” QM Dethroning the King of PopNevermind was stuffed into enough stockings over Christmas of ‘91 to boot the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, from his roost at the top of the Billboard album chart. Author Chris Smith said the album was “shooing away the 1980s like an annoying insect and establishing a new sound for a new decade.” CS The album went on to sell over 10 million copies domestically – a feat accomplished by less than 100 albums in the history of music.The album didn’t take off just because of Cobain’s quick ascension to iconic status. It had much to do with the album being a collection of “bracing punk-disguised-as-pop.” PM Nirvana displayed a knack for “evocative wordplay” AM and “crisp pop melodicism.” BL The songs “exemplify the band’s skill at inscribing subtlety onto dense, noisy rock” RS that was “positively glistening with echo and fuzz-box distortion.” AM Beyond “Teen Spirit”Of course, an album doesn’t reach this kind of stature just on the basis of one song. It “flowed from one great song to the nex, each recognizable in itos own right.” CM Alongside “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nevermind found top-10 success on the album chart with “Spirit,” In Bloom, and Come As You Are. The latter shows a “restraint…that only adds to the yearning, with the guitars creating an otherworldly contrast.” CMThere’s also “the barely contained Stay Away,” CM “the buzzsaw blast of Breed,” CM “the hardcore fury of Territorial Pissings, the barbed energy of Lounge Act, and the solemn, searing Something in the Way – the closing acoustic ballad that sounded like it had taken in every emotion spat out and sped up by the record and transformed it into graceful acceptance.” CM One of the most disturbing songs is Polly, “an acoustic tale that Cobain wrote from the perspective of a man who has kidnapped, tortured and raped a young woman…His crimes are casual, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.” CM Luckily, “the resourceful girl outwits her captor” CM and the song becomes one of “celebrating women struggling to survive a patriarchal world.” CM The Explosion of AlternativeNirvana wasn’t just at the forefront of grunge supplanting hair bands and helping give a dose of ferocity to pop music, but reshaping the definition of alternative rock. In the early ‘80s, bands like U2, R.E.M., The Cure, INXS, and Depeche Mode started out gaining audiences on college radio stations that afforded them small, but loyal cult followings. Throughout the decade, those bands rose to prominence.In the 1990s, Nirvana “planted the alternative flag on the Iwo Jima of American consciousness.” RV Nevermind served as a “foundation for most of the rock…of the ‘90s…loud, distorted guitars; raging, sometime screaming vocals; and lyrics that range from the pessimistic, to the positive, and to the apathetic.” DV1 In essence, Nirvana and the guitar-based copycats that followed erased what had been known as alternative rock and turned it into mainstream rock. Notes:“Endless, Nameless” was added as a hidden track to later pressings. |
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First posted 3/15/2008; last updated 11/27/2024. |
Yeah. Pretty on the nose. "Bubblegum punk"? I'll have to let that sink in a little.
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