So why is Nirvana’s Nevermind on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
One day in the fall of 1991, I walked home from high school, flipped on MTV, and saw the music video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
It changed my life.
Well, not right away, of course. I didn’t announce with bated breath that night to my parents that I’M A REAL GRUNGE BOY NOW MOM AND DAD.
But looking back, I align that moment with The Beatles appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 for a previous American generation. What I do recall from the first time I watched this loud, kind of sullen-looking band with long hair jamming out is that I had never heard that kind of sound before in my young life.
It was dark and heavy and yet somehow exciting and riveting.
I was a “classic rock” guy at the time, worshipping mainly at the altar of Led Zeppelin and The Doors, and my mind raced to classify what I was hearing with this band called Nirvana.
It was that intrigue – that new yearning to know more, to listen more – that shifted how I process and think about music.
And from the POV of my adolescent self, that’s not even getting to those weirdly alluring cheerleaders in their punk-goth anarchy uniforms.
To set the scene further, the pre-Nirvana very early ‘90s was a strange time in music and pop culture generally.
It was the era of Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli, and MC Hammer, and still felt like the ‘80s in terms of power shoulders and gaudy colors in fashion. Murder, She Wrote and Murphy Brown were two of the most popular TV shows in the country, and it was the tail end of a 12-year slog of Reagan and Bush Sr. in the White House.
Underneath all of that, there was an explosion of new sounds taking over the underground, college radio, and hipster-kid scenes – bands ranging from Operation Ivy and the Pixies to Public Enemy and De La Soul were producing their best work.
But little old me, rando high school kid on Long Island, was largely oblivious to all of this. Prior to that fateful first encounter with “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” there werecracks starting to form on my sheltered suburban shell, however: I had gotten hip to U2 and R.E.M. by then.
They were both gateway drugs to a different kind of sound, and both released seminal albums in 1991 (Achtung Baby and Out of Time, respectively). And meanwhile, my encounter with The Doors movie further expanded my formerly rather narrow musical palette while throttling my nascent sense of identity in a small but significant way.
And once those doors… of perception were blown off their hinges, if you’ll pardon the pun, I was primed to dive like a maniac into punk, ska, alternative rock, and hip-hop just as the 1990s were producing the richest of stews to feed my hunger.
Nevermind was the catalyst. Quoting the best 1,000 albums ever piece on MTV Unplugged in New York (#11), here’s one key reason:
That swath of source music alone proves out Nirvana’s wide-ranging influences that span far beyond punk rock and metal. I’ve come to understand that one of the reasons they’re one of my favorite bands of all is because of the pop, new wave, ‘70s guitar rock, garage, and other influences you can feel flitting through much of their material.
While Kurt Cobain reportedly later complained how “mainstream” the album sounds, I’d argue that that was producer Butch Vig’s genius – reining in the band’s more caustic and hardcore punk sensibilities just enough to captivate and entrance yours truly without fully scaring the shit out of me.
Later, I would fully embrace Bleach (#73), Nirvana’s brilliant (and far more raw-sounding) debut album, and even come under the spell of soul-bludgeoning tracks like “Oh The Guilt,” but Nevermind sits at just the right place to propel it to become a major pivot point in American music and popular culture.
For all the fuss and hubbub that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and, to a lesser extent, follow-up single “Come As You Are” caused, I personally feel much closer to the rest of the album versus those two smash hits.
Indeed, there have been moments in my life when I’ve been convinced that “Drain You” is my favorite song of all. Of everything.
It has an exquisite hook – and Kurt Cobain more than anything was an absolute genius at crafting simple yet universe-tier clever guitar hooks – an explosion of sound, and ragged cool-ass sing-songy vocals with clever-sarcastic-cryptic lyrics that scream Gen X at full-throated youth-set powers.
One baby to another says, “I’m lucky to have met you”
I don’t care what you think unless it is about me
It is now my duty to completely drain you
I travel through a tube and end up in your infection
And then on top of that it’s the way that Dave Grohl’s voice blends with Kurt’s at the end of each line – met you… about me… drain you… your infection.
Perfection.
The documentary Montage of Heck caused me to reappraise “Territorial Pissings.” It was used in an early scene, played against… well, a montage, and the effect is blistering and marvelously exciting.
What’s interesting is that it’s much more high energy thrashy punk rock than “grunge.” Which means it falls pretty deeply into my wheelhouse of music I dig, especially as executed with precisely controlled chaos by this band.
There’s also that incredible line, pulled, of all places, from Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22:
Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you
I think about that line a lot, alternatively from an ironic or non-ironic perspective, depending on the situation. Kurt Cobain’s lyrics, like so many great songwriters, are slippery like that.
I’ve always loved “Polly,” but it took me years to figure out that it formed its own gateway for me, one that pointed the way to heavy-feeling music that’s delicate and often acoustic in terms of instrumentation.
This style, which I sometimes think of as folk grunge but at times can be categorized as anti-folk, turned me on to artists ranging from Beck (see: One Foot in the Grave, #18) to the Meat Puppets to Alice in Chains’ quieter work (especially see their fantastic Unplugged album, #143).
What’s also great about “Polly” is how flexible it is. For example, this version, performed on Live at the Paramount, leans into its harmonies to the extent that the word sublime doesn’t quite do it justice.
I honestly never paid close attention to what “Polly” is about, and lightly assumed it was some cryptically worded narrative about a relationship (perhaps with S&M undertones?) and was therefore a little shaken up when I found out that it’s about something much darker than that.
Even more embarrassingly, once upon a time I recall kind of whisper/singing “Polly” to my college girlfriend, simply because I love the melody so much and probably imagined the gesture to be romantic. She recoiled a little and asked, “What’s that song about?”
“Lithium” shows off Kurt Cobain’s close study of the Pixies’ “quiet-loud” playbook, meaning following up a gentle, pretty verse with loud, raucous chorus. It’s perfected, weaponized as the verse is gorgeous in an intimate and slightly heartbreaking way, while the chorus unleashes thunderous, stadium-shuddering hooks.
Don’t fool yourself that Kurt never wanted to be a rock star – “Lithium” is too good, too smart, and too potent to truck with any of that.
It’s just so fucking heartbreaking that his demons overtook his life shortly after he became a full-blown Rock Star, with the unasked-for title of “voice of a generation” thrown on top of it for good measure.
When I think about it, it still hurts a little after all these years. Maybe in the way it only can with something you came to deeply love at a formative age.
I thought about ending this piece in a few different ways: catching Nirvana live in Buffalo in 1993, a true thrill, or hanging out in a friend’s dorm room when I found out that Kurt Cobain took his own life in the spring of ’94, perhaps.
But I think the right bookend is when I watched one of the first airings of Nirvana’s performance on MTV Unplugged in late 1993 while home on break from Binghamton University. It was only two short years since I had first heard of Nirvana by way of the same network’s “Buzz Bin” segment, but at that age so much had changed for me in that time.
Quoting again from the Nirvana Unplugged piece:
As the credits rolled and the band played through their devastating, gut punching cover of Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” I recall feeling the hair raise on my arms.
The way Kurt Cobain hits the word shiver on shiv-VER the whole night through alone. I still feel that feeling even when thinking about it now, decades later.
As you get older and look back on your younger self, momentous events seem impossibly close to each other in retrospect, specks in time that blip from one to the next.
And now, these decades later, we’re left with the music and the impact and influence Nirvana has had on so many, like me.
Nevermind is the album that shaped me more than any other. It’s my origin myth, my coming-of-age story with music. And with that, the only other thing I could possibly add is:
Oh well, whatever, never mind
#1 of the best 1,000 albums ever.
Some stats & info about Nirvana – Nevermind
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, Indie Rock, Punk Rock, Grunge, Alternative Rock, Seattle Bands
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #6
- All Music’s rating – 5 out of 5 stars
- When was Nevermind released? 1991
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #1 out of 1,000
Nirvana’s Nevermind on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from Nirvana’s Nevermind that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
I don’t care what you think unless it is about me.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.