This week in September marks the 30th anniversary (or 30 A.D in the rock calendar) of the start of a glorious period which ended just as abruptly as it started. Nineteen hundred and ninety one (1991) was Year 0 for music. More specifically, it was when Nirvana’s NEVERMIND came out
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| If you don't have THIS sitting in a box somewhere in your parents house, this blog isn't for you. But then again, neither is life in general. |
Anything before this period was denominated Before Cobain (B.C). Like the original C in the original B.C, Kurt Donald Cobain would walk the earth for an even shorter time, before sacrificing himself for our greater good and saving us permanently from the hair bands, overamplified snare drum, and extended guitar solo’s of the 80’s which almost collapsed civilization.
The world may find it hard to believe today but the guys on the RIGHT saved humanity from the guys on the LEFT
Nirvana’s
songs were simple and shameless. Nirvana’s made it clear once and for all that
the human soul speaks and listens in 4 chords, nothing less, nothing more. And
they made this clearest on NEVERMIND.
Cobains lyrics were unrelated thoughts strung together by heroin. And Dave Grohl drummed the shit out of every song. I don’t care what the anyone says, his drumming was louder than the Big Bang. The guitar solo's in all of Nirvana's songs made it clear that it did not want to be in the song. The bass player was an effective way of reducing overall taxes and the other fella (s) who came and went were additional gig security I guess [check out the video below - til the end]. The legend goes that the unnamed fourth member never re-emerged from the crowd.
The founding members of Nirvana vs one sonofabitch who will forever have the greatest story to tell
Anyone
around my age today who says they didn’t start playing the guitar because of
Nirvana is a catholic priest who didn't touch a kid. In fact Come as You Are, in my calculation, is the first (and often only) song played by 95% anyone who touched a guitar and is alive today.
It was
around this time that angsty teenagers like your truly were introduced to cool words and concepts
like angst (itself), tourettes, suicide, depression, mullatos and other ideas...that haven't aged
too well. Nevermind didn’t come out with lyrics on the inlay (which was the most wonderful
ever when you were buying cassettes back in the day), and it was really impossible
to understand anything between the first and last words in all of Kurt’s singing
so various versions of the songs were floating around those days. I built my vocabulary and generally my entire personality around some of those mumbled words, which may explain a few things to those of you who know me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkwOJwvy5cI
My favorite
track on the album – Lounge Act (above), the most underrated piece of music ever, I
guarantee wasn’t originally meant to me sung in English but Arameic or
Hebrew or some other medieval tongue. Today is the day I actually found he said "Smell Her on You" and not "Smerrokyu". I came pretty close tho.
It’s sad that while we approach Year 30 A.D, the wokey disease is alive and well. The baby (boy, in case you missed it) on the the cover of Nevermind is suing (God knows who) for exploitation. I guess it took a combination of 1) waiting 30 years 2) running out on novelty of being the kid on the Nevermind to inspire the lawsuit to propel you to the top of the most hate mofo today, by the last generation.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-58327844
I can't wait to share the next part of the The History of Music - The Greatest Era if Music Ever. Judging by how I started writing this draft sometime in April and only published in panic after Facebook started blowing up Neverminds 30th Anniversary, I hope to get it out before the turn of the century.
