AceNewsDesk – Why is Kurt Cobain so important? Variations of this question about the Nirvana frontman/grunge icon pop up regularly on the popular social forum Reddit.

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Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Apr.07: 2024: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

Why did Kurt have such a cult following?

What made Kurt Cobain stand out? Explain to me like I’m five the cultural significance of Kurt Cobain. What made Nirvana so special? Can someone explain Nirvana’s influence and importance?

The questions are worthwhile — in the time of Spotify, TikTok and Taylor Swift, it’s hard to fathom how one singer-songwriter and his little rock band could have such a profound impact on music. There are many ways to answer this question, but perhaps the best one can be found by examining the musical landscape from 1994, the year Cobain died.

Tear down that wall

But first, let’s rewind back to the ’80s: Back then the American music world was divided. On the shiny, glittery surface, MTV-approved pop stars and poodle-haired rockers dominated the Billboard charts and radio playlists. Beneath that, in the so-called underground of sweaty clubs and college radio, bands toiled away under the loose umbrella of “alternative music” — punk, metal, grunge, indie rock, shoegaze — rarely worrying the charts or appealing to the tastemakers at record labels and the mainstream music media. The wall between the two worlds was rarely breached, but as the ’80s went on, a handful of bands began to scale that wall.

Alt-rock band REM reached the Billboard top 10 in 1987 with their album Document, thrash metallers Metallica did the same the following year with …

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And Justice For All, underground acts such as Jane’s Addictionand Soundgarden signed with major labels, and a previously unknown band named Faith No More combined rap, funk and metal to score an unlikely top 10 hit with the track Epic in 1990. MTV began to pay attention, more so-called alternative bands caught the ears of the major labels, and suddenly the underground was creeping into the sunlight.

In 1991, the paradigm shifted even further.

REM, now signed to major label Warner Bros, went to #1 with their album Out Of Time, and in the months that followed gangsta rappers NWA and Metallica also topped the US album charts.

Then, on January 11, 1992:

A scruffy Seattle trio named Nirvana scored a symbolic win for the burgeoning grunge movement when its album Nevermind deposed the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, from the top of the Billboard album charts. “ A record by a band no-one had ever heard of, which had hardly been promoted at all, had knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the chart,” Craig Schuftan summarised in his book Entertain Us!: The Rise and Fall of Alternative Rock in the Nineties.

A revolt from below had taken place.”

What followed was indeed a musical revolution — the alternative music scene that had been bubbling away beneath the mainstream suddenly came to a boil, sweeping like a tsunami across the US and the world, up-ending decades of traditional music industry thinking. Bands that had previously only dreamed of getting their music on MTV or pay-to-play radio playlists or in prime positions in record stores were suddenly doing all that and more, finding new legions of fans and selling millions of records in the process. Over the two years that followed Nirvana’s symbolic regicide, major labels scrambled and ambitious indies rose, all searching for “the new Nirvana”, the next unexpected success.

The beginning of the end for grunge @acenewsservices

The Seattle grunge scene had spurred the diversification and growing democratisation of the music industry, but Cobain’s death in April 1994 was a sad signpost that the end of a short-lived grunge era was nigh.

By 1994, these searches had made the music scene unrecognizable compared to a decade earlier. Despite this, 1994 was still technically a banner year for the rock subgenre.

Of the so-called big four of grunge — Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains and Soundgarden — the latter was the first to sign to a major label but the last to score a blockbuster record. Success finally arrived for Soundgarden in ’94 with Superunknown, which sold nine million copies worldwide thanks to its rampaging riffs (Spoonman), brooding grooves (Fell On Black Days), haunting epics (Black Hole Sun), and Chris Cornell’s incredible vocal range which seemingly spanned from heaven to hell. Not to be outdone, Pearl Jam’s third album Vitalogy became the second-fastest-selling album in US history (behind only Pearl Jam’s previous record Vs), and pushed the band forward sonically — it’s a punkier, less grungy, more diverse album that also features Better Man, one of the band’s biggest singles.

Meanwhile Alice In Chains followed up their massive 1992 record Dirt With Jar Of Flies, a largely acoustic mini-album that became the first EP to top the Billboard album charts.

For Nirvana, their Icarus-like career was over following Cobain’s death, meaning the release in November 1994 of their MTV Unplugged concert recorded 12 months earlier served as a quiet epitaph for the band that had instigated a musical revolution. The acoustic live album went #1 globally, has sold more than 12 million copies, and in Australia was among the top 50 best-selling albums for three years running. Beyond the big four, enthusiasm for grunge continued — L7’s Hungry For Stink, 7 Year Bitch’s Viva Zapata, and Melvins’ Stoner Witch all sold well, while Stone Temple Pilots’ Purple is another highlight of the genre from 1994. But one of the best grunge albums of all time landed just days after Cobain’s death, and it came from Hole — the band starring Cobain’s wife Courtney Love. Live Through This is part ferocious feminist roar, part fragile confession, set to a barrage of barnstorming riffs and burning melodies that was long overshadowed by the widowing of Love, but has come to be re-appraised as one of the great rock records of the ’90s.

The post-grunge wave begins

The term “post-grunge” began as a put-down — a sneering label hinting at a perceived lack of authenticity in the sound and attitude of the bands who rose in grunge’s wake. But for every terrible band that was tarred with the post-grunge brush, there were some great ones, and in 1994 they released some great albums. Some, like Veruca Salt‘s American Thighs and Weezer’s debut self-titled record (AKA The Blue Album) were rightly revered upon release, melding the abrasive edges of grunge with the sweetness of power-pop. Meanwhile albums such as Live’s Throwing Copper and Bush’s Sixteen Stone won devotees and detractors in equal measure. The haters dissed both bands as corporate cynical cash-ins riding the coat-tails of Nirvana and co, but the fans couldn’t get enough. Live’s big break scored three songs in the 1995 triple j Hottest 100 (I Alone amazingly appeared in both the 1994 and 1995 countdown) and Throwing Copper stayed at the pointy end of the ARIA album charts for four years. Bush’s Sixteen Stone had four songs in the Hottest 100 across the ’95 and ’96 countdowns, and slowly won over a huge following — released in December 1994, it took 16 months to crack the ARIA top 50, where it stayed for almost a year.

The return of punk

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Punk rock’s influence on grunge was evident, but as a standalone genre it had been languishing in the underground since its late ’70s heyday, much of its potency as a movement seemingly long forgotten.

But two albums from the Californian punk scene brought spiky-haired power chords and snotty attitude back to the fore, selling about 30 million copies in the process — The Offspring’s Smash and Green Day’s Dookie.

Both records are fast, sweary, fun, honest and as catchy as a cold.

They also helped open the door for older punks such as Bad Religion and NOFX to enjoy more success and are two of the biggest albums of 1994.

The Offspring‘s Smash remains the best-selling indie album of all time — its big singles Self Esteem and Come Out And Play spent six months each on the Billboard charts and were voted in at #3 and #4 respectively in the triple j Hottest 100.

Meanwhile Dookie, the bigger of the two albums, tapped into the angst and anxieties of teenagers the world over, and its popularity lingers — singles Basket Case and When I Come Around have just passed one billion and half a billion plays respectively on Spotify.

Further down the spiral

Few albums exemplify how far Nirvana had pushed the boundaries in 1994 than Nine Inch Nails’ second record The Downward Spiral — a noisy, violent slice of industrial rock that peaked at #2 in the US and #12 in Australia, and sold about 4.5 million copies worldwide.

Recorded in the Los Angeles home where members of the Manson family murdered Sharon Tate, the concept album follows a man on his path to suicide, and tackles themes such as religion, addiction, violence, depression, nihilism and more.

A grim yet immaculately produced record, The Downward Spiral spawned the songs Hurt, later a surprise hit for Johnny Cash, and depraved funk banger Closer, which incredibly reached #3 on the ARIA charts and #2 in triple j’s Hottest 100.

This mainstream acceptance of the heavier and darker undersides of the alternative scene proved highly influential for generations of metal musos who followed.

Mind you, 1994 also spawned the first album of Marilyn Manson, so it wasn’t without its downsides.

What is the alternative?

The broad scope of what “alternative rock” was meant that you could walk into a record store in 1994 and find some pretty disparate albums sitting in the same section. For example, you couldn’t get musically further from Nine Inch Nails‘ The Downward Spiral than Jeff Buckley’s Grace, both of which are considered alt-rock masterpieces. The only studio album released by Buckley during his lifetime, Grace is a spellbinding showcase for his remarkable voice, versatile guitar work, passionate songwriting and talent as an interpreter of other people’s songs — while his originals Last Goodbye and Grace were the songs that made it into the ’95 Hottest 100, it’s Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah that has become his legacy. Grace’s esteem has grown over the past 30 years, but the album was largely ignored upon release except in Australia, where the album climbed into the top 10 in September 1995 and has sold more than half a million copies.

Alternative music wasn’t just about guitars — Tori Amos took her heart-on-her-sleeve piano-driven rock songs to new heights on her second record, which remains her most successful.

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Driven by the wonderfully cryptic lead single Cornflake Girl (#35 in the Hottest 100, #19 on the ARIA charts) and debuting at the top of the UK charts, the album sold about 2.5 million copies worldwide and cemented the American singer-songwriter as one of the most vital voices of the ’90s.

The opening of the alt-rock floodgates meant that albums that sounded unlike anything that had come before suddenly had the potential to sell millions:

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• Exhibit A: the jangly/scuzzy imprecise science that is Pavement, who stuck with indie labels amid the alternative boom of the ’90s and scored big with the “slacker” anthems on their second album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, including Cut Your Hair, Range Life, and Gold Soundz.
• Exhibit B: cult favourites Ween, who were never going to sell millions but stunned the world in 1992 with the most unlikeliest of hits, Push Th’ Little Daisies — a song that never would have sold like it did without Nirvana upsetting the mainstream apple cart.

In 1994, Ween dropped Chocolate & Cheese, a cherished collection of genre-hopping absurdity that includes the singles Freedom Of ’76 and Voodoo Lady and made it to #80 on the ARIA album charts:

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• Exhibit C: Kyuss, who were as cultish as Ween and just as influential, and who brought stoner rock to the world, reaching #53 on the ARIA charts with their ’94 album Welcome To Sky Valley and paving the way for Queens Of The Stone Age.

So broad was the term alternative rock that it also included Hootie & The Blowfish, who were passed over by most major labels because they weren’t grunge enough but who were lumped under the alt umbrella as a marketing ploy by their eventual signers Atlantic Records. Their debut album Cracked Rear View, released July 1994, was the biggest-selling album in the US in 1995 and is estimated to have sold 21 million copies in the US alone.

Meanwhile, in Australia …

Nirvana’s success dramatically changed the American music industry, as well as Australia’s, which was structured with a similar divide between the mainstream and the underground. The first ripples of the alt-rock uprising reached Down Under in 1991 and bands such as Ratcat, The Clouds, You Am I and Cosmic Psychos began to make waves. But as former triple j presenter Richard Kingsmill put it, Australia needed its own Smells Like Teen Spirit moment to “really stamp how great all this Aussie music really was”.

“ And that was Tomorrow by Silverchair.”

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Cheekily dubbed “Nirvana In Pyjamas” by some, the Newcastle teens’ debut single, released in September 1994, was a rare worldwide hit for an Australian band and helped drag our own alt-rock movement out of the shadows.

Anarchy in the UK

The grunge band’s influence on the UK was less profound — the British music scene was already open to harder-edged sounds. For example, American alt-rockers Pixies, who had a profound influence on Nirvana, had three top-10 albums in the UK before they even cracked the Billboard top 60. But the rise of Nirvana and grunge ended up having an oddly inverse effect in England by 1994. While American guitar music was embracing its abrasiveness, the British equivalent leaned into its Englishness almost as a direct response to the grimness of grunge.

As Blur frontman Damon Albarn told Melody Maker in 1993 upon the release of their album Modern Life Is Rubbish: “Our last album killed baggy — this one will kill grunge.”

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And so rose Britpop, a burgeoning alt-rock sub-genre that would go on to dominate the mid-’90s much like grunge had dominated the first part of the decade. The Seattle sound was out and Cool Britannia — led by Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Suede, Elastica, Manic Street Preachers and Radiohead — was in.

The end, but not the end: Nirvana’s legacy extends beyond 1994, of course.

The number of kids who picked up a guitar because of Cobain, or drumsticks to emulate Dave Grohl, or a bass to play the loping lines of Krist Novoselic is innumerable, and continues to this day. You could argue that if it hadn’t been Nirvana, it would have been another band that stood on the shoulders of giants such as REM and Pixies and The Replacements and Sonic Youth, and dived over the wall that kept the underground away from the mainstream. But in the end, it was Nirvana. Their influence wasn’t just created by their sound or their industry impact though. The underdog status of Nirvana — the band no-one had heard of who dethroned the King of Pop — made them the band that other up-and-coming bands looked at and went “maybe we could do that”.

But 30 years on from Cobain’s passing, the music industry is such a different place that it’s hard to understand how profound an impact he and his band had.

But listening to the music from the year he died isn’t a bad place to start.

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