ALBUM: "Nevermind" - Nirvana (Geffen, 1991)

In the wake of Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994, Nirvana’s second album has assumed a near-mythic status which renders it untouchable to all but the loftiest of social commentators. One of those ubiquitous titles which pops up time and again in the upper echelons of 'All-Time Greatest' lists, so much has been written about Nevermind that its status now precedes it - often to such an extent that its actual content is unfairly undermined. Since I bang on about the band so often on these pages, I thought it was time to offer my own appraisal.


Given the album’s casual omnipotence, it’s easy to forget precisely what Nirvana achieved with Nevermind: whether you dig its artistic accomplishments or fail to see what all the fuss is about, there’s simply no disputing the enormity of its impact. Nirvana’s emergence at the start of the last decade paved the way for every major rock act to have followed. Call it a blessing or a curse, but without Nirvana there’d be no Green Day, Rage Against the Machine, Weezer, Muse or Radiohead - in fact, the entire cultural landscape itself would be radically different (Quentin Tarantino acknowledges Cobain in his screenplay for Pulp Fiction, a film he offered the singer and wife Courtney Love key roles in). The album hit a nerve which struck deep into the heart of a generation struggling to find its own identity, causing a wounded soul to emerge kicking and screaming in all its pent-up fury.


Indeed, beyond its immediate musical influence, the success of Nevermind revolutionised the way the industry thought, in turn opening the door to a world of possibilities for musicians previously considered too much of a minority voice to achieve cultural recognition. Sub-genres like post-rock would never have been given the opportunity to develop and flourish as freely as they were ultimately able to, and even leftfield acts like Death Cab for Cutie owe the band a clear debt of gratitude (frontman Ben Gibbard recently composed the score for About a Son, the upcoming documentary narrated by Cobain from hours of unreleased audio footage). Predating the equally-significant explosion of online music dissemination by a good ten years, Nirvana’s revitalization of the rock market brought passion, intelligence, attitude and integrity back to music.


It’s obvious to any casual listener that on a fairly basic musical level Nirvana were far from revolutionary, basically tacking together a series of key influences (Pixies, Melvins, R.E.M., Sex Pistols, The Beatles) into one dirty great roaring package. However, if you’re able to strip away all the window-dressing applied to the band and listen to the music afresh, I challenge even the thorniest critic to remain unmoved. It still lights a fire in me every time I hear Very Ape or Radio Friendly Unit Shifter, just as Breed makes me want to shove the nearest person to hand and get shoved right back – one can only imagine how it must’ve felt hearing Teen Spirit for the first time in a world full of C&C Music Factory clones. Hell, a fair proportion of Nirvana’s output wasn’t even that special (Dive and Been a Son being two examples which immediately spring to mind), but the reason their catalogue will continue to endure is down to the sheer passion, drive and intellectual savvy which underpins it. You simply can’t exchange illusion for substance when it comes to achieving longevity in rock’n’roll - G.G. Allin died for the cause, but he’s unlikely to be revered fifty years from now because he never had any fucking tunes.


One of the charges that I hear consistently hurled at Nirvana is that they were an overrated teen-angst group peddling immature rants against the world when they ultimately had it pretty cushy (personal discontent aside, let’s not forget that this was a band who sold 10 million records and once knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard chart). However, to adopt such a narrow perspective does, I feel, rather miss the point. Of course they’re overplayed and unduly deified, but that’s hardly the band’s fault - any more than the fact that their aggression resonates with young people or that Smells Like Teen Spirit has now become an excuse for 12-year-olds to ruck at school discos. Kurt Cobain’s own relationship with success may have been complex and evasive, but the simple truth is that both he and Nirvana never asked for any of it: the hype, the fortune, the pressure or the mantle.


Moreover, to simply dismiss them as rudimentary angst-merchants is both ignorant and reductive, since any song Cobain wrote which pandered to this mentality was always endowed with a hearty dose of cynicism and irony (let’s face it, most sulky adolescents rather miss the point of Teen Spirit’s knowingly apathetic rhetoric). There’s little direct mention of adolescent malaise anywhere on Bleach, the only album of theirs actually written during the singer’s formative years, and Cobain always possessed an astute degree of reflexivity when it came to analysing his own position in the world (lest we forget, this was a man who was all in favour of naming the follow-up to Nevermind ‘I Hate Myself and I Want to Die’). However, rather than kicking brattishly against the mould, his artistic response was considerably more subversive, opening In Utero with a sardonic track which satirised his own status as king of the outcast teens (Serve the Servants) and a musical lampoon of Teen Spirit that addressed the media’s intrusion into his life through savage metaphor (Rape Me). Cobain wasn’t any kind of genius, just as he wasn’t saying anything that hadn’t been said a hundred times before by infinitely more literate artists. However, he was a gifted, articulate and intelligent songwriter capable of disguising his own confessional intent under veils of imagery: listen to the indolent carnal entreaties of Come As You Are, which effortlessly eclipses the unsubtle bluster that nu-metal bedwetters like Papa Roach would later hold up as the last word in catharsis.


The moment which always best epitomises Cobain to me is the end of their MTV Live and Loud set, in which a baying audience whoops and hollers while the band destroy their instruments. Alone onstage, Cobain flings his guitar through the air before turning to the crowd and clapping rabidly in a vitriolic display of sarcasm. So far, so characteristic, but then something unexpected happens: he turns back, and – with an almost involuntary look of guilt – loiters apologetically at the side of the stage for a moment before disappearing from view. The image is eternally poignant: that of an angry, confused young man on top of the world but unable to view his achievements as anything but hollow - torn between conflicting desires for recognition and anonymity, adoration and respect; between the purity of his intentions and the bastardisation of his art for commercial gain.


The fact is then that myth-making has always been redundant in the case of Nirvana. Cast aside the cultural ramifications of their success and the romantic gloss of Cobain’s troubled psyche and you’re left with the eternally-befuddled perception of Everett True, the band’s unofficial man-on-the-floor who has remained perpetually unable to reconcile the myth with his own direct experience of the trio: a small-time punk band kicking against an establishment they had no affinity with (former NME scribe Keith Cameron once described the trio in equally delightful terms, deeming them “a beautiful waste of time”). As a teenager in the mid-90s, I grew up with the legend, not the people behind it - to this end, I’ll probably never be able to get as close to Nirvana as I’d ultimately like since it seems inconceivable to me that they were once just another touring band you could check out at your local fleapit. But I’m slowly getting there: as I continue to reach the same age as Cobain’s own personal milestones, the more clearly I’m able to view them in purely intimate terms.


Above all else though, I’ve discovered that for me Nirvana do exactly what they say on the tin: they take you to a place of absolute harmony. Nevermind is a record that beats you about the head until the damage is so profound it hurts no longer; just when it looks like you’ve finally been bludgeoned into submission, they spoon-feed you sugar ’til you drool like a baby. It’s no secret that Cobain used music as an outlet for his own internal conflict, or that the literal definition of the band’s name formed a direct correlation with his perception of punk rock (which he saw as a spiritual entity capable of taking you to a place of total freedom). This is why he was able to hurl himself into the drum-kit night after night with no thought for self-preservation: as long as he was in the throes of this perfect escape, nothing could ever hurt him.


There’s a moment on Nevermind which encapsulates this concept with effortless majesty. It’s during the middle blast of Stay Away, where Krist Novoselic’s bass just kinds of dips around in mid-air while Cobain’s guitar chimes in perfect melodic unity; soon after, a slashing refrain cuts across the vista accompanied by the words “I don't know why!”. It’s a total punk-rock freefall, a state of blissed-out immunity that’s neither here nor there: the sound of someone awash in a wall of distortion, flailing aimlessly in hopeless abandon. The same is equally true of Lithium, a song whose dopey smile is able to mask the pain inside because its author seems content to exist in his own protective bubble. As Nevermind’s penultimate track suggests, both songs are blissful sighs of resignation - a submissive shrug designed to leave you floating on air. Played loud, they leave me feeling utterly invincible, as if consumed by one overwhelming response: I’m on a plain. I can’t complain.


With this in mind, go put on Nevermind again, crank up the volume and just let it flood over you. Lose yourself in the fluffy cloudscape of Lithium and slam-dance like a loon to the all-out aggression of Territorial Pissings. Resist the urge to search for immediate meaning in the lyrics and appreciate them for what they are: a series of misnomers and non-sequiturs strung together in a specific order towards a certain effect. Listen to the chorus of In Bloom and laugh yourself silly at the irony of a thousand meatheads hollering along to one of the smartest refrains ever penned, never quite grasping that they know not what it means. Check out the hilarious middle-eight of On a Plain, where Cobain attempts to utter some profound rumination on life but ends up only confusing himself (“As a defence, I’m neutered and spayed / What the hell am I trying to say?”). And then go watch the wickedly demented video for In Utero’s lead-in single Heart-Shaped Box, which proves definitively why most of the band’s contemporaries failed to survive the hype of the so-called ‘grunge explosion’ - they were simply incapable of writing a song so artful in craft and brutal in execution.


Dying young seals the legend of an artist in a time-capsule - it solidifies their image in memory, ensuring they can never become anything less than their achievements in life. In short, they’re allowed to burn out but never fade away. Would Kurt Cobain’s output have sucked now if his life hadn’t been cut so tragically short? If the band’s MTV Unplugged set and prospective collaboration with Michael Stipe were anything to go by, I seriously doubt it. Cobain’s mass of wasted potential is that which has always left the sourest aftertaste, since creatively if not personally it’s always seemed like he still had so much left to give (if you’ve never heard Do Re Mi, his final recording which eventually surfaced on With the Lights Out, go hunt it down - it’s an astonishing song that offers an all-too-tantalising glimpse into the next stage of his ongoing evolution).


While In Utero perhaps remains a more accomplished album in strictly artistic terms (spare a thought for my other half, who was once forced to endure a drunken rant on why the album’s second side “could easily take any rock record of the last 25 years”), for these reasons Nevermind will always be the one that takes the cake. As Dave Grohl attests in Eagle Rock’s excellent Classic Albums documentary, the band’s intention was never to create any kind of landmark, just to make an album that sounded really good. It still does. It always will. Nevermind: the bollocks.