Well, whatever, "Nevermind..."

[macro]

Try this version on for size - I heard about Anka's album on NPR (maybe Fresh Air) and it was intriguing to hear a big band take on the song:

Well, now, that was different. I had never listened to Anka or any big band for that matter, but it was really interesting to hear that song (and some others at youtube) that he had redone. I ended up going over there and listening to a couple more. I've always believed that a great song is a great song, regardless of the genre, and this is evidence IMO.

One great musical masterpiece was the title track from from Metallica's And Justice For All CD. I always wanted to hear a huge orchestra perform that song.

[M2]

As much as I disliked Nirvana and the whole Seattle thing, I can't argue.

My dislike was because I was a child of 70s and 80s rock, and the new sound was a shock to my system. For the first time in my life, at age 25, I felt outdated and uncool. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" just sounded like a bunch of jumbled noise to me.

I now appreciate the band and the album and it's place in music history, but it doesn't bring back great memories.

I'm the same age, but I had the opposite reaction. I was beyond tired of Boomer rock and I was aching for our generation to bust out with something different.

[bucksfan2]

You could make the argument that Nevermind was the most influential rock album ever produced. It took the Seattle grunge movement mainstream which lead to all the different varieties of music we hear today. Smells Like Teen Spirit also became the anthem for people in my generation and paved the way for the music video.

Was this also around the time CD's became very popular?

[Johnny Footstool]

I agree Bleach has a better sound, and it' less forced "grunge" which I like, but the iconic singles on Nevermind make it better IMHO...

My favorites were the non-singles -- "Drain You," "On a Plain," "Something in the Way," and of course "Polly." (I had just started dating a girl named Polly when the album came out. I ended up marrying her.)

[westofyou]

You could make the argument that Nevermind was the most influential rock album ever produced. It took the Seattle grunge movement mainstream which lead to all the different varieties of music we hear today. Smells Like Teen Spirit also became the anthem for people in my generation and paved the way for the music video.

Was this also around the time CD's became very popular?

Sgt Peppers makes Nevermind look like smalltime IMO, Nevermind is great but it's more about a marketing explosion then a realization to the music industry, and all those avenues of music where already there when Nevermind came out, they just weren't being sold in the malls.

Doolittle, Straight out of Compton, Ritual de lo Habitual and Pretty Hate Machine were all out and blaring before they threw that kid into the pool for that photo shoot. There was tons of great music out there before and after... but hey just one mans opinion.

[M2]

You could make the argument that Nevermind was the most influential rock album ever produced. It took the Seattle grunge movement mainstream which lead to all the different varieties of music we hear today. Smells Like Teen Spirit also became the anthem for people in my generation and paved the way for the music video.

Was this also around the time CD's became very popular?

CDs were already mainstream by that time. Had been for about 5 years.

And the music video popped in the early '80s.

But Nirvana, more than any other band, provided a generational call to arms. Nevermind was Gen X's calling card. It was a behind-the-scenes generation until that point. After that, music, movies and pop culture began to change rapidly. I'd argue that Gen X feeling that it had arrived in some measure helped swing the 1992 Presidential election. A lot of young people who might have sat on the sidelines instead got out and voted. The workplace even got altered (notably many companies became a lot less buttoned up).

[redsfandan]

You could make the argument that Nevermind was the most influential rock album ever produced. It took the Seattle grunge movement mainstream which lead to all the different varieties of music we hear today. Smells Like Teen Spirit also became the anthem for people in my generation and paved the way for the music video.

Was this also around the time CD's became very popular?

as much as i like nirvana and nevermind i think that's going just a little overboard.

cd's had already become the then next stop in the evolution of music packaging.

edit: i want to guess that you don't mean it paved the way for music videos in general. that wouldn't make much sense to me.

[M2]

Sgt Peppers makes Nevermind look like smalltime IMO, Nevermind is great but it's more about a marketing explosion then a realization to the music industry, and all those avenues of music where already there when Nevermind came out, they just weren't being sold in the malls.

Doolittle, Straight out of Compton, Ritual de lo Habitual and Pretty Hate Machine were all out and blaring before they threw that kid into the pool for that photo shoot. There was tons of great music out there before and after... but hey just one mans opinion.

The Beatles were huge before Sgt. Peppers. On either side of Sgt. Peppers, they had vastly superior records (Revolver and the White Album). The British Invasion was three years old and going strong by the time Sgt. Peppers rolled around. Psychedlia came and went in a flash during that period with very little lasting effect on music in general.

Sgt. Peppers main achievements have to do with inside baseball - how records get recorded, AOR, pretty packaging being as important as the sound.

It definitely changed the business, but the world was already in rapid flux. Boomers were already ascendant and grabbing the horns of American culture. So they wore Nehru jackets for a year. Big deal. The post World War II society was being seized by the first post World War II generation and Sgt. Peppers, IMO, pales in comparison to Meet the Beatles when viewed through that lens.

As for the Pixies, Jane's Addiction and NIN, yes they were big in the underground (which had grown fairly large by that time, well beyond its hardcore roots), but it was a separate society. Most of my friends and I were plugged into it, but you could be right next to it and completely miss it. My college roommate, despite the fact that he lived in a major metropolitan area and everyone he knew was deep into the local club scene, was completely oblivious to it. Once you got beyond the minority that knew those bands extremely well, it was fodder for blank stares.

And insiders were always taken by surprise by who made it. I can tell you that folks in Boston were befuddled that the Pixies were the band to break through from that area. Throwing Muses were supposed to be the last, best hope of the Boston indie scene after so many had fallen by the wayside.

From what I gather, Mother Love Bone was supposed to be Seattle's breakthrough act, but then Andrew Wood ODed. A month before Nevermind hit, Pearl Jam released Ten and no one was paying any attention.

On the national front, the Chili Peppers had scored success with Mother's Milk and probably the biggest indie album to that point had been Faith No More with "The Real Thing," which featured a top 10 hit with "Epic."

But Nevermind topped the charts around the globe. Suddenly Pearl Jam had an audience for Ten, the Chili Peppers went from underground darlings to mainstream with Blood Sugar Sex Magik (released on the same day as Nevermind). I know a lot of people who became Pixies and Jane's fans after those bands had broken up, picking up back CDs after the fact from Columbia Record Club.

Everything changed after Nevermind. Like Eric Bachmann said, the underground got overcrowded. There was no more subbacultcha.

I count rap as a parallel movement, which absolutely broke mainstream prior to indie.

[westofyou]

My college roommate, despite the fact that he lived in a major metropolitan area and everyone he knew was deep into the local club scene, was completely oblivious to it.

Dave... it has to be Dave.

The Beatles were huge before Sgt. Peppers.

Bigger than Jesus IIRC....

It definitely changed the business, but the world was already in rapid flux. Boomers were already ascendant and grabbing the horns of American culture. So they wore Nehru jackets for a year. Big deal. The post World War II society was being seized by the first post World War II generation and Sgt. Peppers, IMO, pales in comparison to Meet the Beatles when viewed through that lens.

Revolver was more groundbreaking sound wise, Sgt Peppers kicked the paisley generation into high gear and made it a magazine ad for the movement, as Nevermind did for grunge and the unbuttoned down look.

The debate of what the greatest album is could be beaten into the ground... what I never get is how Trout Mask Replica always ends up in the argument when the music snob part of fandom gets involved

[M2]

Dave... it has to be Dave.

You are correct sir. I thought he was an anomaly until I moved to Virginia and discovered he was mainstream.

Fair point about Sgt. Peppers and its marketing impact, but the marketing world was already Boomer-centric by the time 1967 rolled around. It was just the latest twist.

My take is/was that prior to Nevermind, Gen X was an afterthought (assumed to be mostly a mini version of the Boomers). The Boomers arrived like a decade-long Normandy invasion, wave after wave they kept steaming onto the shores. Gen X, IMO, arrived with atomic blast called Nevermind. While you can see the antecedents to the blast itself through the filter of history, the post-Nevermind world was starkly different and it wasn't just pop culture.

The Boomers got a litany of big events and signifiers which proclaimed their ascendance. Billy Joel even made a really awful song in which he listed them. If he were to do the same thing for Gen X, it would sound like something out of Edgar Allan Poe, with "nevermind" finishing each stanza.

Muppets, Fonzie, Scooby Doo, MTV, Run DMC, Mary Lou Retton, Mike Tyson, nevermind
Columbia disaster, Berlin Wall, dot-com boom, Monica Lewinsky, who won Florida, 9-11, nevermind

And I believe that's the entirety of it.

[Falls City Beer]

Nevermind kind of sucked, IMO. Horrible production, unrealized potential all over the place.

But man, In Utero was a revelation.

[Falls City Beer]

Dave... it has to be Dave.



Bigger than Jesus IIRC....



Revolver was more groundbreaking sound wise, Sgt Peppers kicked the paisley generation into high gear and made it a magazine ad for the movement, as Nevermind did for grunge and the unbuttoned down look.

The debate of what the greatest album is could be beaten into the ground... what I never get is how Trout Mask Replica always ends up in the argument when the music snob part of fandom gets involved

Never loved Trout Mask, but Doc at the Radar Station is outstanding.

[M2]

Nevermind kind of sucked, IMO. Horrible production, unrealized potential all over the place.

But man, In Utero was a revelation.

In Utero bores me to tears. Take Rape Me, Frances Farmer and RFUS off that record and it's a pretty empty vessel.

I also have developed a problem with Steve Albini-produced records. I'm a big Albini fan (love Big Black, love Shellac, think he does a superior job of song construction), but he'll always be an analog loyalist at heart and the records he produced in the '90s fade into the subsonic range as the discs age. I can barely hear Surfer Rosa, Dial M, Pod or Rid of Me these days. Say what you will about Butch Vig's goes-to-11 production on Nevermind, but I'm not struggling to hear it.

Right as Albini may be about the superior fidelity of analog and of live recording, he tried to shoehorn analog techniques onto digital recording back in the day and those records need remastering. Inaudible vocals also peeve me.

[Falls City Beer]

In Utero bores me to tears. Take Rape Me, Frances Farmer and RFUS off that record and it's a pretty empty vessel.

I don't dislike a single track on it; it's one of the mightiest sounding recordings I've ever heard. I actually can't listen to it that often; it just wrings me out.

[M2]

I don't dislike a single track on it; it's one of the mightiest sounding recordings I've ever heard. I actually can't listen to it that often; it just wrings me out.

Really? I usually share your musical sensibilities, but I find that album to be a plodding snorefest. Aside from everything else, the lyrics revolve around Cobain having become an increasingly uninteresting rock star. I could care less. I can plug into the disaffected confusion of Nevermind, that notion that the world off kilter, making abnormalcy the norm. I've got no such connection to the papparazi not understanding my wife, the music industry trying to chew me up or how rock critics don't get me.

Is self-obsession an emotion? If not, I fail to see what emotional content there is in that album.