Come As You Are

[Hey, it's me again! Here's a bit more of the "freshman"/a generation stereotype comes into view section. This looks at Nirvana's sudden rise and how they mirrored their generation and what their success says about their cohort. It will likely follow closely in organization behind the previous post.]

If, like many college students, Jenn X and her friends happened to stay up late watching MTV’s 120 Minutes on [find date], they would have saw and heard something that would alter the course of music and pop culture history. A world premiere video by a then-obscure Seattle band just happened to lead off the top of the midnight hour … all blew the lid off of the music industry while helping codify a younger generation.

It started simple enough, with a couple of clanky guitar chords. Then suddenly a bass and drum kicked in hurricane force, which subsided again into a ringing guitar chord, a rhythmic bass line and simple yet propulsive drum beats. A frail, unkempt man delivered a few lines that were hard to understand. Then the musical tornado ensued again for the chorus as vocals, guitar, bass and drums all raged as if they were trying to destroy or save the world. A few minutes later, it was all over, with the lead singer yelling “a denial!” repeatedly after a bunch kids in the audience of a high-school gym had come down from the bleachers to destroy the band’s equipment and anything else they could find. People who saw the debut, or subsequent early airings, of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” may not have been sure what they had seen, but they also were unlikely to forget it.

While it would be stretch to say Nirvana singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain really was the voice of his generation, he and his bandmates -- bassist Chris Novaselic and drummer Dave Grohl -- were emblematic of their generation. They were all products of broken homes. Their childhoods were not happy ones and their adolescent years involved searching for self-fulfillment while struggling to survive in a job market that had little to offer the young. While he tried to get the band off the ground, Cobain worked a series of menial McJobs; a resume he drafted in his journal shows his most recent experience as working at Lemons Janitorial from September 1987 to February 1988 for $4.50 an hour.

But the smash success of the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” single and video, as well as the Nevermind album selling more than 300,000 copies a week by the end of the year, changed the lives of the band and the world around them. As 1991 came to the close, a symbolic changing of the guard took place atop the Billboard album chart, as Nirvana claimed the number—one spot from Michael Jackson.

“After this, everything was either pre- or post-Nirvana,” rock journalist Michael Azerrad wrote in 1994, a time when Nevermind had come out of nowhere to sell eight million records. “Radio and press starting taking the ‘alternative’ thing seriously. Suddenly, record labels were rethinking their strategy.” Nirvana represented a triumph of grass-roots rock and roll, while showing that the twentysomethings had the power to move and redefine the mainstream.

Not only would a new sound (later labeled “grunge”) and a new look (utilitarian flannel) begin to take the world by storm, but a new generation had announced that they could no longer be ignored. Azerrad saw the triumph as a turning point in America. The album’s success, and the impact of who bought it “had all sorts of implications, from consumer marketing to political demographics,” he wrote. “It also marked the definitive end of the baby boomers, who prided themselves on their youth, as the sole arbiters of youth culture.”

But while it is generally agreed the songs were catchy, why was it such a cultural phenomenon? Cobain, while not one to say he was speaking for a whole generation, did believe their music resonated with his peers. “We’re a perfect example of the average uneducated twentysomething in America in the nineties, definitely,” he once said. “I think there’s a universal display of psychological damage that everyone my age has acquired.”

Azerrad believed Cobain’s cohort something they could embrace in the band that was missing from the music scene. “Tired of having old fogies such as Genesis and Eric Clapton or artificial creations such as Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli rammed down their throats, the twentysomethings wanted a music of their own. Something that expressed the feelings they felt,” Azerred observed. “This was passionate music that didn’t pretend. Getting into Nirvana was empowering for a generation that had no power.”