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[Flo_Evans]

Kids these days.

I was a junior in high school when he killed himself. I think it hit the school harder than when someone was actually murdered there.

 

[SaviorX]

Reading this thread, it's like 50 Cents run from 02'-07' never existed

 

[Wolfgunblood Garopa]

Truth

It's not your fault if you were too young. Times have changed a lot, and it's not easy to really appreciate what was going on then if you weren't old enough.

+1 for Lady Gaga.

Gaga was not out to make money. Take for instance how she scrapped the original Monster Ball Tour for a new one, at the cost bankrupting herself by $3m.

Good grief.

 

[Sequence Six]

It's not your fault if you were too young. Times have changed a lot, and it's not easy to really appreciate what was going on then if you weren't old enough.

It's also not easy to appreciate differing viewpoints if you refuse to understand their context.

I disagree with you, therefore I'm young and have no perspective? Please. I was there for those days, I heard their music, I watched their videos, I remember my sister crying for hours when Cobain died. Nirvana was at the vanguard of a newly popular sound. They made an impression on the youth of that generation in a way not many musicians do.

But their sound did not live on. Their impact was cultural. That's why I say their legacy is the people who adored them continuing to sing their praises more than any lineage of musical evolution.

 

[-ImaginaryInsider]

Well I'd never actually heard of Nirvana until I hit high school, and even then they were fairly niche. You had a few kids wearing the hoodies and stuff but there were few people actively listening to them. However, this is in the UK, so maybe it's because Grunge never really became mega huge over here? I don't really remember it much when I was a kid. Most music when I was growing up in the 90s was Britpop and dance music. I had more exposure to Damon Albarn than Kurt Cobain. Alternative music in high school was basically either Emo and Metalcore or Thrash and older stuff. Grunge was sort of left by the roadside.

Much like how Bowie started with glam and moved past it, Nirvana started with grunge but their catalog was varied enough they transcended it and got absorbed into the alternative scene that sprang up after. When grunge broke it was suddenly flannel and undercuts all over the place. Even early alternative just mutated that movement, it didn't really replace it.

I never knew about "Brit-Pop" until years later , Oasis and Blur made it over here, but they were marketed only as "alternative". I have some friends in Redditch, I'll have to ask them about Nirvana.

 

[bigsnack]

Cobain had killed himself before I was a teenager, but the impact even in my grade school during Nirvana is hard to forget.

Nirvana and grudge had a Beatle-mania like period, it wasn't just musical, it was hair, it clothing, it was an attitude. In the 2000's, a band like the White Stripes had major impact, they helped push a garage-rock revival into the mainstream, but they never were a middle-class cultural event that swept through nearly every level of a High School.

The Beatles and the British invasion caused a spike in people learning guitar and forming bands amongst suburban teenagers, and I think Nirvana was the last band to have a similar effect on that wider scale. There have been tons of great and relevant bands since Nirvana, but given the fragmented way we now consume music, I don't think it allows for a singular cultural "event" to form around one particular band or genre to the degree it once did.

A lot of great music followed Nirvana but as far as it being the music of a generation (or at least a large part of a generation) Nirvana was probably the swan song of rock music in the mainstream.

Hip hop kind of exploded after that and I think that the big albums in rap defined the generations after grunge.

Since then music has been insanely devalued and it doesn't seem to the have the cultural pop that it used to. Once the release of a new iPod was a bigger deal than the music it played that seemed like a really bad sign for music.

These two comments cement it for me, considering that I was 11 - 12 when Nevermind was at its peak. It was such an abrupt about face culturally, as well as musically. Living in a small town, most of the hair band loving kids went from being "normal" to being "lame" in a matter of weeks, it was a powerful phenomenon to experience first hand. That being said, this was really a subset of what was happening across the entire music industry, and I think it feels much bigger within the rock community.

I'm not sure if we'll get anything like that again, not only because of the comments already mentioned, but because scenes don't have a chance to even develop for long periods of time before being exposed to a mass audience. The Seattle music scene went through it's own growth before being exposed to the entire country, and now music is distributed worldwide instantly upon release.

 

[TheMAK]

Death Row Records.

+ Tupac

[/THREAD]

Nothing comes closes IMO

 

[Massive Duck. C.M.]

I think this thread just shows there are several Americas.

This was about the time I started getting into rock too, though

 

[Fenderputty]

I think if there is one, we won't know for at least a few years. No one thought about Nirvana the way they do now when they were first being discovered.

This isn't true. I remember them being compared to
The Beatles at the time because they changed the scene so much from hair bands and solos to grunge.

 

[FOOTE]

That's not by my definition.

Those two are safe pop acts. Both are savvy and hard working to build their brands and make money.

Nirvana was a completely different beast.



Foo Fighters was boring.

I read your post wrong. You're correct.

I snipped your second part but I want to mention that the Foo Fighters are still boring.

 

[Kill3r7]

This isn't true. I remember them being compared to
The Beatles at the time because they changed the scene so much from hair bands and solos to grunge.

Agreed. Nirvana was compared to the Beatles as far back as I can remember. No other rock band since has come close to having the same impact.

 

[Sullichin]

Nirvana has always been one of my favorites but I've been obsessed with them for the last few weeks. A perfect band. None of the other bands / artists / Kanye Wests mentioned in this thread have come close to doing what Nirvana did. Music is too fragmented these days, for better or for worse. Not to mention that popular rock is mostly terrible now, and the best songs played on rock stations is still Nirvana. The posts saying they were only big because Kurt died are uneducated at best. You can't ignore how huge they were when they actually existed. I'm sure Negative Creep would still be incredible if Kurt was alive and I'm sure every song on Nevermind would still be radio single material while still being great songs.

 

[ViewtifulJC]

I think this thread just shows there are several Americas.

This was about the time I started getting into rock too, though

They were the biggest hit for middle class white America, and guess who shapes the conversation in these types of discussion

 

[FrenchMovieTheme]

They were the biggest hit for middle class white America, and guess who shapes the conversation in these types of discussion

lol what? the discussion/conversation is shaped by whomever is discussing them. but i do get that nirvana wouldn't be shit to someone who doesn't like rock music just like kanye west wouldn't be shit to someone who doesn't listen to rap music. i suppose you can generalize between white and black if you want

 

[Delusibeta]

ITT: people wearing opaque pink glasses. And Nirvana wasn't the last generation defining act, that was Elvis Presley or The Beatles, depending on which side of the Atlantic you lived on.

 

[Laieon]

How are you guys forgetting about Nickelback and Imagine Dragons?

According to last.fm, I've listened to over 650 artists.

I genuinely like Imagine Dragons, they're great.

Spoiler

So are Nickelback. Nothing wrong with embracing how generic you are and just having fun. You can't tell me you've never enjoyed singing "photograph" or "rock star" with your friends

.

 

[Fenderputty]

ITT: people wearing opaque pink glasses. And Nirvana wasn't the last generation defining act, that was Elvis Presley or The Beatles, depending on which side of the Atlantic you lived on.

If you only count the rock genre as one and none of the sub genres. This also largely ignores the electronic genre.

 

[Fenderputty]

Agreed. Nirvana was compared to the Beatles as far back as I can rember. No other rock band since has come close to having the same impact.

I'm not even a fan. They killed my solo. Lol

 

[Flo_Evans]

ITT: people wearing opaque pink glasses. And Nirvana wasn't the last generation defining act, that was Elvis Presley or The Beatles, depending on which side of the Atlantic you lived on.

Elvis was an American act. The Beatles and Nirvana were international. Nirvana went from playing in their garage to a worldwide tour in a few years. If not for health problems (heroin) canceling half the tour they would be even bigger than they were.

 

[120v]

obviously there will always be "generation defining" bands and artists, but on a cultural level Nirvana was the last "epoch"... for example if you turn to any alt rock station it sounds virtually the same as 1995. whereas rock in the 90s was very different from the 80s, in the 80s it was different from the 70s and so on.

the way i think of it Nirvana and their contemporaries were rock's "last act".. of course there's still rock and it continues to evolve and diverge into sub-genres, but none made much if any cultural impact. and it's kind of up in the air if whether we'll get something like beatles/led zep/nirvana again

 

[PantherLotus]

The problem with this thread is the same problem from page 1: nobody here is addressing that generation defining means that a particular artist's entry into the scene changed everything. Every subsequent point about how music is fragmented or that grunge morphed into various offshoots or that napster made music disposable and all of those arguments kinda make the OP's point.

Here's a test to see if your band/artist is actually generation defining:

Before [your nomination] was big, [music genre] was huge. But once [your nomination] came on the scene (no doubt on the backs of some ground breaking, lesser-known artists), that [previous genre] died on the spot. And the sound and cultural impact that [your nomination] had can be observed years after the fact in the following ways: X, Y, Z.

What did Kanye kill? What did Oasis kill? What did Eminem kill? (<-- I love all of their music, btw). Part of the problem here is that there's not an entire dominant style or genre of music that really could ever be killed anymore.

Picture this: Imagine waking up one day and seeing a new type of post-rap hip hop act so insane, so instantly dominant, so different from anything out there. BOOM. All the rap you know is instantly uncool and lame. Dropping Yeezy in a conversation is like asking 'who wants to hear She's My Cherry Pie?'. RAP IS DEAD. Crazy right?

That's what it would be like if you saw a generation-defining act today. And it will never, ever happen again.

 

[Not]

Sadly. It stings so damn much that I was born into the One Direction generation.

 

[Goddard]

I'd say you have the time frame correct but not necessarily the band. There were a lot of extremely prominent rappers in the 90s that redefined culture massively, just perhaps not your culture.

 

[-Eddman-]

The cool thing about Grunge is that none of the main bands actually sounded "the same". Nirvana was punk, Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots were Hard Rock, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden were Alternative Metal and the Smashing Pumpkins some kind of Post-punk/punk/gothic/70s rock hybrid, Sonic Youth was avant-garde rock.

On top of that, maybe one level of popularity below, you had the feminist bands like L7, Bikini Kill or Hole. It was certainly a very prolific time for american rock in terms of mainstream awareness.

 

[Prototype Viktor]

In order since Grunge, gangsta rap, Alt rock, nu-metal/girl band resurgence

 

[Napoleonthechimp]

Oasis (and Blur and Pulp and The Verve)

This for me. The BritPop era was massive in the UK (even if it wasn't elsewhere).

 

[MrCunningham]

The cool thing about Grunge is that none of the main bands actually sounded "the same". Nirvana was punk, Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots were Hard Rock, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden were Alternative Metal and the Smashing Pumpkins some kind of Post-punk/punk/gothic/70s rock hybrid, Sonic Youth was avant-garde rock.

Grunge was such a cobbled together label though, all of those bands sounded different because none of them ever classified themselves as "grunge" acts during their conceptions. Some of these bands even hated being labeled as grunge. Kurt Cobain was never happy about the Grunge label, there are quite a few interviews with him showing his distaste for it. Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam never liked being called grunge either.

Record companies were forcibly marketing any band that came out of the Seattle scene as Grunge as well as anything that remotely sounded like grunge that didn't come from Washington State. So many of the original Grunge bands were reluctant to wear that label on their sleeves because it undermined a lot of their own unique styles and influences. Most of these bands were happy to bury the grunge label after Cobains suicide.

On top of that, maybe one level of popularity below, you had the feminist bands like L7, Bikini Kill or Hole. It was certainly a very prolific time for american rock in terms of mainstream awareness.

It is pretty well known that Kurt actually ghost wrote quite a few of Hole's most well known songs. I think it was said somewhere that he enjoyed working with their band more than he did for Nirvana.

 

[RJT]

The problem with this thread is the same problem from page 1: nobody here is addressing that generation defining means that a particular artist's entry into the scene changed everything. Every subsequent point about how music is fragmented or that grunge morphed into various offshoots or that napster made music disposable and all of those arguments kinda make the OP's point.

Here's a test to see if your band/artist is actually generation defining:

Before [your nomination] was big, [music genre] was huge. But once [your nomination] came on the scene (no doubt on the backs of some ground breaking, lesser-known artists), that [previous genre] died on the spot. And the sound and cultural impact that [your nomination] had can be observed years after the fact in the following ways: X, Y, Z.

What did Kanye kill? What did Oasis kill? What did Eminem kill? (<-- I love all of their music, btw). Part of the problem here is that there's not an entire dominant style or genre of music that really could ever be killed anymore.

Picture this: Imagine waking up one day and seeing a new type of post-rap hip hop act so insane, so instantly dominant, so different from anything out there. BOOM. All the rap you know is instantly uncool and lame. Dropping Yeezy in a conversation is like asking 'who wants to hear She's My Cherry Pie?'. RAP IS DEAD. Crazy right?

That's what it would be like if you saw a generation-defining act today. And it will never, ever happen again.

Wu-tang did that. It killed the until then dominant west coast gangsta rap genre.

 

[SolidSnakesMyStepDad]

Nah too many people agree that Kanye West is a mediocre rapper despite his genius as a producer.

And too many people don't agree that nirvana is overrated as well?

 

[SolidSnakesMyStepDad]

Sadly. It stings so damn much that I was born into the One Direction generation.

LeWrongGeneration. You are acting like the time of Nirvana wasnt also the time of boy band popularity reaching their highest popularity.

 

[Fallout-NL]

I need to stay out of this thread.

This is one of the most uninformed posts I've ever seen on this board. Again, under 30 I assume.

Nevermind changed everything. And anyone old enough to remember it happening wouldn't doubt it.

It wasn't my fav album from the era, but the first time anyone saw Teen Spirit on MTV they knew a major paradigm shift had occured in rock music and youth culture.

Agreed. It wasn't my favorite album either, but looking back on it - it acted as a gateway into all the stuff that I ended up listening to and - listening to it now - it is very clear that there is something to that album. It's a turning point, partially because Smells Like Teen Spirit is a fucking brilliant song and partially because it came at exactly the right time and place. MTV being what it was then and the internet being what it is now, I'm not sure we'll ever see its like again.

LeWrongGeneration. You are acting like the time of Nirvana wasnt also the time of boy band popularity reaching their highest popularity.

This is also very true. Despite Nirvana's (admittedly still pretty huge impact) you still had to suffer through 80% garbage on MTV back then to hear a couple of good songs. It certainly wasn't some kind of awesome music paradise.

 

[MrCunningham]

LeWrongGeneration. You are acting like the time of Nirvana wasnt also the time of boy band popularity reaching their highest popularity.

It wasn't. Cobain died in 1994. NSYNC was formed in 1995 and the Backstreet Boys were formed in 1996. The height of the boy band craze didn't come until the late 90's and early 2000's. The early boy band crazy with New Kids on the Block was waning big time around 1993. Not that I am saying that there weren't boy bands (and R&B Groups) during this time, but it was quite a few years off from the height of that craze.

 

[Earthpainting]

Considering my father says the same thing about The Beatles, I think the premise of the thread is just a sign of getting older, and not being as impressionable to music as much any more as you used to be.

I also must admit I associate the 90s more with boybands, and rap stepping away from its playful tone to something more darker and cynical. Tupac Shakur's passing also felt bigger at the time than Kobain's suicide. On the rock front, we had Oasis, Blur and The Verve dominating the radio here, so while Nirvana and all the other Sonic Adventure-esque bands had a presence, I'm not sure they really defined a generation on this side of the pond.

 

[Fallout-NL]

Considering my father says the same thing about The Beatles, I think the premise of the thread is just a sign of getting older, and not being as impressionable to music as much any more as you used to be.

True, but the question, if you look at it not as a question for you personally, but as a phenomenon that is likely to occur again. The answer is also a 'not likely', considering the fragmented nature and increased accessibility of popular culture in the current media landscape.

I also must admit I associate the 90s more with boybands, and rap stepping away from its playful tone to something more darker and cynical. Tupac Shakur's passing also felt bigger at the time than Kobain's suicide. On the rock front, we had Oasis, Blur and The Verve dominating the radio here, so while Nirvana and all the other Sonic Adventure-esque bands had a presence, I'm not sure they really defined a generation on this side of the pond.

You mean in Europe? I live in the Netherlands and I can still remember the exact spot where I stood in the school yard when my friend told me that Cobain had committed suicide.

 

[lazygecko]

The problem with this thread is the same problem from page 1: nobody here is addressing that generation defining means that a particular artist's entry into the scene changed everything. Every subsequent point about how music is fragmented or that grunge morphed into various offshoots or that napster made music disposable and all of those arguments kinda make the OP's point.

Here's a test to see if your band/artist is actually generation defining:

Before [your nomination] was big, [music genre] was huge. But once [your nomination] came on the scene (no doubt on the backs of some ground breaking, lesser-known artists), that [previous genre] died on the spot. And the sound and cultural impact that [your nomination] had can be observed years after the fact in the following ways: X, Y, Z.

What did Kanye kill? What did Oasis kill? What did Eminem kill? (<-- I love all of their music, btw). Part of the problem here is that there's not an entire dominant style or genre of music that really could ever be killed anymore.

Picture this: Imagine waking up one day and seeing a new type of post-rap hip hop act so insane, so instantly dominant, so different from anything out there. BOOM. All the rap you know is instantly uncool and lame. Dropping Yeezy in a conversation is like asking 'who wants to hear She's My Cherry Pie?'. RAP IS DEAD. Crazy right?

That's what it would be like if you saw a generation-defining act today. And it will never, ever happen again.

I think it's all about skewed perspectives curation and marketing from the ecosystem of labels and music press, and how much it has diminished this century. I've also never been keen on using terms like "kill" or "dead" for music genres, because that very rarely ever happens to the degree people make it out to be. The only fitting example I can think of is progressive rock which enjoyed huge mainstream popularity in the 70's but then actually did enter a significant lull in the 80's.

The western billboard chart music market has always been very fickle and obsessed with fleeting trends to a ridiculous degree. It's been very standard practice for whatever kind of genre or style to explode and enjoy a few years of widespread exposure among casual listeners, and then just fizzle out and return to its natural state among music enthusiasts (at which point it is declared "dead" by casual listeners). Hair/glam metal was in all likelihood going to decline regardless of the grunge movement, just like how most other prominent 80's genres were no longer in vogue after the turn of the decade.

 

[timetokill]

You mean in Europe? I live in the Netherlands and I can still remember the exact spot where I stood in the school yard when my friend told me that Cobain had committed suicide.

It's funny you mention that. I'm American but I too remember exactly where I was, to the spot, when I was told Cobain had killed himself.

 

[Spuck-uk]

Nirvana, love them or hate them, were the representatives of grunge culture which was immensely popular in the early to mid 90s and grunge became the defining music of that particular generation. It was also possibly the last generation of music before the Internet became hugely popular.

It seems like since then popular music has become much more splintered and the top 40 generally caters to dance/club music.

Were Nirvana and co the last group to transcend their music and become a cultural movement?

I grew up in that era, and Nirvana most certainly didn't define the generation, unless maybe you lived in Seattle or something.

 

[Spuck-uk]

Death Row Records.

Also this

 

[entremet]

I became a fan after Unplugged. I still play that album til this day.

 

[jhmtehgamr20xx]

I like grunge as much as the next guy, but hip hop went through a renaissance at the exact same time, and one could make a pretty convincing argument that it's influence was wider reaching and more definitive than the grunge movement.

100% co-signed for accuracy.

Then again, hip-hop was more exploitable and therefore, that's where the suits went. Also unlike hip-hop there wasn't that many big mega-artists to push grunge onward after Kurt committed suicide. Yeah Pearl Jam were still big, but not overly so. There was no next-gen of grunge superstars post-Nirvana, whereas hip-hop had P.Diddy, Missy, Timberland, Outcast, Busta etc. after Tupac and Biggie were murdered. They kept hip-hop relevant for that time between '97 and '01; grunge didn't really have any big artists to keep it super relevant after 1994.

Which sucks, because I've been listening to lots of In Utero lately and the album is simply fantastic. Does anyone know how that album was received at the time compared to Nevermind? I feel In Utero's the better of the two but it'd be interesting to see what others at the time thought.

I've also never been keen on using terms like "kill" or "dead" for music genres, because that very rarely ever happens to the degree people make it out to be. The only fitting example I can think of is progressive rock which enjoyed huge mainstream popularity in the 70's but then actually did enter a significant lull in the 80's.

Don't forget disco.

They were the biggest hit for middle class white America, and guess who shapes the conversation in these types of discussion

Aside from gross obtuse generalizing, this isn't even a completely accurate statement. Who do you think was a major factor in gangsta rap dominating during the exact same time?

 

[Kyzer]

What's a black Beatle anyways

A fuckin roach?

 

[block tower]

Death grips

 

[ZoltanXerxes]

I will agree with the OP. There hasn't been a significant movement since Nirvana and it will be hard for any artist to do something similar in the future since the so called "hit" music scene is changing rapidly.

 

[Makai]

Beyonce

 

[lazygecko]

Don't forget disco.

It doesn't qualify. There was only a significant mainstream backlash in North America. Everywhere else it carried on as usual.

 

[Diablos]

True that it was several bands, and not just Nirvana.

But you are wrong on the chronology. Alice in Chains and Soundgarden had moderate hits on MTV before Smells like Teen Spirit. There was no big hit off of Gish for Smashing Pumpkins so again Nirvana predates Smashing Pumpkins. Ten came out before Nevermind, but Nirvana had the first hit.

Smells Like Teen Spirit was the game changer, and Would, Jeremy, Today, Creep, and Black Hole Sun were all after the fact.

Nirvana opened the door for other kinds of bands to be noticed, but honestly, I think bands like Radiohead and Smashing Pumpkins will be remembered more fondly than Nirvana in 20 years. You could argue that they already are.

Pearl Jam could have opened those doors too, btw. Everyone was kind of in the right place at the right time.

 

[illmatic22]

Kanyevel, especially after his comments about president nixon

 

[Ultima_5]

Beyonce

You won't see Beyoncé shirts 20 years after her death in every target across the country

 

[FrenchMovieTheme]

Nirvana opened the door for other kinds of bands to be noticed, but honestly, I think bands like Radiohead and Smashing Pumpkins will be remembered more fondly than Nirvana in 20 years. You could argue that they already are.

Pearl Jam could have opened those doors too, btw. Everyone was kind of in the right place at the right time.

Billy himself admits Kurt and nirvana were king. Nirvanas legacy is also safe forever unlike sp with billy continuing to tear it down

 

[dr.rocktopus]

At least in terms of mainstream rock music, I'd say My Chemical Romance. I was too young for Nirvana's initial explosion (going back after the fact I love them though), but in my later high school years when MCR exploded with Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, it was like a switch. The style, the attitudes, the temperments; combined with the popularity of MySpace at the time, it formed this outward self-awareness. Even if this "self-awareness" sometimes was self-infatuation, bands like MCR, Thursday, Taking Back Sunday, Thrice, etc., formed that base of displaying your feelings amd who you are in a direct and raw fashion that expanded into some of the rock that followed in bands like Mumford and Sons, Monsters and Men and their ilk.

It was no where near as large as Nirvana sounded, but that's probably the closest I feel to what I experienced. Even that sense of uncaring for what other thought about you continues on today in "hipster" culture, without the music. Hard to say what amount was affected by the music, though.