Everybody has got to start somewhere, and there is an entire wasteland of doomed bands who have tried everything to get a foothold in the industry; even Nirvana, the harbingers of the grunge revolution and devoted critics of the mainstream music industry, had to grit their teeth and bear it when Sub Pop demanded that […]
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There was no competing with any other songwriter in Nirvana compared to Kurt Cobain. Though he may have had a limited vocabulary for guitar chords and proper music theory, the soulful energy channelled through classics like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘In Bloom’ struck a nerve with kids that was impossible to put into words. […]
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Every now and again, a rupture comes along that breaks the linear plodding of pop culture. In the 1990s, that was ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, a mammoth anthem that launched Nirvana to manic heights and dragged grunge along with them. But since then, the great vastness of the internet seems to have smothered those ruptures. […]
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In the rough autumn of 2025, Chris Murphy of Sloan made the remark that the recent rise of Geese reminded him of Nirvana’s explosion. Given that his own band gleefully clung to the grunge icon’s coattails until they were considered peers, you have to give his critique of Geese’s ascending flight some credence. So, with […]
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No one’s ever going to find a band that was as good at self-deprecation as Nirvana. While the last thing that most bands want to do is tell everyone how much their music sucks, Kurt Cobain could only be brutally honest whenever he gave interviews, and when listening to him talk about the mixes of […]
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When Nirvana released ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in September 1991, the world wasn’t ready for the tsunami it would create. An unexpected success, the song captured the imagination of Generation X overnight and opened the floodgates for the trio’s Seattle compatriots, a loose grouping of acts that became known as grunge. The lead single from […]
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“What else should I be?” Kurt Cobain asks, in the opening line of ‘All Apologies’, Nirvana’s final single before his passing in 1994. The lyrics had been ruminating in Cobain’s mind for years, having initially written ‘All Apologies’ on a 4-track in his shared apartment with Dave Grohl in Olympia, Washington, in 1990. “I remember […]
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By the time that Nirvana blew up, Kurt Cobain was never going to take the term ‘grunge’ all that seriously. He may have liked the idea of a lot of people liking his band, but there was a lot more to it than simply cashing in on the trend of flannel shirts. The corporate side […]
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Oh, to have been one of the lucky souls at one of the early Nirvana shows. You often wonder if people witnessing history are actually aware of it, but surely those rock lovers had an inkling. Stuart Braithwaite wrote in his book about the magic that was seeing Nirvana live for the first time, and […]
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Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain brought the sound of grunge music from the underground to the forefront of rock music on a global scale in the early 1990s. When listening to Nirvana’s impressive catalogue of three progressive studio albums, some of Cobain’s biggest influences are immediately apparent. Nirvana’s music was often compared to the 1970s electric […]
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