Nirvana - Nevermind
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Free Music Notes for Nevermind
Free Music Review: The Album That Changed Music Forever
Hit: 5 Stars
You can count on one hand the number of albums that have changed music forever: Sgt. Peppers, Dark Side of the Moon, London Calling -- add Nevermind to the list. How many 12-cut albums can you think of that are 10 cuts deep?
The genius of Nirvana (read: Cobain) was that he invented a new kind of music. The trick is not just to do something revolutionary, it's to do something revolutionary and have people identify with it. I remember buying this album because I couldn't understand the damn words to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and I thought the album would have liner notes. Mine didn't. As soon as I put it on, I knew it was something special.
If you don't think Nirvana (and particularly this album) changed music, try listening to one of the songs on this album without wishing that Kurt was still around cranking out pain-riddled, counter-culture musical poems.
Free Music Review: Nevermind the bullocks -- here's Nirvana
Hit: 5 Stars
nirvana (noun) - a place or state characterized by freedom from or oblivion to pain, worry, and the external world.
grunge (noun) - dirt, filth, rubbish; something of inferior quality; trash.
The 1980s were one big, immoral popularity contest. Never mind the quality - if it was "in," people wanted it. While hard rock had dominated most of the 1970s, the 80s were all about pop: artists like Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, Lionel Ritchie, and Whitney Houston. By 1980, punk rock, which began in the mid-70s, had evolved into "new wave," spawning groups like Tears for Fears and A Flock of Seagulls. Meanwhile, rock titans like Neil Young seemed to have lost all the edginess that made them so attractive; Bob Dylan stumbled through the decade, fashioning a couple great albums and releasing a much greater number of duds. Music aficionados were forced to ponder the direst of ponderings: was rock dead?
Whether rock was dead or alive, Nirvana rejuvenated it and brought it back to the forefront, nearly stopping pop in its place. The world hadn't heard anything so ferocious and reeling with pained awareness since the days of the Sex Pistols, and for a world still feeling hungover from the superficial craze of the 1980s, it was a welcome wake-up call. Nirvana actually emerged at the end of the 80s, led by lead vocalist and guitarist Kurt Cobain and also featuring Krist Novoselic on bass and, initially, Chad Channing on the drums. They released their debut, "Bleach," in 1989, produced and recorded for a mere $600 on the Sub Pop label. It sold roughly 6,000 copies. When the band heard that Sub Pop was going to become a subsidiary for a major label, they decided to "cut out the middleman" and were signed to Geffen Records. "Grunge" music, the murky indie-alternative rock played by groups like Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, or, more famously, Pearl Jam, was on the verge of becoming popular. Geffen executives hoped Nirvana could find some fame as one of the better grunge bands. They hoped to sell 250,000 copies of Nirvana's second effort, 1991's "Nevermind," earning a "Gold" certification from the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). The band themselves didn't really care.
When the record was released in late 1991, MTV's late night music video showcase "120 Minutes" began playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the album's lead single. Soon it became so popular that the network began playing it during the day. The album appeared on the Billboard 200 at #144, and in November of '91 it entered the Billboard Top 40 at #35. Half of the initial U.S. pressings went to the northwest, where the album quickly sold out and was unavailable for days. Around the rest of the country, the album began selling so quickly that none of Geffen's marketing strategies could be enacted. Finally, in January of 1992, Nevermind hit #1 on the Billboard Top 40. At that time, it was selling roughly 300,000 copies per week.
Critical response to the album was decidedly mixed. Rolling Stone gave it 3 out of 5 stars, saying, "If Nirvana isn't onto anything altogether new, Nevermind does possess the songs, character and confident spirit to be much more than a reformulation of college radio's high-octane hits." On the other hand, Robert Christgau, the so-called "Dean of American Rock Critics," gave the album an A. "This is hard rock as the term was understood before metal moved in - the kind of loud, slovenly, tuneful music you think no one will ever work a change on again until the next time it happens," Christgau wrote.
That's exactly what "Nevermind" is: a hard rock, post-punk album picking up where the punk groups of the 1970s left off. It's harder now to understand just what an impact it had upon its release. Nirvana's sound has been imitated countless times by countless groups (Nickelback, Creed, etc. etc.), resulting in a new form of rock: grunge. When Nevermind was released at the beginning of the 90s, despite its cover art depicting a baby pursuing a dollar bill on a fishing hook underwater, it was like a generation coming up for air after being drowned in commercial, spiritless noise for a decade. Nirvana defined its generation like no other, and "Nevermind" was the crucial album of the 1990s.
To really understand the album or the band, one must be familiar with its leader: the legendary, quasi-infamous Kurt Cobain. Most people are very familiar with him, due in no small part to his untimely and much-discussed death in 1994. He was born in Aberdeen, Washington, a small coastal town that looks like something out of "The Fog." Friends and family have said that he was the sweetest of children, but his teenage years were a horse of a different color. Cobain hated athletics (despite his father signing him up for the local wrestling and baseball teams, on which Cobain did quite well) and befriended a gay student, leading to taunts and bullying from Cobain's peers. He focused mostly on drawing, and kept a personal journal, in which he at one point wrote, "I am not gay, although I wish I were, just to piss off homophobes."
Cobain is a rock god. He was named the greatest rock n' roll hero of all time by "NME" readers in 2006, and he remains one of the most enigmatic and fascinating personalities in the history of popular music. On the outside, he was a good-looking, hostile, roughly-dressed twenty-something; on the inside, he was fighting an endless battle against his own inner demons. The thing that separated Cobain from his similarly rude, rebellious peers was this: he cared about the world. He really did, and he wasn't afraid to admit it. Much of the immense pain in his life came from his own terror at the state of the world and, in particular, the people in it. It's evident not only from his many, many quotes, but from his songs themselves. Rough numbers like the mocking "In Bloom" or the woeful "Lithium" sound angry and reckless on top, but beneath all the anger there's immense sorrow at the state of things. The trademark punk madness, juxtaposed with sincere humanism, was one of the most appealing things about Nirvana.
Then there's the lyrics themselves, penned by Cobain. While rival group Pearl Jam sang, "I take a walk outside/I'm surrounded by some kids at play/I can feel their laughter, so why do I sear?", Nirvana grumbled lines like, "When I was an alien, cultures weren't opinions," or such refrains as, "Give an inch, take a smile/Fashion shifts, fashion style/Throw it out and keep it in/Have to have poison skin." Cobain seemed to be almost rambling as he spewed out line after line of surreal poetry, and though all of it may not mean much - his bandmates attest that most of the lyrics were written within five minutes of their first performance - there sure appeared to be some sort of deeper meaning. Cobain seemed to be on to something which the rest of the public couldn't quite grasp.
His lyrics wouldn't have been nearly as powerful without the music to back them up. Songs like "On a Plain" were simple enough to catch the public ear, but at the same time, the arrangement of the music added a new and very appealing depth to them. Despite his aim to wipe the earth clean of the shiny, soulless tunes of the 80s, Cobain loved pop music. In fact, "Nevermind"'s most famous song, the inescapable "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (voted the 9th best song of all time by "Rolling Stone"), was Cobain's attempt to write the perfect song. While crafting "Nevermind," he aimed to create the ultimate pop album in the vein of his heroes, the Beatles, one which was modern and catchy enough to obliterate records like Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" (number 1 on the charts at that time) but meaningful and spirited enough that the public would grow from listening to it, not step back as they had in the 80s. Of course, he wanted it to rock, too.
The result was a manic, pounding, rollicking rush of intense rock music. Bassist Krist Novoselic added an oily murkiness to the tracks, keeping Cobain's edgy, buzzing guitars from taking off, much like Cobain's own darkness prevented him from ever soaring as a public figure (until his death - more on that later). The band's original drummer, Chad Channing, was fired and replaced with Dave Grohl. Where Channing just sort of rolled through each song, Grohl was like a hurricane and an earthquake in one thunderous package. When he drummed, he drummed. He didn't have the versatility or sheer prowess of drummers like Rush's Neil Peart or Stewart Copeland of the Police, but he could and did pound the hell out of those things, much like the Who's Keith Moon. In the public eye, Kurt Cobain was Nirvana, but any fan will tell you that Novoselic and Grohl were equally important, the firm, high-velocity support for Cobain's meandering surrealism.
Of Nirvana's three albums, "Nevermind" is widely regarded as their masterpiece. Each of its 12 tracks are gems. It may be a testament to the album that its lead single, the aforementioned "Smells Like Teen Spirit," is probably its weakest track. That song, with others like the rambunctious "Breed," or the purposefully abysmal "Territorial Pissings,"are pure hard-rocking delights. The watery guitar on the almost ethereal "Come As You Are" is irresistible, while the surprisingly melodic chorus of "On a Plain," or the woeful breeziness of "Something in the Way," are downright ghostly. While the record may have retained that ghostliness since its release, it's certainly more haunting considering the dark circumstances of Cobain's death.
There is no underlying theme on "Nevermind." It's not conceptually dense or extraodinarily creative, like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." And all these years later, the abundance of Nirvana-wannabes on popular radio have numbed our ears. But if at first "Nevermind" doesn't seem particularly amazing, listen to it again, and then again, and perhaps even again, and to your surprise, you will forget about all those other "post-grunge" groups out there and hear the album as the world heard it back in `91 and `92. What makes "Nevermind" so wonderful is, in part, its story: after all, Cobain and his crew had no intentions of blowing the world away when they released the album. Then there's the music. "Nevermind" is the sound of a band that had something to say, said it, and had a pretty good time saying it too. It's rowdy, but aware (painfully so, at times); visceral, but sophisticated. It's amazing that a genre so inherently ugly, punk, can turn out to be so wise and beautiful. And punk was never more beautiful than Nirvana.
Truly, Nirvana could have been the best and biggest band since the Beatles. Although the Beatles' debut was a piece of pop perfection, it took them five more albums to craft a genuinely brilliant record. Nirvana's debut, on the other-hand, was a nasty, black snake of a record, far from brilliant, but certainly promising. It took them only one more album to generate a masterpiece, though, and their next album, "In Utero," was similarly great. "In Utero" is, perhaps, structurally and conceptually deeper than "Nevermind," and it sounds more like the rough, vomitific rock of "Bleach" than the shiny yet slimey rock of "Nevermind" (a sound which the band often expressed their disapproval with). But "Nevermind" was their masterpiece, a perfect rock record that spoke to millions of people. If one considers that all this was done within the course of three albums, it's breathtaking to think what the group may have done had not Cobain been killed.
So if the band could've been so great, what happened? Well, although Nirvana was the pride and joy of American listeners around 1992, when "In Utero" was released in 1993, the public was losing interest. "In Utero" was an album that intentionally challenged its listeners, and considering that most listeners were just getting familiar with its predecessors, that was a challenge they weren't willing to accept. On top of that, the public was getting sick of Cobain's seemingly incessant depression and disregard for his fans. He was becoming more and more alienated by the band's sudden popularity, too. 1994 found Cobain seeking a divorce from his wife, Courtney Love (the public frequently called "Cobain & Love" the new "Lennon & Ono"), and even planning to disband Nirvana.
Then he was killed. The public went mad. Suddenly everyone loved Nirvana again, and everybody always had. They were brilliant. Cobain was immortalized, trapped forever as the dark, troubled 27-year-old lead of one of the greatest bands of all time. A nation grieved for one of its most promising and talented youth. How did he die? Suicide, officially. The most popular rock music conspiracy is that Cobain didn't kill himself: he was murdered. He and his band are still discussed in this day, and truthfully, if he hadn't died such a sudden and shocking death, they might not have been remembered so fondly.
Regardless of the history, Nevermind is one hell of an album. "Rolling Stone" ranked it #17 on their list of the 500 Greatest Albums, commenting, "His [Cobain's] slashing riffs, corrosive singing and deviously oblique writing, rammed home by the Pixies-via-Zeppelin might of bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl, put the warrior purity back in rock & roll." It was ranked the second best album ever on VH1's list (behind the Beatles' "Revolver"), and has ranked toward the top of countless other "all-time best" lists. Deservedly so. This is truly one of the finest records ever cut, so fine that it almost single-handedly murdered our nation's obsession with pop. Unfortunately, Nirvana ended too soon to complete their mission, and so we remain a nation terrifyingly conscious of trashy pop and sickeningly unaware of the good stuff, the real music - stuff like this.
Free Music Review: SIMPLY A WORK OF ART!
Hit: 5 Stars
... FINALLY ..."NIRVANA PAPERSLEEVE IS AVAILABLE", A CLASSIC BAND AS NIRVANA COULDN'T WAIT MORE FOR RELEASE ON JAPAN AS MINI LP.
THE SOUND IS EXCELLENT AS ALL UNIVERSAL RELEASES! THE PACKAGE IS SIMPLY BEAUTIFUL! HIGHLY RECOMMENDABLE FOR ROCK FANS!
NEVERMIND WAS RECENTLY THE BEST COVER ART OF ALL TIMES!
Free Music Review: Not Impressed, Never was...
Hit: 2 Stars
Ok, Im probably gonna get flamed here, but I dont care. I have never like Nirvana, nor will I ever like them. Kobain's death was a tragic loss, I cared about him as a fellow human being, but never a musician. What else can I say about that. I grew up in the 70's and 80's, during the singer/songwriter time, and in the 80's during the Punk, New Wave, Hairband time, so for me, when Nirvana came along with their NEO-PUNK anthems, I hated it all. They said that the GRUNGE MOVEMENT defined GEN X, well not for me. I rebuke that. Grunge killed everything else, which alot of you might think thats a good thing the Hairbands died, but I dont. The Gunge/NEO HIPPY scene of the early 90's made me sick to my stomach....I was born in 67, and my generation did not know a freaking thing about being hippies. Nirvana killed good music back then, as far as Im concerned, but hey, what is my opinion worth anyway. To each his own....Free Music Review: Safe version of what The Sex Pistols recorded 14 years earlier
Hit: 1 Stars
When Nirvana released their second album Nevermind in September of 1991, thankfully it was ignored in its first few months as heavy metal bands like Guns and Roses and Metallica ruled the rock and roll mainstream with their Use Your Illusion 1 and 2 and Black Albums respectively plus Anthrax, Judas Priest and Megadeth released great albums amidst the hair metal trash.
Then, around either December of 1991 or January of 1992, MTV started playing the video for Nirvana (or as I called them NERDVANA)'s "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and I said to myself, exact words and this was not a made up story and I quote "I see the lead singer (Kurt Cobain) is a left handed guitarist like Jimi Hendrix and I predict he will die in three years" end quote. In 1994 (almost three years after this album was released), my prophecy came true as he offed himself.
Cobain, unlike Hendrix, was a deplorable guitarist and un-revolutionary IMHO!
Nirvana were not revolutionary, they were basically a safe version of The Sex Pistols and The Clash (despite the fact that Dave Grohl was the only talent in Nirvana as he is a great drummer, singer and rhythm guitarist). It irks me to see people compare this album to real classics like Dark Side of the Moon, Who's Next, Sticky Fingers, Hotel California and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Nevermind is overrated.
Aside Teen Spirit, other lousy songs were "In Bloom", "Come As You Are" (should have been titled "Don't Have a Gun") and "Lithium" (who would write a song about a sedative to combat hyperactivity). "Territorial P*ssings" sounds like he was writing about a pack of wolves marking their territory. "Endless Nameless" was annoying. "Drain You" was silly.
Whom in the blue Hell came up with naming a generation "X", Generation X was a punk band Billy Idol was in back in the 70s. Thank goodness I discovered Queen when Nirvana were at their peak. Also, people comparing a rock legend like John Lennon to, what Ted Nugent aptly called a weenie, Kurt Cobain was like comparing solid gold to tin foil. Lennon was about happiness and wanting peace in the face of negativity whilst Cobain whined and cried about how bad his life was and sounded like a three year old who had his toy taken from him.
Avoid this and any Nirvana album!