"I'm sorry I couldn't have spoken to the young man," Cohen said of Cobain, recognizing some of his own past excesses in Cobain's downfall. "I see a lot of people at the Zen Center, who have gone through drugs and found a way out that is not just Sunday school. There are always alternatives, and I might have been able to lay something on him. Or maybe not."
[UPDATE: I originally said Soundgarden released their third album, Badmotorfinger, on the same day — which is what Wikipedia said on September 24. But later, Soundgarden did a Facebook post admitting that they had caused the wrong info to be put on Wikipedia. It was scheduled to be released that day, but it was postponed to October 8, 1991 because the band insisted on changing the album's front and back covers. You can see the original cover art in their Facebook post.]
All three albums were commercial and artistic breakthroughs for those bands.
They're the kind of album you listen to straight through, not skipping any tracks, because each one feels essential, from the hits to the songs you might have forgotten about but are happy to hear when they come on (Nirvana's "Lounge Act," RHCP's "My Lovely Man," Soundgarden's "Somewhere").
Nevermind has been celebrated for bringing an entire genre into
the mainstream and signaling an authenticity-driven reaction against
synth-heavy '80s music, even though the album itself has been criticized
(including by Kurt Cobain) for being too slickly produced.
Nirvana thought "Lithium" was the song that would break them into the mainstream. They never expected it to be overshadowed by you-know-what …
Two features of this song make it stand out as one of Nirvana's best. One is the lyrics, which were unusually clear for Cobain. "I'm so happy, 'cause today I've found my friends. They're in my head. I'm so ugly, that's OK, 'cause so are you. We broke our mirrors." There's so much you can read into that word, "ugly."
The other thing is Krist Novoselic's bassline. While the guitar part in the verse starts at the bottom and climbs upward, the bass starts at the top and descends. He wasn't a flashy bassist who drew attention to himself, but he gave extra attention to this song. He also does some tasteful noodling in the "I'm not gonna crack" section.
The chorus of "In Bloom" is brilliantly self-referential in mocking the whole idea of a band with fans, while being more lovable than that concept sounds. "He's the one who likes all our pretty songs, and he likes to sing along … but he knows not what it means …"
"Drain You" was one of Kurt Cobain's favorite Nirvana songs. I love how in the place where you might expect a conventional guitar solo, they instead do an eerie instrumental interlude with disorienting guitar noises and dissonances, culminating in a frenzied crescendo that leads back to the beginning. Grunge genius.
That same day, RHCP put out a 17-song funk masterpiece. "Give It Away" captures the essence of the band: gleefully sexual, deceptively simple, rhythmically infectious.
"Breaking the Girl" is an uncharacteristically acoustic Chili Peppers song with an electrifying percussion break (starting at 3:03). Chad Smith's propulsive drum beat gives a remarkable momentum to the song.
"Under the Bridge" is a haunting portrait of heroin addiction. I get chills when I hear the choir-like backing vocals start to sing: "Under the bridge downtown …" The beautiful interplay of the guitar (John Frusciante) and bass (Flea) at the end is worthy of comparison to George Harrison and Paul McCartney in the Beatles' "Something."
"Power of Equality" kicks the album off with an urgent note of social awareness ("American equality has always been sour"). The Chili Peppers' singer/rapper, Anthony Kiedis, was clearly self-conscious about this white band being indebted to many black musicians: "My lily white ass is tickled pink, when I listen to the music that makes me think." He makes an explicit call for racial harmony: "Death to the message of the Ku Klux Klan!" The song ends with an earnest lament:
People in pain, I do not dig it Change of brain for Mr. Bigot … Misery is not my friend But I'll break before I bend What I see is insanity Whatever happened to humanity?
Soundgarden found their voice with Badmotorfinger, which kicks off with the frenetic "Rusty Cage."
"Slaves and Bulldozers" is a 7-minute epic that sounds like a fearsome machine, with staggering vocals by Chris Cornell.
"Mind Riot" is the relatively poppy side of Soundgarden.
"Outshined" defines the Soundgarden sound and attitude: powerfully heavy, and with a determination to get through life's dark moments.
Focus on the interlude that starts just before 3:00. On the surface, there's not much going on here — no key change, no guitar solo. But a gentle, introspective passage like this to contrast with the heaviness is the kind of thing that elevates a rock song, and distinguished Soundgarden from other bands of the time.
"The guitar Kurt Cobain played during Nirvana’s famed MTV Unplugged in New York concert is headed to auction with a starting estimate of $1 million," Rolling Stone reports. He played a used Martin acoustic guitar from 1959.
During Unplugged, Kurt Cobain told the audience about how he wanted to buy a guitar that belonged to Lead Belly, calling him "my favorite performer." (Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic joked that the band would pass around a "donation basket.") Here’s the Lead Belly song Nirvana played at the end of Unplugged, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" I love the moment at 4:50 when the music stops near the end of the song, and while Cobain is catching his breath he has a look in his eyes as if he's suddenly grasped the whole weight of human existence.
Here's Lead Belly's version of that traditional folk song (also known as "In the Pines"):
Nirvana released their debut album, Bleach, 30 years ago today, on June 15, 1989.
If you subscribe to Amazon Prime, you can listen to the remastered version with bonus material for free here.
Most of Bleach was relentlessly heavy and dark, before the band opened itself up to more varied approaches on Nevermind and In Utero. The exception is the poppy "About a Girl," which has been compared to the Beatles.
While that's the most obviously commercial song on the album, the band's knack for hooks is also clear on "Blew" (the first song on the first Nirvana album and the second-to-last song they ever played live) and "School" (showing the power of minimal lyrics with just 16 words: one line each in the verse, chorus, and interlude).
"Mr. Moustache" is dominated by fast metal riffs, but occasional vocal harmonies give a taste of what's to come on Nevermind (compare it with "On a Plain," for instance).
The most overlooked song on the album is "Sifting," which lumbers along ominously before rushing headlong into a gloriously catchy chorus.
Bleach inevitably didn't put Nirvana in its best light: the album's budget was just $600, and the drummer's choppy feel made it clear why he was later replaced by Dave Grohl. But for all its flaws, Bleach gives us the original intensity of the greatest rock band of their all too brief time.
I vividly remember when I was 13, sitting around watching MTV on April 8, 1994. Kurt Loder announced on MTV News that Kurt Cobain had been found dead in his home and that the cause of death was "a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head." I was so young that the meaning of that delicate phrasing didn't register with me, so I asked my mom about it. She had to explain: "That means he killed himself." . . .
He was 27. He left behind a one-year-old daughter and many others.
Nirvana [which had songs #18, #9, #1 in my list] released only three proper studio albums. In a Rolling Stoneinterview near the end of his life, Cobain was critical of the band's soft/loud formula and talked about wanting to branch out stylistically. He said he wanted to "learn to go in between those things, go back and forth, almost become psychedelic in a way."
We'll never get to hear how the band might have developed; the analogy would be if John Lennon had died not in 1980 but in 1965. They should have done so much more. But they changed the direction of rock music in the few years they were around. (As I said yesterday, I realize that other bands have a better claim to inventing grunge, but Nirvana perfected it and reached a lot more people.)
For days after the news broke, MTV constantly reran the Nirvana Unplugged concert, and I watched it almost as constantly. I started learning to play guitar that summer.
This is a park bench in Seattle, south of Cobain's home, where he died. The photographer, Eric Shoemaker, says: "Nirvana fans gather at the park on the memorial of Kurt Cobain's death (April 5th), to pay tribute. . . . The park's benches are covered with graffiti messages to the rock icon."
As you can see, someone wrote the first line of "Dumb," from In Utero: "I'm not like them, but I can pretend."
Suicide prevention advocates have developed guidelines for news media coverage of suicide deaths. . . . They . . . recommend avoiding coverage that describes death as an escape for a troubled person.
One example was the 1994 death of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, who was beloved among young music fans, including in Seattle, where his career rose and where he was found dead. Local coverage of his suicide was closely tied to messages about treatment for mental health and suicide prevention, along with a very public discussion of the pain his death caused his family.
Those factors may explain why his death bucked the pattern. In the months after Mr. Cobain’s death, calls to suicide prevention lines in the Seattle area surged and suicides actually went down.
25 years ago today, on September 21, 1993, Nirvana released its third and last studio album, In Utero, the defiantly raw and noisy follow-up to Nevermind.
And if you really want to feel old, think about this: In Utero is an older album today than the Beatles' White Album was on the day In Utero was released!
There’s a “soulful” tribute to the album called Heart-Shaped Tracks (Spotify link). Based on the free samples, my favorite is the cover of “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter,” which feels true to the spirit of the song while fitting comfortably in the R ’n’ B genre.
“Serve the Servants” kicks off the album perfectly with a chaotically discordant chord (the ‘90s equivalent to the beginning of “A Hard Day’s Night”?). The first line is a droll take on the band’s success: “Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old.” At the end of each chorus, Kurt Cobain seemingly mocks himself for overdramatizing how he was affected by his parents’ divorce in interviews: “That legendary divorce is such a bore!” The song is unusual in that the singing in the chorus is lower and more relaxed than in the verse; the other way around is far more common.
“Heart-Shaped Box,” the first single from the album, was perhaps the only song on In Utero that an unsuspecting listener at the time might have expected as a follow-up to the poppier Nevermind. This was one of three songs that was remixed by Scott Litt to have clearer vocals than in Steve Albini’s original mix; Krist Novoselic explained that songs like this and “All Apologies” were “gateways” to the rest of the album, which would cause more people to discover the album’s “aggressive wild sound — a true alternative record.”
“Dumb” is the “Polly” of In Utero; the songs have a similar chord progression, but “Dumb” is more fully satisfying, with atmospheric cello adding depth to the soft side of the band. The cellist on this song and “All Apologies” was Kera Schaley, the only musician to play on a Nirvana studio album without being in the band.
“Milk It” is an aggressively un-commercial song with shockingly dissonant guitar playing. One line is heart-breaking knowing what happened the next year: “Look on the bright side is suicide.”
“Pennyroyal Tea” was going to be released as the third single from the album in April 1994 (following “All Apologies”), but the single was canceled because of Kurt Cobain’s suicide that month. He looked forward to the afterlife in an oddly non-rhyming couplet: “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld/So I can sigh eternally.” He said: “The song is about a person who's beyond depressed; they’re in their death bed, pretty much.” Asked about the Leonard Cohen line, Cobain explained: “That was my therapy, when I was depressed and sick. I'd . . . listen to Leonard Cohen, which would actually make it worse.”
“Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” is one of my favorite Nirvana songs, with manically oscillating guitar noise over relentlessly thumping drums. Most of the song is not quite “radio friendly,” but it gets most melodic in the bridge, with Kurt Cobain offering uncharacteristically straightforward advice: “Hate, hate your enemies/Save, save your friends/Find, find your place/Speak, speak the truth.”
“All Apologies” brings the album to a bittersweet close, culminating in a meditative chant over droning guitars. Kurt Cobain had this song around since 1990, before Nevermind. When Dave Grohl heard a demo of it in the early days, he thought: “This guy has such a beautiful sense of melody — I can’t believe he’s screaming all the time.”
September 24, 1991 was a great day for music.25 years ago, Nirvana released its second album, Nevermind, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers released their fifth album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
A girl I went to high school with spent a semester in Australia. She must have blossomed there, for when she returned home, she magically had an Australian accent. Predictably, we would have none of it. Kids might be cruel, but they also have great bullshit detectors. Nobody likes a phony — not even in Middletown, Maryland. The accent receded; the mockery endured.
This, I suspect, has always been the case. But at least since the invention of Holden Caulfield, phoniness has been the unpardonable sin. Meanwhile, authenticity has become our greatest virtue. . . .
We just spent a week celebrating the career of David Letterman, a man whose entire raison d’être consisted of being the first post-modern late-night comedian — a guy whose humor hinged on being in on the joke and ironic (not like all the phonies on TV at the time!).
This, of course, brings us to Hillary Clinton, and her fake Southern accent. There might have been a Southern accent where Tom Petty came from, but there wasn’t one in Illinois or New York (you know, the places where Clinton grew up and represented in the U.S. Senate?) . . .
The revolt against the phoniness of American life goes back to at least the 60s, which is why it’s odd that Hillary Clinton is so transparently engaging in “show business.” But for Generation X, in particular, the ethos of authenticity practically defines our generation. It’s why Kurt Cobain in a cardigan was cooler than KISS in makeup. It’s why single camera sitcoms with laugh tracks (once wildly popular) now feel so damned cringeworthy. It’s even why John McCain, with all his flaws, seemed much cooler than George W. Bush in 2000. . . .
The strange thing about memory is the way in which certain moments can be lost to you for years, even decades, until something or someone reminds you of them, and you feel their sudden presence with a stupid, piercing longing. Stupid because those moments seem too minor, not to mention too long gone, to think back on with any sort of earnest yearning; piercing because despite this, the thirst for them is, as they say, real: Indeed, it feels nearly sexual in the palpable pangs it arouses.
It’s not cool to fall prey to nostalgia—what the writer Svetlana Boym has cited as the “hypochondria of the heart.” It marks you as backward-looking rather than forward-thinking—conservative, sappy, old. Knowing all of this full well, however, doesn’t help much when viewing Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the affecting new documentary about Nirvana’s frontman, directed by Brett Morgen. I couldn’t keep my foot from moving to the music. I couldn’t keep myself from mouthing the words. I couldn’t keep the sobs from rising in my throat.
All of this is embarrassing to admit, but since embarrassment is the central affective mode I remember from being a teenager, it might be appropriate. After all, I was 15 in 1991, when Nirvana released their major-label debut, Nevermind, its combination of sonic ferocity and wistful sweetness blowing my mind and cracking my heart. In his music and lyrics, Cobain traced a utopian arc—suggesting that a world of authentic, unencumbered energy and feeling could be possible—while simultaneously signaling that such a world could only be sensed briefly, not fully accessed. Something—disappointment, oppression, corporatism, self-hatred—was always in the way. In this, Nirvana felt nostalgic even on first listen. Remember when we glimpsed that moment, how good it was, but how fleeting?
He's estimated to have committed suicide 3 days earlier. (Wikipedia.)
Here's an interview with him from December 1993, after they released their last album. Most of the clip is pretty mundane, but if you skip ahead to 6:38 (after it looks like the interview has ended), you can see a chilling moment. He talks about his famous stomach problem:
Ah! It's gone! I finally have been prescribed the right stomach medicine after 6 years of being in constant pain . . . I was in pain so long, I didn't care if I was in a band, I didn't care if I was alive. And it just so happened that I came to that conclusion at a time when my band became really popular. It had been going on and building up for so many years that I was suicidal. I just didn't want to live. So I just thought: if I'm going to die, if I'm going to kill myself, I should take some drugs. May as well become a junkie, because I felt like a junkie every day.
I've blogged tributes to Nirvana and to Cobain, so I don't have anything more to add to what I said:
I vividly remember when I was 13, sitting around watching MTV on April 8, 1994. Kurt Loder announced on MTV News that Kurt Cobain had been found dead in his home and that the cause of death was "a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head." I was so young that the meaning of that delicate phrasing didn't register with me, so I asked my mom about it. She had to explain: "That means he killed himself."
Nirvana released only three proper studio albums. In an interview near the end of his life, Cobain was critical of the band's soft/loud formula and talked about wanting to branch out stylistically. He was disappointed that the band up to that point had emphasized the heavy side of that formula instead of a poppier, Beatley side. We'll never get to hear how the band might have developed; the analogy would be if John Lennon had died not in 1980 but in 1965. They should have done so much more. But they changed the direction of rock music in the few years they were around.
ADDED: This Metafilter thread has a lot of remembrances of Cobain and Nirvana. A commenter named lubujackson says:
As a tween when Nirvana hit, I never thought "life sucks" was Nirvana's message as all the haters seem to believe. Lyrically, the songs cover a lot of ground in an impressionistic way, and at the time I just thought Nirvana was really good, satisfying rock music. Most importantly at the time, they passed the Holden Caufield "sniff test" for phoniness.
DaDaDaDave says:
Nirvana made great music to jump around your seventh-grade best friend's living room to. For me that was about it (and that was enough), but I had several friends in whose emotional lives Kurt Cobain was an important force for good. Cobain's songs may be about depression, but they aren't depressing--even the slow, sad ones have a reinvigorating and genuinely human energy. Two decades later I can put on any Nirvana album (even Bleach) and it still sounds good; any Nirvana album on my car stereo will cause me to drive faster. What more can anyone ask of a rock band?
Naju comments:
I was 12 and my favorite band was Nirvana, and I can't tell you how influential and positive they were for me. They were my punk rock, they made me question everything, they made me smarter. It's easy to be jaded about the whole downer teen angst thing going on in the music. But I was young and reading the biography of the band was sort of life changing. The way Kurt befriended and stood up for gay people at his high school, and the ways he went against the grain in order to be compassionate and real, made me realize that my friends laughing about "fags" were just incredibly immature and lame.
Gompa says:
People sometimes forget just how hard it was, before the internet, to access unconventional culture, particularly if you didn't live in a major city. I was in high school in northern Ontario in the early 1990s, and other than these mix tapes my friend's older collegiate neighbour made for him that had some Dead Kennedys and Dead Milkmen and stuff like that on 'em, we were completely out of the loop. You'd catch a Sonic Youth video on the MuchMusic "alternative" show, go down to the crappy little record store at the mall, go to the "S" section - nothing. I remember it being flat-out miraculous to find the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Mother's Milk album in one of those stores.
After Nevermind? Before long, there was a whole section in those stores stocking this kind of stuff. Also, Cobain was a namedropping goldmine - I'd read an interview with him, write down the names of every band he referenced, and then go on a shopping spree next time I was in Toronto. That's how I discovered Fugazi, the Meat Puppets, the Vaselines, L7, the Pixies. Basically uncovered the trail that would, by '93, lead me to quit a business degree and do something I actually gave a shit about with my life.
Discovering Nirvana at the age of 18 changed the basic course of my life. I'll always have Kurt Cobain to thank for that. Wish he was still around to hear it.
Here's a comment I posted over there:
Nirvana was to grunge rock as the Beatles were to '60s rock, or as Mozart was to the Classical style, or as Bach was to Baroque. They didn't invent their style. They perfected it. You don't become the definitive reference point for a whole genre just at random.
Kurt Cobain was the first to admit that he mostly ripped off a lot of other bands to make Nirvana's music. I'm so glad he did.
I'll close with a comment by adipocere:
I remember hearing Bleach played for the first time on a radio station with the vaguely-defined "college" format with a "What? Is? That?" sensation. I believe I got that on cassette and played the hell out of "Negative Creep" (try that song in your workout mix).
Damn, listen to "Sliver." That's the track where Cobain's empathy and his ability to craft a set of lyrics around someone else's story became his strength. I wouldn't say it was his formula but it was definitely a new plateau for him.
Much later, I heard "All Apologies" off of In Utero and turned to a friend. "I don't think he's going to be around much longer." It sounded like a suicide note or the foreshadowing to some dreadful accident.
Finally, I was driving a hundred miles home at three in the morning, trying to stay awake, radio blaring, when the DJ came on to announce the news. I pulled onto the shoulder, got out of the car, stood there for a while not believing it, then got back in. I did not have trouble staying awake for the rest of the drive home.
Here a few of the main questions I've asked myself in selecting the songs:
1) Is it capable of giving me chills? (Or: does it emotionally affect me?)
2) Is it capable of getting stuck in my head?
3) Do I enjoy listening to the singer's voice?
4) Does the music have some sort of dramatic arc or development? (A bridge or other deviation from "verse/chorus/verse/chorus" is especially helpful.)
5) Is there a sense of "inevitability" — that is, does each note seem to lead naturally to the next?
A song where I'd answer "Yes" to all those questions is probably a good contender for the list. A song where I'd answer "No" to most of those questions probably won't be on the list.
This song — which has a casually effervescent quality that reminds me of Paul McCartney — gets a "Yes" answer to all 5 questions.
The 2001 people imagined decades ago must have sounded like this--the electronic squall, the nearly overwhelming surge of drums, the drifting grasp on reality. ... 8 years on, “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” sounds like a future that we still haven't caught up with.
The Factual Opinion quotes the line, "He then played every song from 1993," and says, "I always imagine that he’s talking about hearing every song from 1993, from 'Whoomp (There It Is)' to 'Mr. Jones.'" Although that's what the line would seem to literally mean, I always imagine that he's talking about Kurt Cobain in the last full year of his life, and "every song from 1993" means every one of his songs from 1993 — in other words, In Utero, Nirvana's last studio album. That's why (I imagine) Ben Gibbard wittily accentuates the next line, which I hear as a reference to Cobain's famously conflicted feelings about his own success: "The crowd applauded as he curtsied bashfully."
I'd be remiss if I didn't recognize some of the people who made this great music who aren't around to make any more of it.
It's a commonplace that rock 'n' roll and jazz are fueled by drugs. [UPDATE: This post inspired one by someone else: 10 theories why artists are so prone to drug use.] Well, it's easy to think about what actually exists for us to see and hear; it's harder to think about what doesn't exist but should.
Shannon Hoon, lead singer of Blind Melon (#24), died of a cocaine overdose on October 21, 1995. He was 28.
I vividly remember when I was 13, sitting around watching MTV on April 8, 1994. Kurt Loder announced on MTV News thatKurt Cobain had been found dead in his home and that the cause of death was "a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head." I was so young that the meaning of that delicate phrasing didn't register with me, so I asked my mom about it. She had to explain: "That means he killed himself."
He had died 3 days earlier — like Layne Staley, on April 5. He was 27. He left behind a one-year-old daughter and many others.
Nirvana (#18, #9, #1) released only three proper studio albums. In a Rolling Stoneinterview near the end of his life, Cobain was critical of the band's soft/loud formula and talked about wanting to branch out stylistically. He said he wanted to "learn to go in between those things, go back and forth, almost become psychedelic in a way."
We'll never get to hear how the band might have developed; the analogy would be if John Lennon had died not in 1980 but in 1965. They should have done so much more. But they changed the direction of rock music in the few years they were around. (As I said yesterday, I realize that other bands have a better claim to inventing grunge, but Nirvana perfected it and reached a lot more people.)
The band members themselves assumed that this would be the song that would break them into the mainstream. They never expected it to be overshadowed by you-know-what.
If I were really trying to make an accurate list, Nirvana would have to take up at least 10, maybe 20, out of the top 40. But that wouldn't be very interesting.
So this song is just a stand-in for all the others I've had to leave out.
What really makes this song for me is Krist Novoselic's bassline. While the guitar part in the verse starts at the bottom and climbs upward, the bass starts at the top and descends. He wasn't generally a flashy bassist, but he clearly gave this song some extra attention. He also does some tasteful noodling in the "I'm not gonna crack" section.
It's common to say that other bands like the Pixies and the Melvins got a raw deal because they were making music slightly earlier that had a huge influence on Nirvana. Well, I'm sorry, but if there are truly great songs by the Pixies and the Melvins, I haven't heard them. Which composers from the classical era deserve more respect — Haydn and Mozart, or Wagenseil and Monn? If you think all that matters is how early they appeared on the timeline of history, you'd have to say Wagenseil and Monn. Well, I know a lot of people who listen to Haydn and Mozart; I doubt if I know anyone who listens to Wagenseil or Monn.
Greatness isn't primarily a game of "I did it first!" It's about making art that touches a lot of people. They were the greatest.
Everything about this music -- the chord progressions, the asymmetrical meter, the adventurous song structure -- shows that they're thinking things through more than most bands. This only enhances, doesn't detract from, the emotion.
9. Nirvana - All Apologies
1-chord verse + 2-chord bridge = greatness
This is performance is from 1992, before the band recorded the song, so it's wonderfully rough around the edges:
One of those "this is what it's all about" songs. Very straightforward, but everything just comes together here.
Don't miss the guitar solo, in which Dave Navarro reins in his virtuosity just enough to avoid glam-rock territory.
7. Sonic Youth - Bull in the Heather
They're such a monumentally important and influential band that it feels wrong to pigeonhole them as "grunge." But I think this song fits in pretty well, with Kim Gordon's "I'm too lazy to sing an actual melody" ethos.
And those guitar noises!
10, 20, 30, 40...
6. Radiohead - Just
This is why Jonny Greenwood is an acclaimed guitarist. How many rock bands are even aware of the existence of the octatonic scale (a.k.a. diminished scale), let alone able to use it to such wonderfully stomach-churning effect?
Here's the famously enigmatic video:
ANNOUNCEMENT: Next week will be 100%, solid, uninterrupted grunge, as I unveil the top 5 songs, Monday through Friday, one day at a time! Stay tuned...
This is exactly the kind of song that will get me in trouble with the official arbiters of grungedom (watch out -- they're out there!) for putting it on the list. "How can you include that lame MTV hit but not the real grunge like Mudhoney / Screaming Trees/ Afghan Whigs / Archers of Loaf?!"
Well, because I've never heard a song by any of those bands that I remembered the next day. "Shine" is a song I'll always remember.
Being commercial and accessible doesn't subtract any points from you in my book. I just care whether something's a good song or not. And this is.
Nirvana was always a heavy band, but they were more uncompromisingly heavy before they switched to a major label. "School," from their first album, Bleach, gives a taste of their early period.
The entire lyrics to the song are:
Won't you believe it, it's just my luck
No recess
You're in high school again
17. The Smashing Pumpkins - I Am One
This is the first song from their first album, back when they were a straightforward rock band with minimal frills. Billy Corgan and James Iha actually showed off their guitar virtuosity -- a relic of the '80s that would become verboten in the '90s (and even more so in the '00s). You certainly don't hear two simultaneous shredding guitars anymore.
There's something wonderfully unironic about this song -- possibly related to its surprising religiosity ("Time is right for a guiding light...").
