I'd put Nirvana in the same boat with Devo. Influenced things, did some good songs, but ultimately the body of work isn't all that stunning. Sgt. Peppers was a very influential album, but the Beatles were great because they put out album after album of great stuff. It wasn't until the white album that they started putting in ballast.
i think devo had one song nirvana had many... all of their albums were great and their greatness was shortlived due to curt being....
Nirvana was great and i always think about how it sucks so much that kurt got taken away so early from us. we deserve to hear what courtney is keeping from us because we were robbed of what we could have had in the future from one of the greatest bands ever. on every cd there were many great songs like on nevermind where every song was excellent. they had between them and alice in chains the greatest unplugged set. kurt was a great writer and singer which made up for his lack-luster guitar playing. they will be my favorite band ever because of their attitude, sound, and great things they gave to rock fans everywhere
Well, they were huge before he shot himself, it's not like he was in Mudhoney or something. Just listen to the records, Nevermind itself qualifies as a candidate for THE record of the 90's. Forget the overplayed "Smells like Teen Spirit" and "Come as You Are." Listen to "Lithium' and "Breed" again. Hell, listen to the whole album, that'll answer your question. Hot damn now I gotta go play all this stuff again. "About a Girl,", "Negative Creep,", "Molly's Lips." Mmmmmmn -- Pointless rumor #83: Einsturzende Neubaten's playing at the local Hooters tonight.
What? By whose standard? Unless you've got some really good arguments I don't think you're qualified to post on this thread. A "Santana Most Underrated Band Ever?' one maybe. I know that's wrong, just wanted to say it. It is interesting that someone who posted "TRUE GREATS.... Hendrix, Zepplin,The WHO, Sabbath, Santana, Tito Puente, etc" doesn't think much of Nirvana, the Velvet Underground, or Bowie. I would suspect maybe he's only heard the singles by Nirvana, or made up his mind sometime in 1975. But it's gonna be the marketplace that decides. And Nirvana's still selling records. From a story on MtV.com from the end of last year: 'With numbers like those, there can be little denying that Nirvana are one of the most popular and commercially viable rock groups of the last 20 years. All of Nirvana's records have continued to do well in catalog sales, with Nevermind selling at a clip of better than 230,000 copies annually, while MTV Unplugged in New York still averages 120,000 copies a year." But the same story also concludes Nirvana wasn't all that hot compared to the numbers put up by the Stones and the Beatles. Seems unfair really when you figure they only had 3 actual studio albums. http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1451583/20011220/story.jhtml
I saw Nirvana play in the Autumn of '91. Great band, great show. How do you measure a bands "greatness" anyway? How they were live? Their infuence? The number of records sold? It's only rock-n-roll.
Most metal pretty much started sucking in about 1979 and it just continues to suck AND blow into the present day. This thread is timely as I was just listening to a bunch of Nirvana the other day. They were good. Aside from being the band that rescued rock and roll (the way the ramones did 20 years earlier) they were just good. Listen to Dave Grohl's drumming - he's a god on Nevermind. The whole Kurt Cobain Tortured Soul thing makes me want to punch something. While it's true that happy people rarely create anything interesting, I think that the Kult of Kurt has hurt more than helped Nirvana's post-shotgun blast reputation.
PJ hasn't done a video since Jremy, have they? For a band to refuse to make videos is a huge Up Yours to MTV and it always tickled the crap out of me that PJ had the balls to do it. I can picture the suits at MTV having hissy fits over it.
Oh, spare me. It's not like this is some sort of shakespearean tragedy. He was a heroin addict who blew his own brains out!!! "taken away from us" good god, I could puke. Look, I was very sad when KC killed himself - I was also very angry. It was idiotic thing to do. Instead of self-medicating his depression with heroin, he should have been on anti-depressants or something. And waking up to that skanky wife of his every morning couldn't help much either. This deification of KC is really silly. He wrote some great tunes and was in a great band but, in the end, he was just a loser with a drug problem and a gun.
They did a cartoon video for "Do The Evolution" off of Yield. I believe that the creator of Spawn had something to do with that video and DTE was the last video they did, though others on the thread would likely know better than I.
Re: Re: Nirvana weren't that good (or were they ???) What metal are you really familiar with these days, or for the last 10 years? The stuff they play on MTV? That mostly is a bunch of crap, but to say there's been no good metal since 1979 is just wrong, unless you're just really not a metal fan. Do you know Machine Head? Early Incubus? Pantera? Judas Priest? Ozzy? (his first two albums were great) Sevendust? Iron Maiden? These are great metal bands.
Loved, absolutely loved Nirvana in the early 90s. Grew up and now hate them with a passion. What did they revolutionalize or innovate? Why did people prefer them over hair metal? Hair metal had great musicianship and catchy songs. How did Nirvana possibly make a great band like Guns N' Roses out of date? Didn't the Use Your Illusions come out the same year as Nevermind, '91? Since when did awesome guitar playing go out of date? Seriously, comparing Slash and Kurt is no contest. In Utero is awful. Unplugged is ok, although I never listen to any of the 3 Nirvana CDs I own. Grohl is no god on Nevermind. I prefer the Foo Fighters a thousand times more than Nirvana, I'm actually a fan of the Foo Fighters. But to answer the question, Nirvana weren't good, in my opinion: I'd rate the music as below average to average, fine chord pairings, not much soloing. Drumming not bad. Vocals, pretty bad. Lyrics, totally worthless. As a band and cultural icon, the most overrated they could've been. Is Pat Smear gay?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Nirvana weren't that good (or were they ???) So what metal bands do you think are good, oh wise one?
Grew up and what?? You grew up and pulled out the Poison albums?? Started listening to Winger again?? And hair metal bands also had larger stores of penicillin than functioning gray matter. Hair metal bands were dedicated to the cause of arrested development and never growing up.. If that's your thing, great, I hope it works for you. Myself, I got tired of airbanding guitars somewhere in the junior high school years. Well, yeah, I know the lyrics of "About a Girl" and 'Drain You" don't quite measure up to the lofty standards of "Cherry Pie" or "Girls, Girls, Girls.". But somehow, I manage to take some worth from lyrics such as "I travel through the tube and end up in yoiur infection" or "Meat-eating orchids forget no one just yet/Cut myself on angel hair and babies' breath" Cobain was too busy looking at the way that love is at once nourishing and at once exploitative and draining. He really never had time to master the art of turning all women in his songs into one-dimensional sex objects, or finding a way to rhyme the words "dance " "chance" and "romance." Sadly, that's the world's loss. As far as musicianship. Sure, Slash would beat the heck out of Cobain in Randy Andy's Sixth Annual Guitar Wank-Off in some seedy bar in rural Arizona. But you want to measure the ability based solelyon technical proficiency. I don't. I would rather measure it based on its overall effect within the song. It's a different style with a different purpose. Just because it doesn't measure up on the proficiency-based scale doesn't mean that it's lousy. I can't imagine Nirvana without the uniquely angry, grinding sound. Your concern, not mine. .
Re: Re: Re: Nirvana weren't that good (or were they ???) I guess the problem is that I don't like metal. Or that I stopped liking it 25 years ago. It's quite possible that some of those bands you mention are good at what they do, I find what they do highly uninteresting.
This the best point in this entire discussion. There are no objective absolutes regarding the quality of music (and comedy for that matter). It is all subjective and relative to each individual listener. One person can say a band is great and the other can say that they suck. The fact is that they are both right. Rock-n-Roll is not figure skating. Murf
If you think thats greatness, go right ahead. I just prefer straighforward love or other songs to weird nasty confusing imagery. If you love them, great, I just offered my opinion on them in my last post. I was attacking them a little in my last post, but I had to to give my opinion on them.
i think they were seriously overated. they were an ok band with a moody, good-looking frontman. as for the music, it was nothing that we hadn't heard before. still, every generation has its own heroes, and mine were much earlier. kurt was ok tho' coz he was a fan of queen, so he's alright by me!
Nirvana aren't overrated. I'd say that along with The Pixies and Rage, they were the most important band during my HS years. I do think that Nirvana spoke most to teens back in the day. I might be wrong off course. I do know that, listening to Nevermind again a short while ago, I was a bit dissapointed. Not in the record, but the fact that it did no longer evoke the same emotion it once did with me. But I guess that is more due to me changing than to any lack of quality in that album.