Nirvana: From the Underground to a Pop Phenomenon

Kurt Cobain and his kitten, Olympia, 1989

During the early 1990s, the world was going through several changes. With the advent of the internet and the improvement of radio and television technology, music and pop culture were beginning to build new communities of young people who shared the same styles, developing new ways of consuming, dressing, thinking, and making music. At that moment, new genres emerged, such as shoegaze, Britpop, riot grrrl, and grunge. 

The word "grunge" was American slang for "someone or something that is disgusting." Being translated into a music style, it hypocritically designated a movement notorious for its anger towards the world. The genre emerged as the voice of a generation, becoming a cultural phenomenon in a few years. Through a DIY punk posture, the genre was an attempt to create a new musical movement that symbolized the riot of a frustrated 90s youth.

With all that adolescent resentment, the grunge movement appeared as a way out for the disappointment-filled young people in the face of an exclusionary adult society who insisted on dictating their ways of life. The terrible cliché situation that many of the children living in Seattle were going through — kids with unbalanced families, divorced parents that always change from town to town, and no friends — resulted in a diffused feeling of hate accompanied by a desire for freedom. Thus, when you hear Kurt Cobain screaming “if you wouldn't mind I would like to blew” playing along with a heavy, distorted melody on a completely alternate tuning as the first line of Nirvana’s Bleach, you realize that what this generation wanted was to throw their world in the trash.

Kurt sleeping with his guitar, Kirk Weddle picture

Along with “Blew”, the other 12 songs from Nirvana's first album disclose some of the noise the band would make throughout the 90s. With songs about teenage angst, the hypocrisy of American society, the Seattle music scene, parental negligence, and music industry pressure, Cobain explores the fury his reality caused upon him. 

The album had a very low budget, costing just U$606.17 dollars, and was distributed by the indie label Sub Pop. Its low production and studio quality granted a noisy atmosphere which conveyed the exact feelings the singer was verbalizing within the lyrics. Bleach would later be described as "deliberately bleak, claustrophobic, and lyrically sparse, with none of the manic derangement or sense of release of the live performance". After all, it wasn't even a quarter of what Nirvana would come to represent in the 90s — and to this day.

An AIDS prevention poster was the inspiration for the album's name

On September 24, 1991, the legendary and furious Nevermind was in all music stores, 4 months later it would reach the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album chart, selling millions of copies and turning Nirvana into MTV's favorite band. At this time, the band completely reinvented and popularized the alternative music genre, betting on an experimental and innovative way of making music, instead of insisting on a “classic” and generic rock style other bands of the time still did in order to make success. Therefore, with the band’s massive success and popularity, Nirvana started creating a whole new spectrum of youth culture that claimed the immortality of the teen spirit.

Nevermind's most successful single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, was one of the factors responsible for making the band achieve a mainstream breakthrough. The song displays the pop structure that the band was starting to explore within the album — a conventional format of verses and choruses that move from quiet to loud several times, making the song more dynamic and appealing to the audience. In a way, the song is built on a noisy atmosphere filled with that rich pop sensibility which Cobain would later describe as an attempt of making “the ultimate pop song.”

Smells Like Teen Spirit, single cover (1991)

Having attempted — and succeeded — the making of a perfect pop hit seems like a hypocritical joke to a band that usually uses riffs and a pace filled with heavy metal influences, as exemplified by the seventh song of the album, “Territorial Pissings”. That pop structure shows an enormous ambivalence on the composition of Nevermind’s songs: accompanying heavy lines, there was also that Beatles-ish format. 

Nevertheless, that pop attempt did not place them as a big commercial pop band, but neither were they, at that moment, just a punk tribute spreading noise and rage. Nirvana was stuck exactly between those genres, and that's why the band had a whole scope of songwriting creativity to explore. It is indeed extremely ironic to think that Nirvana started as a DIY loud screamo band and suddenly became a pop phenomenon.

Nirvana at the classic Nevermind pool, Kirk Weddle picture

Almost like an authentic Holden Caulfield of his generation, Cobain expressed through his lyrics ambiguous messages that when assimilated and clarified became beautiful protests about the youth culture of the 90s. In “Live! Tonight! Sold Out!”, Kurt Cobain states “Music comes first, lyrics are secondary. Most of my lyrics are contradictions. I’ll write a few sincere lines, and then I’ll have to make fun of [them]. I don’t like to make it too obvious, because if it is too obvious, it gets really stale. You shouldn’t be in people’s faces 100% all the time. We don’t mean to be really cryptic or mysterious, but I just think that lyrics that are different and weird, and spacey paint a nice picture. It’s just the way I like art.” 

Still, the massive success started being in the way of this process: the band was becoming too mainstream to people comprehend and care about the lyrics. A great example of this is “In Bloom”, “He’s the one who likes all the pretty songs, and he likes to sing along, but he knows not what it means.” The lyrics criticize and joke about people that are in the grunge scene just for the thrill of it, he knew that with a catchy chorus people would sing along and would not mind about what it meant, and so they did – and still do. Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad commented, “The brilliant irony is that the tune is so catchy that millions of people actually do sing along to it.”

Cobain at the Roseland Ballroom live in New York, July ‘93 

Therefore, this was becoming one of the reasons for Cobain’s self isolation, the feeling of not belonging and the constant pressure of the music industry destroyed him completely, it's tough to realize that at the height of his popularity Cobain felt so lonely. All of this plastic exaltation by media corporations indulged an artificial image of who Kurt Cobain was, but he did not want all of this plastic fame, after all, he only wanted to be loved as himself and have fun being the Cheap Trick of the 90s. 

With his suicide on April 8, 1994, Nirvana was over, without knowing they would became one of the biggest bands of all time, altering forever the course of modern music. Leaving the legacy of a band that brought the blood of the underground culture to the mainstream, being a cultural phenomenon screaming wildly and throwing guitars up in the air. Unfortunately, a legacy destroyed by the massive capitalization of the band, through big corporative industrial media that sells nowadays the idea of the band as a product.