I saw them before they exploded into fame, and absolutely couldn’t imagine that music becoming popular. There were like 30 people at the show, they were touring in a little van, all the way to Florida! My little brother’s friend had given me a tape with a bunch of grunge bands on it, Tad and Mudhoney and Nirvana among them so when they came to play here I went.
Was absolutely dumbfounded when they started getting radio play, it was so different from everything else being played on the radio.
I think I’m probably older than most of you - it’s hard to overstate how weird and countercultural this music sounded before it became the norm.
At least Kurt never lived to see toddlers in high street Nirvana t-shirts.
He most likely would’ve burnt out on the creative side, sold out, got fat, and phoned it in. It’s the way.
we dressed like trash before nirvana.
nirvana just gave grunge an easy label.
I prefer derelicte
derelicte
maguto approves
I love Nirvana and was a huge fan immediately… But…I think people overestimates their reach. Me and my altern-rock friends were marginalized at our school. I’d say less than 5% of the kids at my high school were into the grunge scene. Most of them listened to Eurodance and pop, hip-hop was starting to become mainstream. People kind of knew of them because of MTV, but most started to listen when Kurt Cobain died.
You think you were in the minority? My jam in high school was Devo, Wall of Voodoo, Oingo Bingo and Laurie Anderson. That kind of music wasn’t very popular in Fayetteville, Arkansas…
You don’t seem too familiar with the concept of minority lol.
Yep, I remember the same. It’s the same phenomenon as beatniks and hippies. They cast a large cultural shadow because of art and media that came from the subculture, but at the time it wasn’t that many people.
Also it’s easy today to forget about the reach of radio. Radio basically dictated what was popular, and even in the 90s there were still regional radio markets that were totally independent. I remember only the rich kids had MTV.
Back then in the Seattle area the radio statios KISW and especially KNDD put grunge on heavy rotation.
They still exist but they’ve all been bought out multiple times and have been a part of the same conglomerate for at least a decade.
There were great local stations that played alternative and indie rock though. Especially if you were near a medium+ sized city or college town.
Now there are a few left and you can stream them, but unless you live in about 5 markets it’s all Clearchannel (I heart radio bullshit).
I grew up near Seattle, so pretty much everyone not into boy/girl bands was into Nirvana.
We didn’t even have a dedicated radio station in the 90’s. They would happily play Alt-Rock and then straight into death metal screaming.
well, first, you have to understand, MTV used to play music
I’m sorry, sir. I’ll get off your lawn ASAP!
No wait, here’s a lawn mower and 2 bucks!
Alright then, thanks for the gift!
No, that’s for mowing the lawn. Also I’ll teach you the firm handshake that will get you hired.
I wasn’t in that first wave of fans.
But it was a massive shift that was partially driven by backlash against the pop of the era, and the pop/hair metal scene.
Since what the grunge bands in general, and nirvana in specific were doing was relatively unknown to the general populace, and that first wave of grunge (again, with nirvana in specific) being really good, and the first songs reaching for the whole wave of depressed realization of how fucked the world was getting from the generation that was in their late teens/early twenties then, it was the right thing at the right time.
Hell, I didn’t really like a lot of grunge at the time (and I’m still picky about it), but I don’t think you can underestimate how hard Smells like Teen Spirit hit. Even those of us familiar with the punk influences of nirvana could tell that shit was fresh. It was an explosion of a new expression of rock that hadn’t been explored in the public at large yet.
Yeah, it got vacuumed up and churned out by later bands as labels went crazy trying to shoehorn other bands into the style, or unsigned bands tried to copy it, but the first few years there were pretty exciting, even for a non fan just because it was obvious that a new genre was forming.
There’s times I regret that I didn’t click with nirvana at the time ( it took years for that to happen), but there’s also a good bit of satisfaction that I didn’t because when I did click with them, it was a powerful thing, and I could do a deep dive rather than having to explore their music one album at a time.
with nirvana in specific
Plus Soundgarden and Alice in Chains…
Pearl Jam was the more mainstream version.
I don’t think you can underestimate how hard Smells like Teen Spirit hit.
Yes! Hearing “I’m stupid, and contagious. Here we are now, entertain us” was one of those lyrics which became a mantra for the post-Reagan era. Literally had Republicans fucking up the country again and some genuinely talented people spoke up.
Everything doesn’t have to be political btw.
This you?
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I totally get what you mean about not clicking with a band or music type when it first blows up. I just had the same thing happen with me with Wu-Tang Clan. I’m from the generation of Wu-Tang, and while I did listen to things like Snoop, Dre, Cypress Hill, and the like, I just didn’t click with Wu. Now I’m binging it like it just came out lol.
Edit: To be real, though, my best friend from when I was in the Navy got me on Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Nigga Please”, though I appreciate it more now.
older millennials can remember a pre internet time where culture was a little easier to heavily influence by record labels and shit because where else could teens go for culture? like now you have the internet and you can go on tumblr or reddit or whatever and any of the million sub communities there to develop culture. Corporate influence is still very much there of course (see the part with reddit, tumblr, and the massive advertising industry that drives it all, etc) but itll never be as concentrated as it was in 1994
Thats probably why corporate interests are trying to ruin the internet. You know how people say the internet is only 4 websites now where people just share clips and screenshots of the 3 sites over and over? Condense it down and you get it a lot closer to that 1994 effect. You lose the charm of having a bunch of geocities pages about putting cats in jars and peoples weird looney tunes fetishes and shit but then you have a sanitized advertiser friendly internet thats easy to browse and much more contained
Thank you for reminding me of bonzaicats!
Surreal to imagine from 2024 POV.
Modern fast fashion allows literally everyone you see to wear stupid fad garbage of the week, every week. The only difference between then and now is the absence of homogeneity. There are just too many fads to chase
I completely agree with this, we’ve made everything disposable and thus removed intrinsic meaning in favour of space for projection, to make everything as lowest common denominator as possible.
Watched a poignant discussion between Anthony Fantano and F.D Signifier recently (link here for those interested) where they focused on the Right’s media illiteracy (their co-opting of RAtM to fuel reactionary and regressive movements is an example which they dissected) and they hit upon an aspect which I found very relevant to this subject, namely that music had an almost completely different dynamic “back then.”
What they point out is that, with the absence of Social Media and the internet still relatively in its infancy, music used to be more of an event and a social marker than it is now. Songs used to be packed with more and more specific meaning considering they had a much harder time at delivering the ideological payload to the masses, people used to form communities around the bands’ messages, and through said communities the message was made entirely unambiguous - nobody in the 90s would have mistaken RAtM’s almost Anarchic messaging for Right Wing chest pumping, for instance, as their message was solidified in culture by the very communities which formed around them.
already clipped off the YouTube link tracking code
My man!
Always and forever, Google can suck it big time.
Start with a generation that doesn’t feel listened to, introduce band that talks about them but that makes music that isn’t as rough as punk music so it’s actually played on MTV and the radio, have much smaller musical scene in general, success!
We used to have shared cultural events. If you wanted to watch a thing, you had to watch it at its designated time (or record it to watch later, I got pretty good with my VCRs timer functions). With streaming and with some shows being dumped all at once, we lost that. I much prefer the weekly schedule for this reason.
Back when even cable TV was only like 30 channels and there was no internet, if something big went down that was cool, everyone tuned it or had to miss out. I remember a documentary special on the Discovery Channel (it used to only be about animals and the planet) that I think damn near every kid in my school watched, and it wasn’t even shark week.
