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nirvana to get

#21
jag872002 said:
I think it is a bad/ watered down punk rock-esq with a kind of bob dylan/ john lennon lyrics. Its not all thats great. I think Alice and Chains is ok, but Nirvana sucks.Its a couple of slowed down punk music with bad lyrics that the singer repeats while whining.

Please someone give me some fresh approach to this.
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why do you need a fresh approach in the first place when you don't even like it? Do you want to like Nirvana? Move on and listen to the bands that sound good to you.

oh, try listening to the Nirvana unplugged album, that might give you what you're looking for
 
#23
tuckomf said:
I think that to get Nirvana, you have to get what Frank Black was doing with the Pixies first. I think the Pixies sound was something that wasn't easily approachable for the masses, with a few exceptions ("Here Comes Your Man," "Where Is My Mind," "Wave of Mutilation"). Kurt Cobain admitted in an interview that when he wrote "Smells Like Teen Spirit," he was trying to imitate the sound the Pixies were making years before. The fact that he's hands down prettier than Black Francis and was able to get close to that dynamic sound is my theory on why they made it farther than a lot of other bands who were making the same kind of noise. Never underestimate the power of a good looking frontman. That's my theory anyway. That, and the devotion of their existing fans being shown in the media in the days surrounding Cobain's untimely death. The Pixies thing brought them to the top, the fans and the media hype kept them there.

What I could never understand was why Dinosaur Jr. doesn't get any love.
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+1

Dinosaur Jr. Rocked! "Where you been?" was my first Dinosaur Jr. album. After that, I was hooked. I think a lot of people either love or hate them upon first exposure. It is probably the vocals that put the average listener off. But man that guy had a sound. I had a chance to see them at Lollapalooza in the 90s. They played a great set.

I remember going to see the death metal sludge band, Obituary, and going to a store signing prior to the concert. Man.. What was that CD store in Tampa called?... Anyway, I remember the guitar player, Trevor Peres, flipping through the CDs beside me and pulling out the "Where you been?" album and going on and on to his band mates about what a great album it was.

But being great or unique sometimes is not enough.

What is the saying?

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

-Hunter S. Thompson
 
#24
I think if you pick it apart as an "educated musician" you can find lots of flaws, but if you just relax and enjoy yourself you might find it kicks some ass. That goes for lots of genres, really.

And go deeper than the hits. Territorial pissings, drain you. Those are good songs.

Now explain emo to me :D
 
#25
I was also early 20s when Nirvana and the grunge scene hit. I was and still am a metal head at heart, but I appreciated the attitude in some of the grunge music then. In particular Soundgarden and AIC. Today, Alice in Chains is still one of my favorite bands. Jar of Flies is a totally underrated masterpiece, IMO. It's my mellow relaxing music and it still gets played frequently. Can't say the same about the others, though.
 
#26
Nirvana was way better than all this stupid Dubstep garbage that my generation listens to today. (I hate my generation btw)

Grunge music is so raw and simple. Really not much musical talent required to play it. Theres just something in the music that speaks to me, so i listen to it. Pearl Jam is definitely more interesting musically than Nirvana, though.

I think a lot of the Nirvana craze was just the culture that it was associated with.
 
#27
you had to be there to fully get it. 80's music mostly sucked. It was plastic, hair spray, treble, synths, spandex and coke. Nirvana was a bright spot, but the big memory for me was vegging on the couch while my roommate watched MTV or Much. Boring, boring, boring and then Jesus Christ Pose came on! WZF was that! Music was exciting again!
 
#28
As a nirvana fan, it's the fact that they're so REAL. They're brutally honest, like music in its complete raw form. With a Nirvana song, it's not about the lyrics being poetic, it's not that it sounds perfect, but it's REAL. I guess it's an acquired taste. But I love them. Here are some of there more serious less "grungy songs" that are just perfect.

Pennyroyal Tea
Jesus Doesn't Want Me For A Sunbeam (Live Unplugged Cover)
Where Did You Sleep Last Night (Live Unplugged Cover)
Something In the Way
Here She Comes Now (cover)

If its not your thing, that's fine. Just know Nirvana is famous because Kurt had a gift that touched many people. A gift that is very rare, that is so powerful that it touched a complete generation of people.
 
#33
jag872002 said:
Its not that i'm angery with it, its just i dont understand why it was so big.
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You had to be there. I graduated HS in `91, so grunge was my gen`s music. The reason grunge exploded ? Rock radio ( and MTV - yeah, they played music) at that time was dominated by bands like Poison, Ratt, Extreme, Warrant. Men in tight leather & makeup making overly-engineered drivel full of sophomoric innuendos. Then grunge hits the scene...and then explodes. It was guys in ratty clothes playing loud and abrasive music, howling about depression, drug addiction, etc. The Ying to the Sunset Strip`s Yang. It was like a revelation for a lot of people my age, that there was an alternative to the prepackaged Top 40 stuff of the day. And then grunge itself became Top 40. I totally get not seeing the appeal today, but for people my age, the Seattle movement was ground shaking. Nirvana ended up being MTV`s Seattle Spokesmen, but I actually didn`t think they were all that great then. Soundgarden, AIC, PJ, etc. - they were the true heroes for me ! And if memory serves me correctly, Cobain was never idolized when he was alive. He was a popular figure and face of a band, but no one ever called him "genius" or anything of the sort until AFTER his death. Had he not offed himself, Nirvana would have faded into obscurity, I think. He became larger than life over the years. To me, Layne Staley`s death was a much bigger loss to music than Cobain, yet he garnered barely a mention in the press when he died, sadly. As others mentioned, there were other exciting things happening at the same time as grunge. Metallica`s Black Album hit in `91. GnR`s Illusions. NIN were just taking off.
 
#34
jag872002 said:
This isnt so much as a bass question or a response, but a kind of question regarding grunge. Im 24yrs old and listen to older and newer music. I love Mastodon and some music now and I love Van Halen and the Beatles, but I never understood grunge.

I think it is a bad/ watered down punk rock-esq with a kind of bob dylan/ john lennon lyrics. Its not all thats great. I think Alice and Chains is ok, but Nirvana sucks.Its a couple of slowed down punk music with bad lyrics that the singer repeats while whining.

Please someone give me some fresh approach to this.
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What's point of this topic? They made some very good songs, but you eventually grow out of them. Alice in Chains is more timeless for me. Saying Nirvana sucks is a bit stupid...
 
#35
Stilettoprefer said:
Nirvana was way better than all this stupid Dubstep garbage that my generation listens to today. (I hate my generation btw)
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I concur, I hate my generation's mainstream music, it's either 20 somethings still full of teenage rage at their girlfriend leaving them and screaming about how they are going to kill their ex or themselves, or electronic, musically boring same 4 chord songs with some singer going on about how much they love someone or again, being depressed that they left them or some 20 year old sat at a computer making random warbling/wobbling sound waves that everyone over the age of 25 and most musicians hate.

The only genre truly worth following for me at the moment is variations of death metal, some great stuff has come out recently like Beyond Creation and Spawn of Possession's newest album.
 
#38
I think the fact that the mainstream had not been exposed to an alternative to the uber conservative radio hits of the day was a factor. The fact that many of Nirvanna's tunes had really good hooks was also a factor. I long ago gave up trying to figure out why some bands are really popular and others (often far superior to my ears) are obscure.
 
#39
jag872002 said:
I think it is a bad/ watered down punk rock-esq with a kind of bob dylan/ john lennon lyrics. Its not all thats great. I think Alice and Chains is ok, but Nirvana sucks.Its a couple of slowed down punk music with bad lyrics that the singer repeats while whining.

Please someone give me some fresh approach to this.
Click to expand...

You need to go right (right right) back to the DIY music scene that Grunge emerged from. By the time it was called 'grunge' the game was up, all those little bands that had thrived on SST were goners. Grunge was born out of the 'outsider' aspect of small American bands who did not have the money to do the massive stadium tours.

The music was everything but formulaic however. The Minutemen played Steely Dan covers and incorporated jazz music like the works of Eric Dolphy into a rigerously DIY punk aesthetic. The Meat Puppets incorporated country and psychedelic influences into hardcore punk (largely to annoy audiences but to also hold a mirror up to the hypocritically narrow-minded masses that showed up to punk shows). Bad Brains blended in Dub Reggae... The Butthole Surfers were even weirder and more diverse. The Melvins took the sludgier B side to Black Flag's My War album and took it much further.

To understand grunge perhaps it is best to listen to Eye Flys, the opening song on the Melvins' first album Gluey Porch Treatments. That ridiculously slowed down riff, forever feedbacking guitars and slow drum hits (still recorded using Hardcore Punk mixing and EQ; clean bass, fuzzed guitar, boomy drums) is purely conforming to the idea of taking punk away from the Ramones/Stooges influences (guilty of being both artschool pretentious and a bad throwback to Phil Spector's wall of sound), and making music to continually challenge the punk scene.

I don't have much time for either Alice in Chains or Soundgarden. Both posed around as hair metal bands in the '80s when the real work was being done by the SST crowd and then jumped onto grunge bandwagon after it had hit pay dirt. Both bands had a very classic rock sound (almost a direct throwback to bands that might have firstly influenced highschool prototypes of the SST bands but not really detectable in the main body of their work).


To shape this round into Nirvana, firstly listen to Bleach. You can hear the Black Flag influence on there as well as other things such as Swans. That martial beat on Papercuts is very reminiscent of Swans in my opinion. Kurt Cobain was gifted/cursed with writing very accessible music (if you compare it, say, to the roughshod output of the Meat Puppets who often sounded drunk at the wheel) and he was also very self conscious. Nirvana were elevated well out of the petri-dish of the underground music scene they had tried to be a part of so they had the unique position of gaining megabux from slowly becoming the figureheads of a music scene that largely didn't exist (Grunge was a media/fashion construct) and risking mass-ostricision from the smaller underground scene they had been part of.
 

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