Nirvana: ENOUGH already!

Imagine if in 1994 Cobain stayed in rehab and Grohl choked to death on a microwave burrito.

Grohl could hold his own in improvisations though, especially 'Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol...' and 'The Other Improv'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44uSksPOHtg

as far as being a more adventurous player, from what I've read Grohl was on his toes the entire time he was in the band, expecting to be fired eventually given their history with drummers. Kurt is pretty testy with him in Unplugged.

On a Lou Reed scale of 1 to 10..

How testy was Kurt to Dave?

sixteen years pass...

Ouch.

Or, put it another way (and since this thread mentions the Chameleons), around the era of this thread ILM had got all Chameleonsed out and I read somewhere on here about how there was this old forgotten classic "Strange Times", seemed like p. much ancient history really but it was new to me. That record was 16 years old at the time, which was 16 years ago now...

The craziest Grohl Machine story I saw was the QOTSA recording of "No One Knows." I just Grohl played it first on maybe drum pads and live cymbals then again the exact same way with real drums and no cymbals, and then they blended the takes? Let me look it up. Hard to do, for sure, especially since the track is pretty busy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nncw_T6MKg8

D Growl so technically proficient and exact like a robot. Like every fill on “in bloom” is exactly the same as every other. Where’s the swing, where’s the improvisation? Ultimately boring

― calstars, Monday, January 7, 2019 12:36 PM (yesterday)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmtbsFW0tCw

Grohl was great as a drummer for Nirvana imo, better that than as a constantly posturing human meme bacon rock star.

On 'In Bloom' he's pretty much copying Chad Channing's drum part anyway.

god this band was awful. listening to their music beyond singles for the first time a cpl years ago was like a skeleton key unlocking the secret to why all rock bands have sucked for the entire duration of my life. https://i.ibb.co/v10wrc4/x2.gif

sb

I've never listened to nirvana and thought "this rhythm section isn't good"

also rock bands don't sound like nirvana in the 21st century

i read somewhere during recordings they would try strobe lights to simulate a click track for grohl to play along to, but that didn't pan out -- he's apparently not as precise and robotic as you'd think!

nah they only tried that on Lithium, the only song Grohl couldn't get without a click track. and of course a failed take of Lithium led to Endless, Nameless

calstars- his drumming is less contained on In Utero (obv bc of the songs)

I've never listened to nirvana and thought "this rhythm section isn't good"

― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, January 8, 2019 11:23 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a really otm post

the strobe light was an albini gimmick i thought. that would be interesting to hear an albini-recorded nevermind

xp I'm not into Chad's drumming at all but yeah they were never terrible

Nirvana was cool, though they never were really completely my thing. i think what's pretty accurate is how they did help kill hair metal but what's less stated is how The Black Album likely laid the foundation where radio was ready for the singles from Nevermind. That coupled w/some incredibly bad releases from a lot of mainstream pop metal giants, and the lack of lasting excitement over the Use Your Illusions. It wasn't overnight though, Adrenalize and that Slaughter album got some desperate "please make these albums happen" airplay in '92.

never thought about that, I always thought The Black Album came out the same day as Nevermind, but it came out a month before (with "Enter Sandman" released in late July)

ENOUGH Already! is still my favorite Nirvana album.

FUIUD

is my second favorite Nirvana album.

As someone who has thought all along that Nirvana is possibly the single most overrated band in history, I'll take anything as close to backlash as I can get.

Allow me to bask in this gloriousness.

(basking)

I cannot think of him without immediately thinking of THE BEST! THE BEST! THE BEST! THE BEST!!!!

I was told by a studio engineer many years ago that "In Bloom" sounded that way because it was a Butch Vig copy and paste job. Have no idea if that is true or not, but I could believe it.

that makes sense.

This is a great sounding album, take a listen to the MFSL disc.... actually don't do that y'all probably will say it sounds like numetal

As someone who was much more drawn to rap & “rhythmic format” dance / house as a kid, and who hated the bands that drew directly on their sound, most of my life (And well into adulthood) I had a kind of respectful disinterest in this band ... they’d also been so fully canonized that it was hard to see through the thick layers of hyperbole and rockist discourse ... never thought they were “overrated” as much as “impossible to rate” without feeling the burdensome weight of 100000 previous conversations and just as many musical tropes and cliches

I revisited the whole catalog though recently, feeling like it was finally time, and I completely love them and, trite as it may seem, their music really has aged incredibly well. They may have introduced a tide of terrible imitators but they all do *such* a bad job of the imitation; it’s very clear to me there are things nirvana could do and did that were inimitable and that they also did more efficiently than their influences ... idk I feel like I’m speaking the obvious here but their ability to speak to certain uglier emotions in a pop structure without trivializing those emotions or making them feel like juvenile entitled bullshit... idk I think it’s aged abt as well as something can

hilarious (over)analysis itt

ask someone who was there if Nirvana was good or not

In anticipation of this I have recorded a new song entitled "My Thugz They Don't Sweat Me." Acoustic guitar, 808 emulator and voice. I eager await releasing it under the Tupac imprimatur.

― J0hn Darn13ll3 (J0hn Darn13ll3), Sunday, November 17, 2002 2:36 PM

deej otm

Oooh yea the "In Bloom" drums are cool. Some Ringo-esq simplicity, or if Ringo was a hard hitter I guess.

i think the main thing that's helped nirvana stand the test of time is the sheer strength of the songwriting--familiar chords played in unfamiliar order, modes and substitutions straight out of tin pan alley, and that's before you get to the lyrics, which were always memorable even at their worst (looking at you, polly)

Can you go on about the unusual chord sequences and melodies? I remember reading a really interesting post on Cobain’s “modal tendencies” here on ILX but I can’t find it in the infinity of Nirvana/KC threads.

ask someone who was there if Nirvana was good or not

I was. They weren't.

I was, they were, but at the same time I never need to hear another note of their music for the rest of my life

I was pretty early (Jabberjaw & Iguana shows) and they were pretty good! But honestly... I liked Tad more.

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/nirvana/1991/iguanas-tijuana-mexico-43d67f03.html
https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/nirvana/1991/jabberjaw-los-angeles-ca-7bd6caa4.html

(...and still do!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0-QESafo50

I was, they were, but at the same time I never need to hear another note of their music for the rest of my life

ditto

xp: ^^^^At 52:24 you can feast your ears on the very first performance of "Come As You Are"

Can you go on about the unusual chord sequences and melodies?

My favorite example is probably Lithium--the first half of the chord progression is fairly common (D F#m Bm G), but the second half of the progression seems to modulate with every chord change (Bb C A C). Someone with more theory expertise can explain exactly what's going on, but that kind of progression is more common in, say, show tunes than rock music. It's surprisingly jaunty when you play it on the piano.

In a lot of other songs, he'll do a little major/minor substitution that adds a bit of comedy, or a bit of tension. Like in Heart-Shaped Box, going to the major IV instead of the minor iv on the "real complaint" chord. Or in Teen Spirit, which throws in that Db chord instead of the much more common C or C minor.

Yeah, I remember that analysis. Like, the pixies would also do that major substitution for a minor chord to give a sort of manic feel, but unlike frank black Kurt would fit his vocal melodies around the chord substitution, modulating with them, rather than against them

i think what's pretty accurate is how they did help kill hair metal

This is one of those rock history truisms that's gotten a whole lot fuzzier the more I've read, and also given what I remember from that era firsthand. There's some truth there but it's usually overstated or embellished (not by you, but in so many other accounts) to the point that it distorts what was actually happening at that moment in popular culture.

On the one hand, as someone who started paying attention to rock as a preteen around 1994, the whole hair-band era felt indescribably ancient and foreign. But what felt foreign about it was mainly the image and the production style, both of which were already going out of fashion before Nevermind came out. So the landscape certainly changed but things were already going that way with or without Nirvana. Lots of post-Nirvana hard rock (Candlebox etc.) was just pop-metal in disguise anyway; the first rock album I ever bought, in the spring of '94 - Aerosmith's Get a Grip - was just regular old pop-metal, no disguise necessary, and it was fucking huge - that album came out in 1993 and sold clean through the next year, probably the peak of the grunge era. When the band followed up with a greatest hits at the end of 1994, it sold 4 million copies - almost as much as Vitalogy or Nirvana's Unplugged. And Guns N' Roses was very much still a big deal, including the Illusions records - my local hard rock station had at least 4 cuts from UYI II in regular rotation through 1995 or 1996. I mean, GNR has never really experienced a lull in popularity, but in the mid-nineties the Illusions records still felt pretty current and relevant even to a young listener who missed their supernova phase.

Def Leppard's popularity must have cratered just months before I started listening - they kept putting singles on the charts through mid-1994 but I never heard any of them; except maybe for a couple stray spins of "Photograph" or "Rock of Ages" I don't think I heard a thing they did until later in the decade. I might've heard a couple of Motley Crue tunes around that same time. The lesser hair bands were pretty much nonentities on radio at that point. But even before the nineties were out a hair band revival had started to take shape - driven mostly by VH1, whose turn-of-the-millenium programming was maybe the first major iteration of mass Eighties nostalgia.

I don't really have a point with all this but it's just interesting to reflect on. Did grunge sound like a foreign country to someone who was 12 years old in 2001?

i think w/GNR the albums felt mature and interesting in a way that was maybe a little unexpected and not exactly what was desired; the singles from the albums were played a lot but tbh i don't recall much culture-wide interest in UYI past the albums' releases and what at the time was a longer period of excitement for new albums. Maybe on the hard rock stations, as you said. They didn't experience the same type of plunge that Def Lep did, i mean after all the UYIs were actually good while Adrenalize just felt like it came from a band bereft of ideas and maybe completely wiped out after everything they went through.

Aerosmith benefited from the pop-metal phase but they always felt outside of it, they were to some of these metal dudes like Neil Young was to some grunge bands. They never really adapted to the times artificially, they just adapted slightly.

i don't think Nirvana killed these bands at all, it was more that their sudden ascendence and the success of other less clownish acts made the more low-hanging fruit bands (that were strictly that late '80s pop metal style) seem all the more absurd. But at the same time, it probably was less an actual death blow and more of Cobain and co rising up to fill the vacuum and grab the fan base these bands were beginning to leave behind. It didn't hurt that they (and Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and AiC) were all pretty interesting both sound wise and personality wise. They got huge pretty swiftly and everyone loved them and no one cared about those other bands, many of whom tried to adapt to the grunge sound and none of whom looked like anything but pathetic when doing so.

Aerosmith were exceptions to the rule: they were still riding the wave of a massive comeback that, while indebted partially to being Hair Metal forefathers, they managed to keep a foot outside of it as well. They were also able to reap the rewards of Classic Rock nostalgia that rose concurrent to Grunge (Dazed & Confused soundtrack, mid-90s CD remasters etc.). They were legacy artists that it was still okay to like.

XP Or what omar said...

Def Leppard's popularity must have cratered just months before I started listening - they kept putting singles on the charts through mid-1994 but I never heard any of them; except maybe for a couple stray spins of "Photograph" or "Rock of Ages" I don't think I heard a thing they did until later in the decade.

Adrenalize is a classic New Jersey, but "Two Steps Behind" got massive airplay in summer '93, a hair metal ballad in name only.

Also: holdovers like Ugly Kid Joe and Mr. Big.

This whole narrative is ahistorical bullshit. Skid Row's second album went double platinum three months before Nevermind came out. "Hair metal" bands continued to make records, and sell records, well into the 1990s. Yes, a few bands like Warrant saw their promotional budgets go down, and a few others just naturally fell off, and labels tried to find alt/grunge bands of their own once Nirvana was a hit, but nothing swept anything else away en masse. Soundgarden was sold as a metal act - their biggest tour before they "broke" was with Faith No More and Voivod. Alice In Chains was sold as a metal act - they opened the Monsters of Rock tour (Van Halen, Anthrax, Dokken IIRC) before they "broke."

that performance of Lithium is the peak of the band imo - at least the rock side

What does he sing after "I'm so r---"? "I can't take the salads out"??

Casting a vote for this live clip (never got to see them myself, sadly):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zagAeZ5eH94

xpost Sund4r: "I can't take a sedative"

Boyz II Men and Wilson Phillips.

Ah

god krist is so annoying

he was the worst in that infamous nardwuar interview too