And aside from the unfulfilled promises and future sounds to be explored on their enchanting Unplugged set, I also left off their furious and messy live albums like From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah and Live at Reading Festival, sets that have been released over the years. There were no real hard and fast rules for assembling the list, though the albums and singles are so formidable that I felt there was little need to comb through the demos, rehearsal tapes, and songs never officially released (if Cobain didn’t feel the urge to properly record “Pen Cap Chew” or finish “Opinion,” then I didn’t really see the need to rank them). This list celebrates the band’s emergence, 30 years ago this week, with the release of their 1989 debut album Bleach. In 2019, Nirvana still feels eerily powerful, cathartic, and prescient. The most effective tool is entertainment.” “It’s almost impossible to de-program the incestually-established, male oppressor, especially the ones who’ve been weaned on it thru their families … like die-hard NRA freaks and inherited corporate-power mongrels … But there are thousands of green minds, young gullible 15-year-old boys out there just starting to fall into the grain of what they’ve been told of what a man is supposed to be, and there are plenty of tools to use. Tucked away in Journals, Kurt Cobain wrote a letter to his ex-girlfriend Tobi Vail (of Bikini Kill) about how he perceived his band in the American cultural landscape. Teenage angst paid off well, as Kurt Cobain once humblebragged, but we fans received something in return, something that it took decades for many of us to fully appreciate. If you’re into your older sister’s Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin records, Nirvana could open you up to Bikini Kill and Daniel Johnston. Cut your teeth on the Beatles and Nirvana can quickly usher you toward Flipper and the Melvins. The band remains a gateway for new listeners, a bridge between generations and extremes. Musically, Nirvana was a cagey mix of ludicrously macho classic rock, scummy punk, irrefutable pop hooks, and precocious indie twee. Fashion laughably wrapped itself in flannel and heroin chic, Hollywood set a rom-com in the midst of Seattle’s music scene, while a Sub Pop receptionist outed the “lamestains” in the “lamestream” media and Cobain graced the cover of Rolling Stone with a T-shirt reading “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.” Nirvana pulled back the veil to reveal such major institutions to be the hapless fools they were then and still are now. For a few years, corporate rock had to pretend to be college rock. Seemingly overnight, the music industry was suddenly chasing down the likes of Royal Trux, Steel Pole Bath Tub, and the Jesus Lizard so as to hand them suitcases of cash. They flipped the axis on what mainstream and alternative meant, usurping the likes of Michael Jackson, Garth Brooks, and Guns N’ Roses at the top of the charts. Like Elvis, the Beatles, and Easy Rider before them, Nirvana instantly inverted the status quo. Thirty years later, we can still feel the band’s aftershocks, even though Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and a rotating cast of drummers (that fortuitously landed on the mighty Dave Grohl) only lasted seven years and made three studio albums before Cobain decided it was better to burn out than to fade away. Those bands were cool, but it was “Love Buzz,” the first single from Nirvana, that proved to be seismic, wholly shifting the paradigm of ’90s culture. For the first year of the series, the Sub Pop Singles Club released music by underground luminaries like Sonic Youth, Fugazi, and the Flaming Lips, bands that have remain touchstones in alternative rock ever since. By that point, Sub Pop was already a label of some renown, both in the Pacific Northwest and on college-radio playlists nationwide, thanks to releases from acts like Soundgarden and Green River and an overall aesthetic cutting ’70s classic rock with ’80s hardcore, spraying cheap beer over all of it, a sound that would soon be called “grunge.” A mix of reverence and irreverence, it was a series that saw grunge bands covering Black Flag, as well as former Black Flag singer Henry Rollins covering Cheech & Chong. In November 1988, Seattle’s Sub Pop label inaugurated its seven-inch-vinyl-only Singles Club with the debut single by a new, unheard-of band hailing from the logging purgatory of Aberdeen, Washington. Krist Novoselic, Kurt Cobain, and Dave Grohl.
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