That said, the further we got from Kurt’s death, the more bands you could find mining Nirvana’s molten soul rather than merely aping their vital statistics. It was a sort of musical inbreeding programme resulting in a whole slew of tattooed, short-trousered yokels, a gob-smacking number of whom lucked into platinum discs. Any major band spawns tadpoles of course, but post-grunge acts like Silverchair and Stone Temple Pilots and Fred Durst’s cabal of dullards and the Green Day/Blink 182 pension plan punks were the bottom of the barrel, mainly because they were copping off bands who themselves were revisionaries. So, American hard rock in the ’90s was distinguished, if that’s the word, by depressingly generic recycling enterprises. “I was getting tapes from bands that didn’t sound remotely like the Pumpkins or Nirvana, and (record companies) thought that I could somehow transform their artist into that sound,” remembers producer Butch Vig. Post Nevermind, the trio became one of the most cloned acts of the era, but the second X-generational acts who sounded most like them were least capable of tapping into their primal, Stooge-like thrust. The band had no real successors, mainly because their music was made luminous by the kind of spirit that doesn’t show up on a Xerox machine. It happened to Nirvana, in one of those once-a-decade package deals. As Dave Grohl pointed out in these pages a few weeks ago, it could’ve happened to anyone: Hüsker Dü, Jane’s Addiction, The Pixies.īut it didn’t. Granted, Nirvana themselves were not the most original band in the world so much as a meld of vintage UK punk 45s, ’80s straight-edge, itchy ’n’ scratchy Amerindie acts and melanchoholics like The Replacements. To hear Kurt Cobain singing ‘You Know You’re Right’ on radio or MTV this winter was to witness Banquo’s ghost showing up at the Headbanger’s Ball looking for his voice back from the likes of Nickleback and Puddle Of Mudd and The Vines.
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