(I normally don't save commentary on any of the music videos I feature on a page of this blog, but in the case of my comments on Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and Nirvana in particular, I'm more than happy to make an exception. Here's a revised version of what I wrote to comment on my choice of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as a Music Video Of the Week.)
They were not charismatic. They were not cool. They were not dedicated followers of fashion. None of them would ever have a chance of dating Linda Evangelista; they didn't vogue, and they weren't vogue. In fact, Nirvana - guitarist/vocalist Kurt Cobain, bassist Kris Novoselic, and drummer Dave Grohl - were flat-out losers. Yet, when their LP Nevermind was released on September 24, 1991, they became winners by tapping into something Generation Xers - those born in the fifteen years or so after the baby boom ended - already knew: The Reagan-Bush era sucked, and so did its music.
Much of the 1980s was a living hell for a lot of kids who spent the decade in high school and/or college. Economic opportunity, despite government propaganda, had diminished. Crime was rampant. AIDS took the fun out of sex. Even kids who graduated from the most prestigious colleges and universities could expect to settle for a minimum-wage job and move right back in with their parents - or single parent, more likely, since their parents' generation had divorced a lot back in the seventies - and the Xers turned to music for solace. But the music they heard on mainstream radio was all either lightweight dance pop performed on synthesizers and sung by superficial pop divas, or overproduced corporate rock from interchangeable bands who placed too much emphasis on their hair.
Then came the nineties. By 1991, the economy was really in the loo, and a short war in the Persian Gulf distracted Washington's attention from domestic concerns. Meanwhile, popular music got worse. Front men were lip-syncing to other people's voices. Rock was dominated by pop-metal bands narcissistically named for their leaders. Michael Jackson's latest album, Dangerous, wasn't. At a time of rising crime and declining living standards, Madonna decided that America's biggest problem was sexual inhibition, and she appointed herself as the person to do something about it. And some of us were actually beginning to like Paula Abdul!
Clearly, someone had to take action.
Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was the first single from Nevermind, and it was a good sampler for the whole album. With disjointed lyrics and even more disjointed music, it pretty much illustrated the frustration of Generation Xers being left with a deteriorating civilization and trying to make themselves heard. Cobain's exhortation to the older generation to amuse him and his friends for its own benefit - "Here we are now; entertain us!" - seemed as much a dare as an invitation.
When Nevermind topped the Billboard charts in January 1992 - replacing Michael Jackson's Dangerous at the top - it led to a fruitful period of rock and roll that produced success for several like-minded "grunge" bands - Pearl Jam, Soundgarden - and bands that, if not Seattle-based or grunge-oriented, rocked out in the same spirit, like Collective Soul. It seemed as if rock was undergoing a renaissance on the same scale of the British Invasion of the early 1960s.
It wouldn't last. Kurt Cobain was conflicted with Nirvana's mainstream success, especially after having acquired a mass audience that liked the beat but didn't get the message. The flannel shirts Cobain usually wore in part as a disregard for fashion became . . . fashionable. And Cobain must have known that the grunge trend was becoming just another commodity when Madonna - Public Enemy Number One to grunge fans - signed Candlebox, a Seattle group with a carefully calculated, grunge-like, radio-friendly sound for rock radio formats, to her own label. After all, you defeat the enemy by singing his own song.
It was all too much for Cobain, and he committed suicide in April 1994. Although the afterburners of what he started continued for awhile, the grunge movement pretty much died with Cobain. So did the cultural backlash against Reaganism; in November 1994, the Republicans took over both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. As for nineties pop overall, well, what we expected after Nirvana's commercial breakthrough was a change for the better. What we got were Hootie and the Blowfish. And by the end of the decade, mainstream radio was dominated by lightweight female pop singers and male vocal groups (called "boy bands," even though they didn't play their own instruments), only this time rock and roll wasn't represented on the charts by pop-metal. It wasn't represented at all.
Twenty years after the release of Nevermind, and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in particular, they are examples of what was then and what could have been later.
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