It is by now a familiar story. After toiling in the American independent scene for much of the late 1980s, a long-haired, moody rock ’n’ roller with high aspirations reluctantly signed on the corporate dotted line. He spent the next year and a half writing songs and, in 1992, saw his creative vision vindicated when his major-label debut climbed to the top of the Billboard charts, fueled by a loud, catchy hit single. That year, he also found time to father a daughter, who would in time grow into awkward adolescence in front of what seemed like the entire world. That man’s name?
Billy Ray Cyrus. But you could be forgiven for thinking of Kurt Cobain instead. This week sees the deluxe reissue of Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” which was originally released on Sept. 24, 1991 — though it didn’t manage to make it to No. 1 until January of the following year — and is now being celebrated, as is our habit these days, on its two-decade anniversary. “Nevermind” ended up spending two weeks at the top of the 1992 charts; in contrast, Cyrus’ “Some Gave All,” which came out in May, spent 17 consecutive weeks at No. 1, still a record in the SoundScan era, and was the year’s best-selling album.
And yet it seems safe to say that “Some Gave All” will not be seeing a deluxe reissue next year or at any other point. Why one band and not the other? Why celebrate “Nevermind,” and not “Some Gave All”?
Music fans will tell you that there are objective, historical reasons for favoring one record over another. “Nevermind” ushered alternative into the mainstream and influenced the sound of every rock record that followed. “Some Gave All,” on the other hand, yielded a much-parodied novelty hit, “Achy Breaky Heart,” the video for which spawned a deeply regrettable line-dancing craze. And though Cyrus outsold Nirvana in 1992, the numbers have since come to vindicate the latter: “Nevermind” has sold 30 million copies to date, 10 million more than “Some Gave All.”
There are also other, less obvious reasons for the favored place of “Nevermind” in music history. As the critic Joshua Clover argued recently, Nirvana was “the last great invention of rock and roll” — the last rock band to really rock, the last consensus-eliciting gasp of a moribund medium. The author Simon Reynolds wrote something similar, suggesting that “an undercurrent to grunge retrospection is the music media’s and record industry’s own nostalgia for the heyday of the rock monoculture.” We revere “Nevermind” because it allows us to remember the days when rock was rock, and everyone agreed about what rock was — unlike, say, “Some Gave All,” a record that conjures mostly memories of bad jeans and poor life choices.
Unlike Cyrus, Nirvana represented something authentically new, at least to most listeners. “Nevermind” synthesized a whole host of punk-derived subgenres into a melodic, well-produced package, and gave audiences an approachable guide, in the person of Kurt Cobain, to the intimidating and noisy reaches of what was just beginning to be called alternative rock.
The “alternative” in “alternative rock” was telling, though at the time the designation seemed intuitive. Even as late as 1991, rock music still substantively retained its 1960s associations, with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan benevolently presiding over their lesser loved — or at least, less frequently canonized — descendants. Nirvana was an alternative rock band simply by virtue of their deliberate definition of themselves as somehow outside the familiar baby-boomer-consecrated, hippie-affiliated rock ’n’ roll lineage.
The rise of an “alternative” was a long time coming — the Sex Pistols and the Ramones had made similar political and aesthetic statements in the mid-1970s — but took a while to fully arrive. This was an issue of numbers as much as anything else. As the music historian Michael Azerrad has written, “the plain and simple fact was there were far more hippies in the Sixties than there were punks in the Seventies and Eighties.”
But if “baby boomer cultural dominance was like a dam holding back the generation after it,” he wrote, “that dam finally burst the day of ‘Nevermind’s release in September of 1991.”
Which is to say, the story of “Nevermind” and its outsize success was — and still is — as much about demographics as it was about music. Consumers coming of age in 1991 were born after “Abbey Road,” “Sticky Fingers,” and “Blonde on Blonde,” and though they were brought up to revere those records, it was also inevitable that they would rebel against them. It took them a while to build up the physical and cultural capital to do so. But around the time of “Nevermind,” they finally managed it.
This, as much is anything, is what critics and fans are celebrating, 20 years on — the victory of one generation’s version of consensus over another’s.
And yet there is an irony here. The oral histories, the tribute concerts and compilations, the pieces like this one — all of these foist upon a new generation exactly the sort tedious reverence for ancient musical history that Nirvana and their fans were rebelling against. “It’s our forebears,” a 24-year-old Seattle resident named Malia Alexander told the New York Times recently, regarding the town’s two enduring brand names, Pearl Jam and Nirvana. “It’s kind of my dad’s music.”
This generational shift, 20 years after we overthrew our own parents’ music, is what older writers and listeners are mourning when we intone platitudes about how much “Nevermind” meant. We are also, increasingly, mourning the time when “we” meant “people who listened to Nirvana.” A demographic change once briefly helped enshrine Nirvana in the rock ’n’ roll canon; oncoming demographics may be on the verge of shoving them right back out.
A look at the charts post-Nirvana shows the gradual petering out of rock ’n’ roll in favor of rap, boy bands and Britney Spears. Alternative rock, since its ’90s heyday, has long since given way in turn to alternatives to rock. Next year marks, among other things, the 15th anniversaries of the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Life After Death” and the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Forever,” with the 10-year commemorations of 50 Cent’s “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” and Jay-Z’s “Black Album” arriving soon after, in 2013.
Even that last paragraph is a curious edit of the past, though. In 1997, No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom” spent seven weeks at No. 1, compared with the Wu-Tang Clan’s wan one and Biggie’s four; the California ska group has since outsold the Staten Island rap crew by a factor of five and the Brooklyn MC by a factor of two.
As with “Some Gave All,” those numbers may have told the tale then. But they certainly don’t now. In the end, how we choose to remember that year — as with how we choose to remember Nirvana in 1991, and the two decades since — will mostly be about how we choose to remember ourselves. And the definition of “we” is always changing.
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Billy Ray Cyrus. But you could be forgiven for thinking of Kurt Cobain instead. This week sees the deluxe reissue of Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” which was originally released on Sept. 24, 1991 — though it didn’t manage to make it to No. 1 until January of the following year — and is now being celebrated, as is our habit these days, on its two-decade anniversary. “Nevermind” ended up spending two weeks at the top of the 1992 charts; in contrast, Cyrus’ “Some Gave All,” which came out in May, spent 17 consecutive weeks at No. 1, still a record in the SoundScan era, and was the year’s best-selling album.
And yet it seems safe to say that “Some Gave All” will not be seeing a deluxe reissue next year or at any other point. Why one band and not the other? Why celebrate “Nevermind,” and not “Some Gave All”?
Music fans will tell you that there are objective, historical reasons for favoring one record over another. “Nevermind” ushered alternative into the mainstream and influenced the sound of every rock record that followed. “Some Gave All,” on the other hand, yielded a much-parodied novelty hit, “Achy Breaky Heart,” the video for which spawned a deeply regrettable line-dancing craze. And though Cyrus outsold Nirvana in 1992, the numbers have since come to vindicate the latter: “Nevermind” has sold 30 million copies to date, 10 million more than “Some Gave All.”
There are also other, less obvious reasons for the favored place of “Nevermind” in music history. As the critic Joshua Clover argued recently, Nirvana was “the last great invention of rock and roll” — the last rock band to really rock, the last consensus-eliciting gasp of a moribund medium. The author Simon Reynolds wrote something similar, suggesting that “an undercurrent to grunge retrospection is the music media’s and record industry’s own nostalgia for the heyday of the rock monoculture.” We revere “Nevermind” because it allows us to remember the days when rock was rock, and everyone agreed about what rock was — unlike, say, “Some Gave All,” a record that conjures mostly memories of bad jeans and poor life choices.
Unlike Cyrus, Nirvana represented something authentically new, at least to most listeners. “Nevermind” synthesized a whole host of punk-derived subgenres into a melodic, well-produced package, and gave audiences an approachable guide, in the person of Kurt Cobain, to the intimidating and noisy reaches of what was just beginning to be called alternative rock.
The “alternative” in “alternative rock” was telling, though at the time the designation seemed intuitive. Even as late as 1991, rock music still substantively retained its 1960s associations, with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan benevolently presiding over their lesser loved — or at least, less frequently canonized — descendants. Nirvana was an alternative rock band simply by virtue of their deliberate definition of themselves as somehow outside the familiar baby-boomer-consecrated, hippie-affiliated rock ’n’ roll lineage.
The rise of an “alternative” was a long time coming — the Sex Pistols and the Ramones had made similar political and aesthetic statements in the mid-1970s — but took a while to fully arrive. This was an issue of numbers as much as anything else. As the music historian Michael Azerrad has written, “the plain and simple fact was there were far more hippies in the Sixties than there were punks in the Seventies and Eighties.”
But if “baby boomer cultural dominance was like a dam holding back the generation after it,” he wrote, “that dam finally burst the day of ‘Nevermind’s release in September of 1991.”
Which is to say, the story of “Nevermind” and its outsize success was — and still is — as much about demographics as it was about music. Consumers coming of age in 1991 were born after “Abbey Road,” “Sticky Fingers,” and “Blonde on Blonde,” and though they were brought up to revere those records, it was also inevitable that they would rebel against them. It took them a while to build up the physical and cultural capital to do so. But around the time of “Nevermind,” they finally managed it.
This, as much is anything, is what critics and fans are celebrating, 20 years on — the victory of one generation’s version of consensus over another’s.
And yet there is an irony here. The oral histories, the tribute concerts and compilations, the pieces like this one — all of these foist upon a new generation exactly the sort tedious reverence for ancient musical history that Nirvana and their fans were rebelling against. “It’s our forebears,” a 24-year-old Seattle resident named Malia Alexander told the New York Times recently, regarding the town’s two enduring brand names, Pearl Jam and Nirvana. “It’s kind of my dad’s music.”
This generational shift, 20 years after we overthrew our own parents’ music, is what older writers and listeners are mourning when we intone platitudes about how much “Nevermind” meant. We are also, increasingly, mourning the time when “we” meant “people who listened to Nirvana.” A demographic change once briefly helped enshrine Nirvana in the rock ’n’ roll canon; oncoming demographics may be on the verge of shoving them right back out.
A look at the charts post-Nirvana shows the gradual petering out of rock ’n’ roll in favor of rap, boy bands and Britney Spears. Alternative rock, since its ’90s heyday, has long since given way in turn to alternatives to rock. Next year marks, among other things, the 15th anniversaries of the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Life After Death” and the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Forever,” with the 10-year commemorations of 50 Cent’s “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” and Jay-Z’s “Black Album” arriving soon after, in 2013.
Even that last paragraph is a curious edit of the past, though. In 1997, No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom” spent seven weeks at No. 1, compared with the Wu-Tang Clan’s wan one and Biggie’s four; the California ska group has since outsold the Staten Island rap crew by a factor of five and the Brooklyn MC by a factor of two.
As with “Some Gave All,” those numbers may have told the tale then. But they certainly don’t now. In the end, how we choose to remember that year — as with how we choose to remember Nirvana in 1991, and the two decades since — will mostly be about how we choose to remember ourselves. And the definition of “we” is always changing.
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