Certain songs, albums and artists can withstand the test of time and be passed from generation to generation, but few have done it quite as well as Nirvana has.
In the fall of 1991, big name artists such as U2, Michael Jackson and Metallica were all coming out with new albums, however none had the same impact that Nirvana’s “Nevermind” did.
“It was a real surprise to people. There was no sense within the music industry that the album would be as big as it became,” said Eric Weisbard, professor of American studies. “More often than not, people know what the big albums are going to be in a particular time… So when a record by an unknown Seattle band rivaled those groups and made it to the top of the charts, it was very surprising and it made people in the music industry sit up and take notice that there was a large audience for a kind of music, punk rock, that they had always assumed could have a small audience.”
Nevermind was released on Sept. 24, 1991 and by Oct. 12 the album was certified gold. By January of 1992, it was number one on the Billboard 200 album chart. Weisbard said there was a combination of reasons the album gained popularity so quickly. The first was that Kurt Cobain was a classic pop-music writer – his songs had a catchy chorus and had the types of hooks audiences could hum easily. The second was the history that came along with punk rock combining with pop music.
“People trusted that Kurt Cobain was somebody who could not only write a catchy song but who really had a personal sense of the history of punk rock and an attachment to that history,” he said. “He was a figure leading you into a world that for a lot of people was a fascinating place to go.”
Twenty years since the album’s release, it is still one of the few albums that changed the face of music and continues to bring people into that fascinating world as it did 20 years ago.
“It holds up because at heart they’re just really good pop songs,” Adam Morrow, of Tuscaloosa’s Callooh! Callay!, said. “It was carefully crafted music, and regardless of how that’s presented or what kind of scene or movement it’s tied to, well written songs last.”
Jordin Bonds, a pre-physical therapy senior at The University of Alabama, said that her dad, who was a musician himself, introduced her to Nirvana at a young age. Like most college-age students, Bonds was alive when the album was released but wasn’t old enough to realize the immediate impact the album had but has grown up in the aftermath of it.
“Nobody could be like Nirvana,” she said. “Just the way the music was different, it made them stand out. Even the people in the band and their own personal conflicts added something to the music. What they’re talking about in the songs, that conflict remains, things change but the raw emotions don’t.”
Weisbard and Morrow agree that no band could ever do what Nirvana did, but believe that has a lot to do with changes in the way we consume music today. In 1991, people only heard the music the radio was playing and the videos MTV was showing. This helped to shape the success of Nirvana because, according to Weisbard, MTV was playing the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video all the time.
Now MTV airs more television shows than it does music videos and the Internet has made it possible for anyone to look up almost any song recorded whenever they want.
“We don’t have to accept what Top 40 radio feeds us anymore,” Morrow said. “How many people actually listen to the radio to learn about new music anyway? We get online, we ask our friends, we go to trusted websites – things have a way of getting through, so that if an underground hero was to break into the mainstream, it wouldn’t matter nearly as much, culturally, because the mainstream has been totally deflated by every little musical niche that we can now find ourselves in.”
“Nevermind” By The Numbers:
– 9 weeks for the album to go platinum
– 253 weeks on the Billboard Top 200
– 10 million copies sold in the U.S., making it a Diamond album
– 30 million copies sold worldwide
