Did Nirvana really change music forever?

Posted On October 19, 2024October 19, 2024

It’s impossible to really measure the impact an artist has unless it’s in hindsight. Many bands claim to want to change the world, but only time will tell if they have the same impact as The Beatles or be left as a footnote, or worse yet, a stain on the culture that they helped birth. But considering how omnipresent Nirvana has become in modern culture, did they really have the impact that many people claimed that they would?

Because if anyone were to have asked Kurt Cobain about his plan for the future, being a cultural icon probably wasn’t the first thing on his list. He may have said that he wanted to be as big as The Beatles, but most people say that in the same way that directors want their original franchise to be as revered as Citizen Kane.

And it’s not like the group was considered the most fashionable, either. Flannel shirts and greasy hair weren’t the most hip look in the early 1990s, but once ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ took over the airwaves, the scene was flooded with bands that wanted something more than to hear the latest Poison track or watch yet another Whitesnake video on MTV.

Outside of being one of the biggest names in music, though, Nirvana still held onto the same beliefs that the punk rock acts of yesteryear had. As much as fans loved seeing their favourite acts come alive in stadiums, Nirvana was a band built for a tight-knit room, and once they went on their first stadium tours, Cobain never had the time to play the same rockstar schtick that artists like Freddie Mercury did.

And when looking at the modern age of music, it’s hard to really see too many of Nirvana’s descendants on the radio or filling out stadiums. Although the backwash of Cobain’s generation, like Creed, eventually packed venues around the world, that was a far cry from what Cobain was doing. If Nirvana were supposed to be the Sex Pistols of that generation, Scott Stapp represented the minute that hair metal came back for a few years, only this time with a yarling vocal over the top.

At the same time, what is rock and roll if not being completely unhinged behind the scenes? Sure, Nirvana wouldn’t be the stadium rock acts that populate the summer festival circuit today, but they had come from the school of bands playing for small numbers of people and worrying about being authentic rather than whether or not the masses related to them.

Even though the Def Leppards and Kisses of the world are more than happy to give people their money’s worth on stage, one only needs to look at the rest of the music scene to see what Cobain left for the rest of us. If you look at the other acts who have shouted Nirvana’s praises, it’s more often than not either visionaries like Noel Gallagher or Billie Joe Armstrong or artists looking to bring something new to the table, whether that be Denzel Curry or Chester Bennington of Linkin Park.

So, really, Nirvana’s impact on music doesn’t really extend to the raw sales. It was about making music for the right reasons, and even if not everyone is pulling from the grunge playbook anymore, Cobain is still being looked at as someone who dared to push the envelope when most other artists were looking to roll over and ride the waves of glam metal.

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