90s Album Thread: Nirvana, “Nevermind” (1991)

Okay, it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room. The diversity of music, trends and bands that emerged in the 90s was truly vast, but if you ask people nowadays (or even 20 years from now) to define 90s music most of them will say “grunge”. The release of Nirvana’s album “Nevermind” (1991) my senior year of high school was the first nationwide shot from the underground “Seattle scene”, and suffice it to say, it simply took over.

I have never seen an album move into and dominate the sphere of popular music as fast and completely as this record did. I remember driving with a buddy to visit colleges in the winter of ’91 and we had the radio tuned to Z100 because we knew, eventually, this Ultra-Pop station would play “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. And wouldn’t you know it, right after Color Me Badd’s “I Wanna Sex You Up”, there it was. From the comfort of our respective seats in the car, we both lost our minds. It was unbelievable, Z100 (of all stations) was playing a song that stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the rest of their catalog. And they did it because they had no choice. Even people who didn’t “like this kind of music” couldn’t help themselves. This was history, there was no doubt about it.

Hair Metal had been hanging on by a thread, and this album made the Aqua Net gatherings in the hot tub attached to back of the limo immediately obsolete. Someone from Capitol Records had to go and tell “Poison” their services were no longer needed. It was bananas. But what’s sometimes lost amongst the memories of flannel shirts and revolution is not only how different this music sounded, but how good it was before it even got to the studio to be recorded. As Butch Vig, who produced “Nevermind”, would say to all the up and coming bands who wanted him to “make us sound like Nirvana”: “If you want to sound like Nirvana, go home and write songs that are as good as Kurt Cobain’s.” And he was right.