Most overrated Band ever? | Page 25 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Clerefor Sede said
I haven’t read the entire thread but anybody here think Nirvana is a little bit overrated?

I’ve heard their pretty short discography and it let me very underwhelmed. I really appreciate the capacity in which Curt Cobain expressed himself and his emotional issues in his music, and the cult following and popularity of the band only reflects a reality in the 90s youth even more. But the instrumental aspect of it I always found too dry.

Any Nirvana fans to guide me through?, because I hate that I don’t like them and I really want to know what to pay attention to.

I’m not the biggest Nirvana fan (I’d take Pixies over them any day, for one thing) but I think for me a lot of their cult comes from contextual factors. More than anything else, Nirvana ended the eighties. After a decade of hair metal, power ballads and often corny synth-pop, they cut through the bloated, corporate music scene like a knife through butter, and brought punk music to the upper reaches of the Billboard charts, transforming the tastes of a nation of teenagers practically overnight. They also paved the way for countless other bands in the same vein to break through in their wake and achieve enormous commercial success, such as Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains , Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins etc. It’s kind of like how the Ramones made most of the bloated prog of the mid 70s sound completely irrelevant, except instead of barely scraping into the charts, their biggest album went to number one and sold over thirty million copies.

For these reasons Kurt came to be seen as the voice of his generation, and then when his death came at the age of 27 he was immortalised. Would Nirvana be as admired today if Kurt had lived, and the band had continued into middle age and lost their edge like so many others do? Definitely not to the extent they are now. In my opinion, they’re still excellent, but are perhaps somewhat overhyped. 

As for the music, as you say their discography is pretty small and as such didn’t allow much room for them to branch out or experiment. With that in mind, I think whether or not you like them really comes down to whether or not you like the grunge sound, which seems to be Marmite-like in that you either love it or you hate it. The grunge sound is what they did, so I think the best thing for anyone wishing to get into them is to hear the tracks that represent that sound best. I know you’ve already heard them, but I think you should pay particular attention to three specific songs: ‘You Know You’re Right’, ‘All Apologies’, and ‘Dumb’, which in my opinion represent the best of their music. 

Also, if you haven’t already seen it, I’d watch this. It’s one of my favourite live performances ever, and I think it’s just haunting, particularly the look in Kurt’s eyes at 4:50. 

Edit: Ooh! Just seen that you mentioned Coltrane as well. I’m a pretty big fan of his (in fact, my username on Discord is Coltrane), so I’ll definitely write something up about why I like him so much at some point. 

@Jules That’s understandable; I’ve done the same thing with many artists I’m now a big fan of. When I first was recommended Björk, I listened to about 6 or 7 of her most played songs on Spotify, hoping to find something that interested me, but none of it stuck out. Fast forward two years, and she’s one of my favourite artists ever, and indeed my avatar on this site. When you do revisit Nirvana’s discography, I think another thing to note is how Kurt (note it’s spelled with a K, not a C) wanted to fuse together the raw aggression of punk with more pop elements.. he described his intentions for the sound of Nevermind in particular as “The Knack and the Bay City Rollers getting molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath”. It’s nothing that hadn’t been done before, but none of their predecessors did it in a way that captured the inspiration of America’s youth quite like Nirvana.

Also worth checking out are some of the albums on his list of favourites. Quite telling are the inclusion of The Shaggs (whose album is notorious for being basically unlistenably bad in a way that people somehow enjoy), as well as Pixies, whose mixture of pop with white noise was basically the blueprint for Nirvana’s sound. 

On Coltrane, I think at this point I would go with you on picking Miles over him. Miles’ discography is way longer due to Trane’s tragic early passing and due to his restless creative spirit has a lot more variety. The sound he arrived at it in the late 60s and early 70s is perfection to my ears: funky, murky and occasionally mysterious jazz-rock that combined Miles’ experimentalism with contemporary influences like Hendrix and Sly Stone. 

That said, for me the main appeal of Trane is the spirituality he expressed in his music. I’m not religious personally, but I find the way he expressed his faith through music to be very empowering and cathartic. A Love Supreme is the most obvious example of this (with the fourth part ‘Psalm’ being one of my favourite pieces of music ever) but in the more extreme direction Ascension is a wonderfully abrasive free jazz rendering of the same feeling. What I like so much about the latter is that if you just dip your toes into the sound, it’ll probably sound absolutely awful, but if you embrace it and fully immerse yourself, you’ll get completely caught up in the pure joy and elation expressed through the music. I also really love Trane’s softer stuff, he managed to record some wonderfully mellow ballads without ever sounding corny. 

I think the ‘what are you listening to right now?’ thread is a good catch-all for non-Beatles related musical discussion.

I’d have loved to hear Trane collaborate with Ravi. Perhaps in another timeline we might have seen both a Miles-Hendrix-Macca collab (which was apparently in the works prior to Jimi’s death) and a Trane-Shankar-Harrison one tooWe can dream, I suppose… The closest we have, probably, is Alice’s solo work, which is highly enjoyable in its own right. I’ve not ventured much further than Journey but it’s one of those discographies I definitely need to dive into. 

It’s interesting to think about what Trane playing with an electrified band might’ve sounded like, anyway. I think Miles’ whole funk and Wah-Wah thing probably slots in better with rock instrumentation, but I think there might’ve been room for some soaring sax in Miles’ fusion bands had the two come back together again.