Reflections on the Twentieth Anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind          Mark Mangini

At the age of twenty, I fear I wasn’t quite the man my parents wanted me to be.  I was too skinny with longish hair.  I didn’t bathe as much as I should have, and I wore unisex clothes from thrift stores that had gone out of style long before I got them.  I was awkward, a little too earnest: a typical college sophomore.  I had successfully abandoned my high school friends without bothering to replace them, and I read pointless Anthony Burgess novels like M/F in my dorm room alone on Friday nights.  I was a loser.  And I was a virgin.

It would be impossible to say anything that hasn’t already been more eloquently said about Nirvana’s Nevermind, so I’m not even going to try.  In fact, I’m going to restate something that almost every other person who’s had an affair with the album reiterates: I don’t even like it, yet it is somehow responsible for everything good in my life.

Now at twenty, Nevermind isn’t faring much better than I did.  Clocking in AT OVER FIVE MINUTES, lead-off track “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is predictable and worse, boring. It gets loud, and then soft.  Then it gets loud again.  “Come As You Are” is dreadful, and the song before it doesn’t even deserve to be mentioned by name.  “Breed” is alright, but the first decent song doesn’t come until track five, “Lithium,” even though its sole merit is ripped straight the Pixies—another band I can barely get through an entire song of—and Nevermind is quickly brought back to terrible by “Polly.”  Clouds finally part halfway through with the excellent run of “Territorial Pissings/Drain You/Lounge Act/Stay Away/On a Plain,” which display the marriage of the Beatles’ melodic sensibility and Sonic Youth’s fuzzy detachment we’re always told Kurt loved so much.  The rest of the album seems obsessed with Green River, Love Battery, or whatever the fuck else those northwest guys worshipped in Olympia’s shittiest basements and clubs.  It all ends with “Something in the Way,” a death-rattle to anyone who has actually sat through each excruciating second (197 of them!).  To put it lightly, unless washing the dishes or watching reruns of The Steve Wilkos Show high at 3:30 in the afternoon on a Tuesday, you’re probably not going to make it through the whole album in one sitting.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t even hear Nevermind until 1995, a good four years after its release and one year after the man responsible offed himself.  This I blame solely on my mother and father, who didn’t birth me until a ripe 1984.  Therefore, I was almost seven when this record came out and about eleven when I finally heard it.  With a characteristic ‘check this out’ and a self-congratulatory nostril-wipe/glasses readjustment combo, my hermetic uncle, in a rare trip out of his horror movie VHS-lined living room, plopped the CD on the kitchen table, flaccid naked baby penis up.  What I heard when I put the album on was the sound of four chords over and over and over again that, much like the gesture a blurry Kurt gives on the back of the booklet, immediately summarized and dispensed with everything I knew about pop music up until that moment.

Growing up in a small town about fifteen miles northeast of Pittsburgh, I knew nothing of music outside of what my dad listened to.  A dedicated Beatles worshipper, my father brought my sister and me up with little knowledge of anything outside of the 1960s pop canon. I came to have every lyric, every harmony, and every chord change memorized before I even knew who sang them, let alone the importance these people played in the history of pop music.  Even more enthralling, I knew little about any music besides these groups.  “Music” was Help!, or it was Pet Sounds, or it was Double Fantasy.  Otherwise it was…well it wasn’t really anything.  Nirvana changed all of that.  Honestly, it could have been anything—a Tupac record likely could have been my escape from Brackenridge, PA. But it was Nevermind and the subsequent digging that led me down my own little pop music wormhole.

While Nevermind occupied my adolescent head for about two years, it was In Utero that played a much bigger role throughout my teenage years.  While friends, who I convinced to love Nevermind just as much as I did, moved on to the wretched Pearl Jams and Soundgardens of the mid- to late-90s, I stayed a bit closer to home with In Utero.  A little rawer, a little more abrasive, a little prettier, In Utero was the first record I obsessed over.  Things I didn’t even yet know how to quantify—things like mixing, sequencing, and production—were perfect.  This obsession got me reading, and I soon discovered my next favorite band, Sonic Youth, and their albums Goo, Dirty, and Daydream Nation.  Sonic Youth begat Television, who’s Marquee Moon opened my eyes to New York punk and its godmother, the Velvet Underground.  It would be years before I began to understand the significance of John Cale, Tony Conrad, and La Monte Young, but at that point in time The Velvet Underground and Nico, The Velvet Underground, and White Light/White Heat, with their unabashed mix of prettiness and experimentation, pointed directly back to my original point of reference, the Beatles.  Except if Dylan had put black tar heroin in Lennon’s tea instead of acid.

THIS is the true legacy of Nevermind: its success was the flood gate that collapsed, allowing tons of kids just like me with no cultural resources to discover the true history of pop music that was beyond our parents’ record collections and 3WS.  If 1991 truly is “The Year Punk Broke,” 1995 was “The Year Punk Broke Mark.”  Maybe it happened to you a little sooner, maybe a bit later.  But if Nevermind was the first record you heard that wasn’t between the Moody Blues and the Alan Parsons Project in your dad’s collection, you broke.  Nevermind was the album that changed so many people from passive consumers of music into scavengers and searchers of more strange/fast/hard/loud/pretty/abstract sounds.  At least that is the way it happened to me.  But I know for a fact that there are a million other kids who had the same exact experience, who can now be found scouring record bins around the world for their next great obsession.   We all have Nevermind to thank for that, even if we can no longer make it through an entire listen.

Mark Mangini is an editor at The New Yinzer.