Heard a guy at the record store swear Kurt Cobain was just okay

Some dude in his 40s said Nirvana's Nevermind only holds up because of the production, not the songs, and now I can't stop hearing how messy the guitar is. Made me wonder if I only liked them because everyone else did back in 1991, you know?

4 comments

4 Comments

elliot_roberts2d ago

The production is literally what made those songs hit so hard. But calling Kurt just okay is insane. Have you actually listened to the raw demos before Butch Vig got his hands on them? The songs were already there, the production just polished them up. So what if the guitar is messy? That was the whole point of grunge. You ever try to play "Territorial Pissings" clean? Sounds like garbage. The messiness is what gave it teeth.

lewis.brian2d ago

Yeah, totally with you on that. @elliot_roberts I mean, those Bleach demos are rough but you can hear the bones of the songs were already killer. The sloppy guitar on something like "School" just adds this anxious, sweaty energy that you can't fake with perfect takes. It's like the whole point was to sound like the amp was about to fall apart, you know?

jordan_henderson132d ago

My buddy @lewis.brian once tried to play "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on a busted acoustic with two strings missing, said it sounded more punk than the real thing. That rawness you're talking about with Bleach is like when I'm rewiring an old house and the plaster's crumbling - the imperfections make it feel alive, not factory fresh. You can polish a song to death but you can't bottle that first live take energy where everything's about to fall apart.

eva_moore2d ago

Have you ever heard a recording of someone's band from their first show? A buddy of mine had this old tape of his high school grunge band, and the guitar was so out of tune it sounded like a dying cat. But man, the energy in that room was something you could feel through the crappy cassette. You just can't get that same feeling when everything's run through a computer and tuned to perfection. It's like trying to recapture lightning in a bottle, but someone scrubbed all the electricity out first.