Where once stood the sex god in his leather pants now stands a beflanneled caveman, banging away on his cool new rock (“Territorial Pissings,” “Stay Away”) where once was the glossy power ballad is now something fragile and raw (“Polly,” “Something in the Way”). Still, they never present themselves as more than ordinary. Anyone who has ever tried to pick up a guitar and play these songs realizes that the punk maxim of needing just three chords is inapplicable: Here are songs that expand on it, progressing in ways that don’t make sense until they do. And as much as the band helped bring punk and underground rock into the mainstream, Nevermind is a tirelessly complex piece of music-not in the way that prog rock is, but in the way folk art can be: an expression that draws on something familiar in ways that feel alien and intuitive. And it hits like a bolt of lightning: His will, it is good.Įven as an outsider, Cobain was an outsider-he drew influence from The Beatles just as much as he did Black Sabbath. “I’m so horny/That’s okay, my will is good,” Cobain sings on “Lithium.” It’s funny.
But in its place, they wanted to build something equitable and new. Of course they wanted to tear down the culture that came before it: It was often misogynistic and cruel. For however much the band is framed as ambassadors for generational angst, what makes Nevermind special isn’t its rage, but its innocence. Listen and you can hear it: the singsong melodies, the simple performances, the way it feels direct but also a little haunted. Drummer Dave Grohl once said that the metaphor that kept coming up while Nirvana was recording Nevermind was children’s music.
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