AllMusic, an encyclopedia dedicated to music, outlines a defining characteristic of alternative or indie rock as “operat[ing] outside of the mainstream” (Allmusic, “Alternative/Indie Rock”). One of the defining characteristics of ‘90s alternative music, then, was that it went against the grain, contra to mainstream music. Nirvana situated themselves well within this genre by creating music that defies musical convention. Their final album, In Utero, with its offensive musical style and exclusionary subject matter signified an overt attempt to thwart the band’s own popularity and remain alternative to the mainstream music scene, but failed, undermining the definition of alternative rock and permanently altering the alternative rock genre. Nirvana …show more content…
The song “Scentless Apprentice,” for instance, is based on one of Kurt’s favourite books called Perfume. Having no prior experience with the book would make for a complicated reading of lyrics such as “I lie in the soil and fertilize mushrooms / leaking out gas fumes are made into perfume.” Even more explicitly, the band unapologetically overlooks any sense that the themes in the entirety of the song “Rape Me” may be offensive. The word “rape” is mentioned 16 times throughout the song and dominates the verses. Even further, after consistently repeating the potentially offensive term, Cobain manages to close the song with a somehow positive note: “good.” This paradoxical union between rape and an implied goodness reinforces Kurt’s disinterest in following the terms of the music industry. The words “my shit is her milk” may be inspiring for Kurt, but there is something telling about its unashamed nature that connotes a sense of the band’s indifference for the reception of In
Cobain, the lead guitarist, writer and singer for a band called Nirvana shook the groggy music world with the release of Smells Like Teen Spirit from the album Nevermind over twenty years ago on September 10, 1991. Nobody ever imagined that the simple four-chord progression would ever grab so much attention that it would hit number 6, let alone the Nevermind album knocking Michael Jackson’s Dangerous out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboards. (Shmoop) The fact that a grungy, distortion filled song became such a radio hit proved that Nirvana’s shy singer was now the much needed voice for the youth. New found fame hurdled the little known Cobain into the limelight almost instantly; hungry fans gobbled up and imitated everything they could about him. No longer were kids interested in listening the pop music that saturated the 80’s; they now had music that voiced how aloof they felt about their existence. Kids who were misunderstood by their parents and elders, finally...
These were three examples of the variations of the hippie aesthetics. This essay gave a look at different songs and how the fell into certain categories when determining if they were hippie aesthetics. They ranged from fully to none at all. This was a time in music where artists and bands were trying to find themselves and to not be part of the mainstreams. The hippie aesthetics involved individuals that were willing to take a chance and step outside the box. They were the risk taker of their time. The hippie aesthetics has influenced some of the music that you hear today and will continue to long into the future.
Our entire lives have been shaped by the events happening around us. Along with us many factors in our day to day lives have evolved too, including musical genre. One such genre is rock. Rock is a genre for the youth, by the youth, it has evolved to stay with the times and stand up for what’s right. In this essay I will prove why rock is a good example to show how genre has been defined, maintained, constructed and negotiated through the past 60-70 years since the very first Proto Rock song came out.
Hard as it may be to believe, it has been MANY years since Nirvana's release of Nevermind, the album that most people who still could be referred to as Generation X-ers consider the seminal alternative rock LP of all time. Nirvana's crunching guitars and mangled lyrical stylings may not have the lasting artistic influence of, say, Bach, but for many people the band's widespread commercial and critical success marked a key turning point in radio rock n' roll. The slickly produced, monotonous and insipid music that ruled the 1991 airwaves was finally getting some real competition from bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden and others. It was okay to mosh. But where has that passion, that feeling gone to again?
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” The opening lines of Howl, by Allan Ginsberg, melodiously encapsulates the beat generation. The beats alluded to by the verbatim ,“The best minds”, are a group of idiosyncratic poets whom through the instrument of prose(driven by spontaneity and a primal lifestyle) , orchestrated a rebellion against the conservative beliefs and literary ideals of the 1950s. Howl, utilizing picturesque imagery, expounds holistically upon the instigator of the movement in culmination with personal experiences of beat members. Accordingly “Howl” evokes feelings of raw emotional intensity that reflects the mindset in which the poem was produced. The piece is structured into three stanzas, sacrificing temporal order for emphasis on emotional progression. The first sequence rambles of rampant drug forages and lewd sexual encounters, eliciting intonations of impetuous madness, one ostensibly hinging upon on a interminable need for satiation of hedonistic desires. Concordantly the following stanza elucidates upon the cause of the aforementioned impulsive madness (i.e corruption of the materialistic society motivated by capitalism), conveying an air of hostility coalesced with quizzical exasperation. Yet, the prose concludes by turning away from the previous negative sentiments. Furthermore, Ginsberg embraces the once condemned madness in a voice of jubilation, rhapsodizing about a clinically insane friend while ascertaining the beats are with him concerning this state of der...
The biggest influential song on Nirvana’s Nevermind album was the first song, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It reached number 6 on the Top 40 Charts. This song was groundbreaking for Nirvana and the alternative music scene as a whole. After the release of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” white, middle-class youth of the United States finally had a style of music to call their own and express their “teenage anthems” (Stuessy, Joe). This was the first song to emerge from alternative rock and to be known in the mainstream of rock and roll, expressing their generation’s expectations, “...here we are now, entertain us”(Stuessy, Joe). “Smells like Teen Spirit” was Curt Cobain’s “attempt to write the ultimate pop song”(Nevermind, Nirvana). He used the soft-loud dynamics of his favorite band, the Pixies. The insidious hooks also showed his admiration for the Beatle’s John Lennon(Nevermind, Nirvana). The style used in this song is simple, plain, loud, and straight-forward. Musically, there is nothing very “innovative” or difficult. However, the reason it is important to rock history is because it brought America’s attention to the once before underground style of grunge. “A driving drum beat, powered by Novelsek’s rhythmic bass, and a memorable guitar riff and solo, mix perfectly with Kurt Cobain’s depressing yet humorous lyrics” (Kastner, Patrick). While it has certainly been overplayed in the past years, it is still an essential part of Rock history.
Grunge began as a raw, rough sounding version of the rock music that was prevalent during the 1980s. It started in 1980s Seattle in the form of bands like Mudhoney and The Screaming Trees. However, it was in the early 1990s, when bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden emerged that the grunge movement took America by storm. These bands allowed people to experience and revel in an entirely new kind of music, which was both expressive and relevant. Though there are several bands both within and outside of the United States that play and some who still play grunge music, the most influential band was Nirvana. Front-man Kurt Cobain still holds a place as a music icon, and it is the ...
Throughout Cobain’s childhood he was a sickly child, suffering from bronchitis, the divorce of his parents and was living in a “depressed and dying lodging town” (Ronson, 1996). At the age of ten Cobain suffered because of loss of security and the constant moving between homes due to his parents’ divorce. (Soylent Communications, 2010) His parents were mostly absent because they were working-class people; Cobain was the “son of a mechanic and a waitress.” (Soylent Communications, 2010) Growing up the child of working-class people really put Cobain in a place where he was deprived of many things and was left fulfill his own needs, emotionally and physically. Cobain found friendship in Krist Novoselic, who had similar dreams and interests in punk music. (Soylent Communications, 2010) The depressing lodging town of Aberdeen, Washington left Cobain with nothing but scars from the repeated cases of abuse he received by the kids of his school, Cobain dropped out of high school to pursue his dreams in his bands. Aberdeen was a dying town and nothing new was ever going on there. Cobain however did get his brea...
The late 1970s gave birth to a punk culture that further distended into an evolution of the genre during the mid-1980s, particularly in Seattle, USA. A punk inspired movement called grunge became internationally recognized after Nirvana’s debut release album ‘Nevermind’, in 1995. Grunge gained a mass recognition for its punk ideology, attire and music, which stemmed further away, and was in itself a rejection to the mainstream metal and pop boom in the music industry of that time. Grunge incorporated a fusion of cultural and social threads that linked themes like feminism, liberalism, anti-authoritarianism, wry post-modernism, and not least a love of dirty, abrasive music; grunge reconciled all these into a seminal whole. (Standard grunge definition, Internet source)
In high school Cobain befriended a gay student and had to endure bullying from people who though he was gay. Cobain later admitted that he was “gay in spirit” and “probably could be bisexual” (“The Dark Side,” 1992). He dropped out of high school two weeks before graduation because he did not have enough credits, and became a janitor. It was in high school, however, that the beginnings of Cobain’s career were formed. He met Krist Novoselic, and later co...
Being on the cutting edge of bizarre, alternative music is an elite privilege, complete with buzz words to exclude the mainstream. The music makes or breaks the scene. One rave deejay explains to Rosen and Flick (1992), "A great rave or techno record is like a religious experience. A bad one will give you a headache
...to be contradictions on the subject, as well as opinions on when does an alternative rock group stop being or becomes “alternative rock music”? Is it defined by the sound of the music, the image of the group, or both? One can also ask if it’s about the era or time the group existed, just like the genre term of classic rock. Bands such as Led Zeppelin, The Who, or Pink Floyd weren’t classified as classic rock music when they were forming and popular during their prime. What really defeats the purpose of the common definition of alternative rock music is during the early 1990’s when popular underground bands like Soundgarden and Nirvana were signed to labels and changed the face of rock music and incorporated the traits that defined alternative rock music into mainstream rock that continue to this day. The term “alternative rock music” has really lost its meaning.
The American rock band Nirvana impacted American culture and society by paving the way for the punk rock subculture into mainstream corporate America. Punk rock music stems from the rock genre but has its own agenda. The crux of punk rock is that it is a movement of the counterculture against the norms of society. Punk rock in itself is made up of a subculture of people who rejected the tameness of rock and roll music during the 1970s. (Masar, 2006, p. 8). The music stresses anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian ideas in its lyrics as well as scorns political idealism in American society. Before Nirvana unintentionally made punk rock a multi-million dollar commercialized genre of music, underground rock paved the way for the punk rock genre by creating core values that punk rockers drew upon.
First, let us define what grunge is and where it comes from. Grunge as defined by web encyclopedia alt.culture is the cumulative influences of punk and ‘70s heavy metal (plus rain, coffee, cheap, potent beer, and occasionally heroin), a cohort of Seattle bands developed a soulful hard rock variant that was instrumental to alternative music’s early-‘90s move underground (altculture. com). Among the bands included in the definition Nirvana would be mainly the one that made this phenomenon popular. Released in 1991, Nevermind—a record by an obscure band working in a genre considered as hopelessly uncommercial—launched the grunge phenomenon and marked an era of unprecedented exposure for alternative acts. Then other bands like Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Candlebox followed the trail that Nirvana started in the grunge w...