Recommendations of the Editorial team
Nirvana
by Vernon Reid, Living Color
For me, Nirvana were a classic record store discovery. Things like that happen more and more rarely. I was at Rocks In Your Head in New York and asked the woman behind the counter, “What’s new?” She put on “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I thought, “Wow. Someone did it, Metallica and REM to combine.” The term “grunge” was foreign to me and I didn’t know it would become a phenomenon. I just knew I was hearing something important. Really great music. My favorite song on Nevermind was “Lithium.” Kurt Cobain spoke to something in the culture that no one before him had expressed in this way: passionate ambivalence. “I’m so ugly, but that’s okay/ ‘Cause so are you.” He summed up the extreme feelings that not having feelings could cause.
The 100 Greatest Musicians of All Time: Nirvana – Essay by Vernon Reid
Cobain took music in completely new directions. People who can be seen as the axis of music history revolves around them are very rare. Hendrix was instrumental, Prince was instrumental, Cobain too. On top of that, he was an excellent guitarist. I once said that to a Joe Satriani fan and it made him really angry. But you can’t think of Cobain as a great songwriter and just an average guitarist at the same time – because without the guitar he wouldn’t have written these songs. His playing through the Big Muff distortion, you can’t take that away, it was essential to his music, and his altered tunings were incredibly influential.
Nirvana: Lithium
The 100 Greatest Musicians of All Time: Nirvana – Essay by Vernon Reid
When I think of Nirvana, I also think of the Bad Brains, the Sex Pistols. All of these bands were radical and idiosyncratic and outlandish, but their songs are incredibly melodic. On Mistaken Identity, my first solo album after Living Color broke up, there’s a track called “Saint Cobain.” I will never forget the day I found out about his suicide. Such immense success as Nirvana experienced has a traumatic effect.
And something else happened to him that was a disgrace in my eyes: because of Nirvana’s success, he always had to defend himself against the accusation that he had sold out and restore that appearance of impeccable purity. When it comes to an emerald or a diamond, you can talk about purity. But with people – that doesn’t work. This is dangerous. Just think: artistic purity. Racial purity. Although I think Cobain was actually perfect in some ways: he was perfectly flawed.
