Recently, my favorite local rock station decided it would ask its listeners to vote for the top 500 songs it has ever played. Last week, that station DC101, played the countdown from 500 up to one. After listening to it, I have concluded one thing: for most people, music was at its apex when they were between the ages of 14 and 18.
Out of 500 songs, can you guess which one took the top spot? If you are thinking anything other than “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, you may seriously want to consider inflicting pain on yourself. This is not to say that I believe it is the greatest song of all time, merely that everyone else in the world thinks that.
Nirvana is ridiculously overrated. There, I said it.
Put away your conspiracy theories and rants about how Nirvana changed the game for all time. They didn’t. They were just the band that had the highest impact during the dark days known as grunge. They didn’t invent rock, they didn’t even invent the plaid shirt. They did, however, become really popular after two albums, then the most important part of this equation: at the height of the band’s popularity, the lead singer, Kurt Cobain, killed himself.
An early death is the most assured way any public figure can be immortalized. In terms of musicians, everyone from Mozart to Jim Morrison owes their notoriety to an untimely death. Don’t think so? Try to imagine a world Nirvana had lived on and Cobain had not killed himself. Their third and fourth albums be more experimental and political, they would have received tepid reviews and people would say they were no longer relevant. In other words, they would have been Pearl Jam.
I am not saying Nirvana didn’t have some good songs. They did. But they were not the second coming of rock, they were a band with simplistic tunes that made it big, surprising even themselves. But most importantly, they happened more than 14 years ago. Move on already.