Nirvana
 

They never said anything about us as people. It was always about Kurt Cobain's pain and his constant whinging about it. I'm alright with his suicide.

They said everything about is as people, because we're two generations into a civilization where whiny selfish druggies- mostly men raised by women who think the world gives a shit about their pain- represent about 90% of the youth culture around the world.

Kurt was a mirror mirror on the wall fo the "Me" generation, but his life was seen as more of a performance art piece or a theatrical tragedy than a warning, and now most of the creative and artistic geniuses are sniveling fucks. But isn't it the purpose of an antihero to remind us that there are no heroes? No. Or maybe.

Hmm, have no clue about that.


Anyway, as far as their music goes I listed to Nevermind and In Utero this year for the first time in about 10 years and I liked Nevermind waaay more than I remembered and I thought In Utero was disjointed and unfocussed and it sounded like the product of a deeply unhappy person. So there you go.

dude, this thread is so full of shit. Kurt Cobain is not Morrissey y'all, he was neither pretentious nor self-absorbed. He was just some dude who played kick ass music really loud, could growl and scream in a way unfamiliar to the radio masses, and had a sincerely fun time doing it, or have none of you ever watched any footage of Kurt on tour? The worst part of his suicide is it totally altered the reality of who he really was and why we really liked him. Kurt didn't whine about SHIT! He wasn't some "me" generation spokesman, and I think he'd find it ridiculously funny that people would accuse him of such. meh.



You're letting the post-suicide image get to you, In Utero was a much more fun record than it gets credit for post-humously. There is a certain sarcasm to that record that got totally lost in translation because of Kurt's death and Courtney Love being totally insane.




People, always remember, NIRVANA WAS A FUN BAND, NOT A BUNCH OF EMO KIDS

Thats a pretty horrible thing to say Genteel.

This is one of the rare times I agree with you. They made some fucking great music, that's it.

great post, i agree 100%.

in utero sounds like a brain damaged man collapsing in exhaustion, addiction and madness.

nevermind sounds like the honeymoon period of floating on addiction, just before the burn out.

bleach sounds like a pop band playing grunge covers.

the early stuff sounds like an art rock band who abandoned their experimentation due to financial pressure and the need to make commercial music.

nirvana epitomised almost everything about rock music they claimed to despise. kurt was the biggest diva junkie hedonist, only he was too self aware and ironic to believe that was what he had actually become. they might have changed the style but the drug taking and squalor remained.

this whole liberal purist attitude - ok you're not racist, sexist or homophobic, great. but you won't committ to any kind of meaning either. kurt wanted to have his cake and eat it too. be an underground punk band but also be the biggest mainstream band on the planet. act like a king chosing who is in the in crowd and who isnt. he championed this kind of puritan liberal revolt in the entertainment industry that has intensified today. im not against it, its just a kind of dead end.

his life ends up looking like the sad quest for meaning in a totally shallow place. the niaeve belief in the power of what is not a particularly great art form ends up looking quite pathetic. theres only so much you can do with punk and it was pretty much done before nirvana even started.

nirvana was a kind of weird post modern punk tribute covers entertainment act. they ripped off and plagiarised so much, and desperately tried to make some sort of grand statement out of it all. but they ended up falling into cliches and coming up with this weird proto emo stuff.

i kind of think nirvana werent so much a punk act as a kind of folk act singing about punk.

i mean, ok - are you really so special and different from some other rockstar because you're a hipster and care for excluded minorities? really? how much of this is just narcissism.

axl didnt exactly turn out to be some sort of homophobic racist. 80's mainstream rock wasnt exactly the primary source of oppression for minorities and women. was it really worth taking that seriously that you'd want to oppose it so ferociously? at least kiss and motley crue never took themselves seriously to fall for their own myth. what did nirvana really bring to the table? the undercurrent of the whole thing is nihilism but kurt never managed to truly face the nihilism, or overcome the massively overstated attachment he had to a certain style of music. he believed in what he was doing and tried to find something transcendental in post punk bands and underground music but there's just not anything there.

if nirvana did anything new it was to express something that hasnt really been expressed in culture before, which is this kind of strange inability to escape contradiction, this mixture of bliss and agony. but kurt didnt develop any other interests than drugs and guns and he ended up hating music. he wasnt able to escape the cliches and traps of life, and didnt seem to be able to make any kind of pact with his misery.

in other respects kurts life was a success, he went from being almost homeless to a millionaire. he managed to spare his daughter the pain of divorce which destroyed him, but by committing suicide. he left her with millions.

really in the end i think it was a classic case of destruction through wealth. happens to working class people who become millionaires. this phenomenon has been studied. you give a poor person way too much money at once they destroy themselves. it doesnt happen in every case but its quite common.

Sure Nevermind sounds as clean as other rock records coming out, but how many bands at their level was or are willing to release an album like In Utero? At the end of the day Nirvana (or Kurt if you will) were great at making pop hooks in punk rock songs.


this whole liberal purist attitude - ok you're not racist, sexist or homophobic, great. but you won't committ to any kind of meaning either.

That's the great contradiction about them.

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I can't tell if yo're saying music isn't a good art form or they didn't do good music.




They were the first to say they borrowed heavily from other bands. And they never made out to be making a grand statement.

What does that even mean?


No, he was just a prick who beat his wife, all the while acting like a macho prick and singing about faggots and immigrants.

If you can't see the blatant sexism in anything by Kiss, Motley Crue and the rest of that shit then you're blind.



For me this was a band that like The Sex Pistols hit against the stupid bullshit that was coming out of the time. Were they the only band? Fuck no, but neither were the Sex Pistols the first nor alone. Henry Rollins said it best "all it takes is for one band to say fuck you then he's called the voice of a generation."

I can't tell if you're really cynical about music. Music for a lot of people can be a transcendental experiance.


That's hardly true. He seemed to obsessed with music and art. To make it seem like he was just a redneck with a guitar is silly. And the fact that he wasn't able to avoid the cliches of music is just a sad fact. However, that doesn't get in the way of the music.

Look at all these opinions! Wow!

i can see the sexism in nirvana - women as angelic saviours of the emasculated male.

i still don't see what exactly nirvana did apart from repeat some sort of gesture of hedonistic nihilism. everything else is "shit" but they were good, or something. i really don't see what the hell these 'punk' gestures do but reaffirm a commitment to settling for the shittiness of entertainment culture, cos like, everything sucks man! that's why we need our heroin.

and my point wasn't that nirvana didn't do enough charity work. it's more like kurt never resolved the question that obsessed him which was basically what was he doing and what could music mean and be in our culture. you can't say they didn't explore these questions, but i think they knew they were painted themselves as the doomed romantic failures, keepers of the flame of authenticity in a corrupt world, and it's just another part of the posturing that makes up far too much of the story.

the truth about nirvana was that it was a pretty miserable and squalid experience, a lot of people leeched it and made some money off it, but the ugliness and suffering that kurt inflicted on himself is hardly heroic.

in the end, he wasn't prepared to turn his self awareness and sense of irony onto himself, not to the point where he could have just accepted his fate. that nirvana weren't really that important. that the stuff he wrote in his babbling suicide note is just insane, like it was worth dying for. like this immediate and niaeve feeling of connection to his music was really worth shooting himself to preserve. he could hate himself but he doesn't seem to have been able to laugh at himself in a way that wasn't psychotic/masochistic. in fact i think there's something very sick about his attitude, and the attitude of much indie music before and since then. that we can just have this direct emotional connection to the childlike purity and innocence of self expression. and this is what redeems us. i think its a load of shit.

i think buzzo was right and i saw the melvins live, and it was probably the best musical experience i'll ever have. of course it doesn't remotely translate to their recorded material. nirvana was ultimately a pop band. kurt ultimately did not escape the cliches because he was more fooled by them than he thought.

im critiquing them on their own terms. obviously that's not acceptable, since it implies a greater respect than simply saying they weren't "shit".

the quasi religious messianic cult worship some people have for that band is really a testament to everything bad about them. kurt deliberately played to this and he became a kind of post modern christ figure for the entertainment industry. his entire life was made into this romantic drama and the whole thing is a load of fucking bullshit. the stupid stories and mythologisation. it became a whole industry of idiots spouting off about the importance and artistic vision of what was really a very sad man who met a very sad end and had already collapsed intellectually and artistically long before his death.

i still like nirvana, they were at times a really amazing band. i just think there is so much wrong with the way they did things and their influence hangs over a lot of people like a bad cloud. and they are also symbolic of a dead end that is still largely with us and that now, they are a part of history. there's nothing left to be squeezed out of the dead corpse of this music, and it's become more and more conservative. the true underground still exists, there are thousands of nirvana like bands. but noone cares because they arent big enough for you to have some nostalgic connection to them from your teenage years. nirvana was popular enough for people to confuse the music with their own lives. the underground that nirvana came from still goes on but only the minority care. the music itself has a limited set of possibilities and the fact is that while it still has a certain kick, it's day is done.

some people really don't want to move on from that and never will.

Disagree with this completely, Nirvana's impact, while be no means intentional, was to the the post-1990s what the Beatles were to the post-1960s, a door opener for so many other great bands. For Nirvana, when major labels were out scouting and Nirvana became a symbol of this "underground" wave into the mainstream, it changed entirely the record industry. Previously, major studios and major distributors controlled music and access to music. THEY decided what was distributed, what was profitable, what was marketable. When they stumbled onto Nirvana and the "grunge" movement, it changed things fundamentally. Suddenly indie labels had power, authority, and distribution. Majors were letting indies more or less do their thing because it was making everybody money. By the 2000s the entire structure had changed, major distributors realized that even small volume bands that didn't push a lot of units, still added up to a lot of profit if several of them were distributed. Distributors and major labels changed their business model, away from focusing on hyping mainstream bands on television and radio towards distributing and supporting indie bands and even DIY bands, but in bulk, and making up the difference through a high volume of bands rather than a high volume of records sold through one or two "big" bands. Now? Small labels and underground bands have access and opportunity without inherently having to sell-out. Indie bands and labels have just never had it so good, its the best of both worlds, and its in part due to Nirvana demonstrating effectively that small, indie bands can have enough impact to even knock of all-time greats like Michael Jackson.

As to Nirvana, I will only reiterate once more, Nirvana weren't an overtly political band, there was NO MESSAGE, they were just a band, having fun, making records and playing shows. People get what they get out of it, but the band was not trying to make any statements, not trying to change our society, they were just playing their music, and people happened to really dig it. Much like with Hendrix, it was all the vampires and hanger-ons who destroyed them, not they themselves.

The other day I was reading an article discussing the Unplugged performance. I guess with each album reaching their 20th anniversary, all these articles are reflecting on the "story" behind how these albums came to be, and how every note and lyric and mannerism by Cobain was some telling of his turmoil. Take away, the fame, take away the music, hell, take away the drugs, from what I know of Cobain, as an outsider, was that he was a man with terrible health issues that he could do little to nothing about. He had severe stomach pain, and apparently back pain. Live with those long enough its not hard to imagine someone contemplating suicide.

I think the Beatles influence was 100 times bigger in 1967 than anything Nirvana did.

The Beatles forced, through their own creativity, every other big player in rock music at the time to reconsider how they did things, to write their OWN SONGS, instead of releasing cover albums with one or two originals. They forced the Beach boys, the Stones, The Who, etc etc to up their game, their creative game.

Nirvana was nowhere near that level of influence. If anything Nirvana more negatively influenced music than positively. There are hundreds of genius bands that will tell you to a person they owe their existence to having heard/seen the beatles.

Because of Nirvana we got Creed, Nickleback, and watered down metal pretending to be "grunge."

jjjj

Not that I'd say Nirvana was exactly as influential as the Beatles, but I think they are in the same range. Further, I think you're over selling the "creativity" of those early Beatles records. They were hardly even original, they were a couple of white guys playing "black music" in a white way, no different than what a hundred other bands were doing from 1956-1964. Yes, they wrote their own material, but the instrumentation itself wasn't exactly groundbreaking or original, it sounded like all the other music on the radio.

Further, I don't think that a lot of the great 60s/70s bands who were admittedly and openly influenced by the Beatles were influenced by the Beatles sound and music so much as just influenced by the Beatles. Jerry Garcia always said he was inspired by the Beatles, but not musically, he always said seeing the Beatles doing it inspired the San Francisco scene to say, "Wait, we can do that, our bands should be doing that." They didn't mean sound like the Beatles, they were just implying playing shows and trying to get big like the Beatles. Interestingly, looking at the 1990s I'd dare say there were MORE bands that sounded like Nirvana on the radio/TV than there were band that sounded like the early Beatles in the mid-1960s..


Yes, and again, I don't think it was the instrumentation, and I say this as a musician, I think they were influenced by the image, marketing, and popularity of the Beatles. Perhaps even thought to themselves, "Wait, we're better than these guys! We should be doing this." I don't think the Beatles climbed into any siginificant musical influence until the 1970s when they themselves began to actually get creative and explorative.


Yes, and because of the Beatles we also got a shitload of crappy surfbands and Smothers Brothers concerts and like Jimi said, "I kinda feel like playing, I'm sick of checkin out these catz with their blue caps." ;)

No way man. Comparing Beatles to Nirvana is like comparing Picasso to Banksy.

The beauty of opinions is they're like assholes, everybody is one ..err has one :cool:

Maybe I've been sipping the Nirvana kool-aid too much, maybe you've been sipping the Beatles kool-aid too much, possibly I've just been sipping to much of Ken Kessey's kool-aid, either way, clearly we just disagree.



I myself never personally heard the early Beatles "sound" in the 1960s bands. Yeah, there is the Beatles image, and yeah, the Beatles were definitely the door opening pioneers for the rise of more artistically sincere "pop music" than was the corporate slop of the 1950s/early 1960s "big industry" system of music production and distribution.

In MY OPINION, the Beatles didn't musically inspire shit. I just don't hear "the Beatles" in those bands. However they did indeed inspire the rise of scenes and garage bands who were motivated by the Beatles' success to start bands and play shitty clubs themselves. THIS IS HUGE by the way, and I by no means intend to minimize the cultural and musical impact of the Beatles. However, I just don't think they were like Ottis Redding or Chuck Berry actually inspiring the sound of the 1960s, just the scene and image. Bands were motivated to do their thing, and their thing sounded different than the Beatles did. IN FACT, to me this seems all the more obvious by the fact the late 1960s and early 1970s Beatles themselves began to try to emmulate the sound of other bands! The Beatles began to sound like other bands, not bands sounding like the Beatles.

How is Nirvana NOT like this? How many countless bands formed or doubled down their efforts in Nirvana's immense wake? Nirvana is almost parallel to the Beatles in this regard, for the sheer EXPLOSION of garage and club bands who burst out after the fact. In the 1960s the Beatles sparked this wave, in the 1990s clearly it was Nirvana. Further, I dare say that Nirvana is perhaps MORE musically influential than the Beatles in the fact that so many countless bands quite literally sounded like Nirvana. If anything, the entirety of the 1990s IS Nirvana. In the 1960s people wanted too look like the Beatles, in the 1990s people wanted to look like Nirvana. In the 1960s people wanted to have bands like the Beatles (not necessarily sound like the Beatles, just play in bands), in the 1990s people wanted to have bands like Nirvana.

Its seems cut and dry!

I think you need to brush up on your rock history.

This may be true. Hell, it is. But Nirvana was the closest thing our generation ever had to the Beatles, like it or not. So the comparisons are inevitable. Just like Eminem has been ridiculously compared to Elvis fucking Presley.

Growing up, as the son of a Beatle-maniac, I think I consciously attributed some Beatle-like qualities to Nirvana, simply because it felt as though my father's generation had been such a meaningful one, and mine had been so empty and ultimately meaningless.

....

Still, Nirvana was just accepted into the rock n' roll hall of fame on their first year of eligibility. That's something only a handful of artists can claim, the Beatles being one of them. The world clearly views Nirvana as a band that defined an era better than anyone else. I think the case is closed on them being the band of the 90's. To say anything else is to admit obliviousness. If you didn't live through the 90's, or were too young to know what was going on, you probably think it was Radiohead. That's bullshit, though.

A better comparison is Kurt Cobain and John Lennon. As strange as that may sound, they were equally snarky, sardonic, pop-culture hating social justice advocates for their own time. Lennon did Bed-ins; Kurt slandered homophobic rock stars and middle american skinheads.

To this I totally agree, and if anything, while I am hugely obsessed with radiohead I never understood the hype surrounding them, I don't see them as all that influential.


I can't agree with this at all. John Lennon was an entirely different kind of artist, and while both clearly had some fun with their music, John clearly took his art as being more serious than Kurt did. John's music often had some kind of purpose or statement, whereas Kurt was mostly having fun with his art, even if sometimes his songs also made somewhat of a cultural or social statement. I don't think Kurt was anywhere near the kind of almost natural intellectual that John was, and it showed in how abrasive John got towards the late 1970s. Kurt was never abrasive, he was just himself. John was himself too, but John's self was a bit more caustic at times. Also, John had a very high opinion of his art and his place in the musical pantheon (in other words he was a bit self-absorbed) whereas Kurt didn't seem much to give a shit about it, if anything, it became clear by 1993/94 that he didn't really care for the spotlight all that much any longer, and it is widely accepted that not only was Nirvana soon to be dissolved, but that Kurt was probably going to go off the radar musically and dive into something more indie or underground, whereas John almost pimped out his final record, and was in fact devastated personally when it didn't have critical acclaim or mass appeal by his fans. John cared about his Billboard numbers and sales charts, Kurt clearly could care less.

The Beatles, like I said earlier, influenced how people saw rockers, how rock music could be a creative ART, and the expectation that a band should write all their songs. NEW SONGS. Rock and roll before the Beatles was not about albums of music, but singles. They changed the whole face of rock music and the rock music industry. Writing all their songs and having them be so GOOD (over 50 Beatles songs are universal STANDARDS, played by Jazz musicians, pop musicians, garage bands, whoever, and known by people who never loved the Beatles, but know Something, know Blackbird, know Come Together....)
In terms of Hard Rock, Nirvana is Beatlesque. In terms of influence on the entire musical spectrum of the last 50 years? come on, MAN.

How many Nirvana songs are hummed by the average music listener? Two? Three? and of course one is the boring as fuck Heart Shaped Box.... ;)

In fact, when Cobain didn't want to do something in the studio, Butch Vig told him Lennon did it and Cobain would give in. I think the issue was double-tracking vocals or something.




This is just fucking stupid. I whistle Beatle's tunes in the shower, not their image.

Regardless of how you personally feel about the Beatles, you must admit there have been literally billions of people in the world who have felt otherwise. Some of them started a band. (One of those people was Kurt Cobain.)

The influence of the Beatles musically and culturally is massive, and I don't know how I got suckered into responding to something so stupid. Must be bored.


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Fun mind-game:

--Pretend Michael Stipe killed himself (or ODed maybe) after Automatic for the People. You couldn't slap the "Generation Spokesperson" on him fast enough.

Or what if Thom Yorke bit it after OK Computer?

Smith after Disintegration? Ooo, that would have been a great dramatic rock story. I can see the biopic now.

Geffen got the money maker with Nevermind that they hoped would come about as a result of them signing Sonic Youth.

What is funny, is I hardly ever listen to the radio, and even then every time I randomly have a radio on its more likely to have a Nirvana song playing than a Beatles song. Interesting ;)


AGAIN, THIS WAS NEVER IN DISPUTE. My argument is that bands in the mid-1960s weren't trying exactly to sound like Beatles records. Further, nobody here as supported their claims with substantive rather than anecdotal evidence (i.e. a list of bands from the 1960s mainstream that sounded like Beatles copy-cats the way dozens of bands like Bush tried to sound like Nirvana ;) )


THAT WAS NEVER WHAT THE FUCK I WAS TALKING ABOUT. I SAID BANDS CONTEMPORARY TO THE BEATLES WEREN'T TRYING TO SOUND LIKE THE BEATLES. I mentioned nothing about their massive influence after the 1960s..


That is great and all, but I didn't realize you played in a band in the 1960s, which was what I was talking about. The musical influence of the Beatles on early-to-mid-1960s bands, and again, it was mostly image not sound. Bands didn't all sound like the Beatles, but plenty tried their best to look like them ;)


(a) Did you actually read what I posted? I precisely said that the influence of the Beatles was to inspired so many bands to form and start bands. However, there is a world of difference between being inspired to start a band and being inspired to sound like a band.

(b) I was talking about bands contemporary to the early Beatles, you're talking about EVERY band since the Beatles and that was not what I was saying at all. Yes, of course many bands have been influenced after the Beatles, but I was talking about the musical (i.e. instrumentation) influence on the sound of the 1960s, and simply put, from 1964-1968 I can't think of even a handful of mainstream bands that sounded like the Beatles.



Maybe next time you should read more carefully before totally trash talking me and being a total prick about it :cool:

Um, I really don't want to sound like an asshole here, but what T&B said about brushing up on your rock history needs to be repeated. And underlined.

Have you ever attempted to slog through the veritable OCEAN of posthumous Beatles reading material documenting how each songwriter grew into an extreme, of sorts, and how the "Lennon & McCartney" song credits were largely the result of an early desire to distribute credit equally between the two chief songwriters? Well, by the end of it, Lennon was so disgusted with McCartney's pop gloss that he dissed him publicly in his solo albums (which sold downright poorly compared to McCartney's, despite his number of singles that became notable hits.

Lennon hated commercialism by the time the Beatles reached their commercial peak in the late '60s. By the 70's, he was releasing work that would have no place on any Beatles album (Imagine and Plastic Ono Band actually remind me a lot of Nirvana. Especially the vocals, and the grit and sincerity of the delivery.

Lennon wanted fame at first, but I honestly don't think he gave a dick whether his albums sold by the time he was solo. Some of his shit is just painful to listen to. But Plastic Ono Band is as gritty as a Stooges album.

Maybe it is you and Toilets who need a refresher course? YOU HAVEN'T NAMED A SINGLE BAND FROM 1964-1968 that sounded like the Beatles, so I'm still not convinced as y'all side-step the issue at hand. I NEVER INTENDED TO DISS OR MINIMIZE THE BEATLES. my point was to talk about music and sound, and again, IT IS MY OPINION that the Beatles were less influential to the sound of bands in that time. This doesn't negate their explosive influence to motivate other musicians to start bands, and as Rob mentioned, to focus on original song writing, but I still dispute that these bands' sound was influenced by Beatles, and in all y'all's posts nobody has yet to demonstrate anything to the contrary. Not even one band!:cool:


In several interviews across the 1970s both John and Yoko babble on about their goals for commercial success. Did they cater to a corporate image of themselves? No. Did it stop them from going more experimental on some records? Hardly. However, John was ALWAYS very attentive to his album sales, his chart positions, and his critical acclaim. You can read all the books you want and it won't hardly change that reality. Yoko even mentioned about how pissed off John was that his last record wasn't that commercially successful initially, and she lamented that it was only his death that catapulted it to number one on the charts.


He still cared about his sales and acclaim, even if he was sort of nonchalant about it. He often felt dissed and that Yoko especially was dissed when people in the mainstream didn't particularly dig their records.


I didn't say fame, I said commercial success. I wasn't trying accuse John Lennon of being a fashion whore, rather, just mentioning that he wasn't exactly aloof from record sales, chart positions, and what rock critics and writers had to say about his records. BY THE WAY IT SHOULD BE NOTED THAT I AM QUITE FOND OF 1970S JOHN LENNON, so please don't naively misinterpret the situation so as to think that I don't dig it, or that I don't know what he was about in that time period, 1970s Lennon was the John I liked the most, the revealing, crass yet funny, intellectual, honest, creative, and especially fun but sometimes abrasive person that he was. John shove the fame up its own ass, but it doesn't mean he stopped caring again about his sales, chart position, and critical acclaim. I just never see Kurt focusing on ANY of that. Also, Kurt wasn't as serious an artist as John was, clearly Kurt was more having fun and John was focusing more on his passions as an artist. In this regard they have very little in common.

By the way, you know that we can have a decent conversation about music without all of y'all throwing out ad hominem insults about my intelligence about music, we can discuss the issues without it having to be personal. I know this comes as a shock to SYG, but its not always personal if we have a difference of opinion about things.

SuchFriends...

I'm not really arguing with you, man. I just know that Paul McCartney was the definition of chart ambition. John Lennon was a sneering, gritty, Snarky, angry man who felt that music should come from a different place. Sure he wanted people to like him. He couldn't believe his solo albums didn't match the successes of the Beatles. But he also went out of his way to sing about unnerving and uncomfortable shit.

"Woman is the Nigger of the World"? Mother? Well, Well, Well? God? These are all songs where he spits at the world, the status quo, and empty pop culture. He definitely mellowed out toward the end, but listening to his "primal scream" era yowling, I can't help but think of Kurt Cobain's world sick larynx straining "All Apologies" chorus.

All I'm saying is this: for kids who were born in the early '80s, like my geriatric ass, Nirvana was most definitely our generation's Beatles. More because nobody else fits the bill than for any other reason, but still- they were it. And while they only released two major, spotlight albums in that decade, they were the band that crashed into pop music from out of fucking nowhere and changed it's trajectory forever. The world went from Michael Jackson to Nirvana just like the world went from Elvis to the Beatles. Both bands, no matter how different they are, were more cultural events than simple rock musicians.

Btw: in all honesty Radiohead is definitely closer to the Beatles in the way their career has progressed, and the consistent quality (from a critical perspective) of their work. But they're not an event. They didn't change much of anything. They just went with the flow, and did more with their version of pop music than anyone else at the gold/platinum level. But will they ever have even one #1 single? Nope. Will they ever sell 10 million albums? Maybe OKC, in a thousand years. I guess if you take Radiohead's experimental take on pop and combine it with Nirvana's undeniable cultural magnitude, you probably have the makings of a Beatle like band.

Also: 60's bands that sound like/admit to being influenced by the Beatles? Give me a fucking break!
The Monkees
Dave Clark Five
Rolling Stones
Bob Dylan (what? Yes.)
David Bowie
Elton John
Badfinger
Kinks
Beach Boys

And there are bands today, specifically indie rock bands like Spoon, who have been more influenced by the Beatles than any other band.

But if you really want to talk about artist whose career trajectory is similar to that of the Beatles.... I'm sorry, but Kanye West has taken the pop chameleon, expedited evolution thing, where each album is a completely different kind of statement, and he's rolled with it more successfully (both critically and commercially) than anyone, Radiohead included.

But what's a black Beatle anyway? A fuckin roach?

Hah. Anyway, I'm with ya bro. I just like talkin about this shit.

If Nirvana had never gotten off of Sub Pop and everything else stayed the same, Nirvana would be a blip in musical history.

So would the Beatles by the way, if anything this is what really connects both bands. Neither thought they would become the biggest bands of their era, they were just bands making a go at it in the club scene, and because people really enjoyed their music they blew up! You'd be crazy if you thought Nirvana wasn't popular on the merits of their music, they weren't created or manufactured, their music just struck a chord with a lot of people and as we say in this era went viral.


I think you misunderstand what I am trying to say. I am not suggesting that John was changing his art to make it more commercially viable, rather that even while experimenting or producing art that was part of a sincere vision, John was still often interested it, concerned with, and even depressed about his sales, chart position, and critical acclaim. When his records were released, he would read articles and he would even frequently call up the label for sales/chart position updates. It doesn't mean he was selling out, or commercially focused, but it does mean he was at least thinking about it. He didn't just abandon these for a "devil may care" approach.


True, but the thing with artists is their art is like real life, it is not a singular vision. You can't define an artist by one song or even one album. While John often vented in his music, and indeed wrote many tunes with a kind of crassly sarcastic social commentary, it doesn't mean he had abandoned the world like some kind of post-hippie era John the Baptist. The guy was a complex figure. Again, I LOVE 1970s John Lennon by the way.




This was never in dispute, what I have been arguing about is the idea that the Beatles music influenced the sound of the mainstream 1960s. I just don't hear it in other bands or records. Most definitely the Beatles were a huge culural influence, but I'm not sure we can say the same about musical sound and style (structurally speaking).


I think the Pink Floyd/Radiohead comparisons have always been much more apt.


These are bands that were purposely constructed to imitate and copy the Beatles, they weren't sincere projects started by sincere artists who were sincerely inspired, so it doesn't quite count to having been "influenced by the Beatles" now does it?


BULLSHIT, the Stones were a straight up blues band, if anything, the Beatles started to sound more like the Stones.


What? No. Further, I dare say that both in 1963/64 AND also in the post-electric guitar upset, Dylan was MORE directly influential on 1960s music than the Beatles ever were (musically speaking)

Seriously now? Come on...


Not really


A bit here, but I think the Kinks had a muddier sound that sounded more like The Who than early Beatles


Yeah right, suuuuuure they do ;)


I was never talking about today, or even the 1970s, very specifically I'm arguing that the Beatles from 1964-1968 didn't influence the sound of that time, just the culture and image.


Meh, it is almost cliche for you to compare Kanye to the Beatles, and I'm surprised you didn't mention Jay Z who tried his hardest to go for that.

It should again be noted, I got no beef with the Beatles and I especially dig 1970s John Lennon. I'm just discussing the musical influence of the early Beatles, which I think has always been overrated because of all the hype and success that surrounded "Beatlemania" of that time. I would never intend to minimize the significance of the Beatles, we pretty much owe all greatest music in the 1960s to them, but not in the kind of direct way I think most people assume. Almost EVERY single band in the 1960s were INSPIRED by the Beatles, but I just don't think the SOUND of the music reflects a direct INFLUENCE.

I only own Nevermind.
The singer was actually alive when I listened to the music.
I liked and still do like the music.
This album I don't see as an album by somebody who was dead when it reached my ears, and it has a rhythm section that was soo good. Plus their pictures were fun to watch then, I'd have loved to have Novoselic as a friend.

Then I didn't pay attention that much to what came afterward.

I know Cobain died and it shocked me, but I can't paint things blacker than they were.

Nirvana, on Nevermind, had a terrific sound and good songs. Some I can hum (Something in the Way).

***

The Beatles played or recorded 483 songs (don't check, I've no idea), Nirvana less than 60 (don't).

***

The Beatles were no longer when their first song entered my world. It was on the radio. It was good. It's always been there. I never paid attention. I don't own any Beatles record. Their songs are everywhere, everyone's.
Then Lennon died and he was the one to love.

***

When I first listened to the Sex Pistols, it was because they were the punk band AND because there had been a tragedy. The band no longer was.
At the time, the hero was Sid, the villain John. The friend who copied me their album relunctantly agreed to add some PIL on the tape but despised the music. I loved it more. Still I thought the Pistols were the ones to be liked and stayed away from PIL for a while for that reason.
Then, slowly, rewriting the story, Malcolm was the villain, Sid a dupe.
Then John was the one.
Then Jon Savage wrote England's Dreaming and stressed the importance of the guitarist...

Now, when I listen to the Pistols, do I like them?
No.
The production is horrible.
Do I like some PIL albums?
Yes.

***

Death sometimes influences opinions, and those opinions might influence yours.
Shouldn't pay attention to it.

Sorry you thought attacks were personal.


Oh, now I see. When The Beatles were the most popular active band in the world, no one was influenced.

Then they broke up and the influence was massive.

Makes total sense.

Hollies and a thousand other Brit Invasion bands (seriously, get any British Invasion compilation and spin it a few times), Byrds, the way the Stones responded to Sgt Pepper with Their Satanic Majesty's Request , Strawberry Fields kicking off psychedilia (so add early Pink Floyd and a bunch of others).

And the fact that they wrote everything was novel and pushed others into writing their own material. First double-album in rock. Lots of other ways they influenced popular music.


Here's a list of the top selling albums in UK in 1960s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...United_Kingdom


Beatles albums make up half the list, 7 of them in the top 10. I find it hard to believe that no one took any musical cues from them at the time.

Thank you kindly, its just a discussion about music, not each other.


Actually, that is sort of exactly how it worked. You can definitely here the influence of Abbey Road and Let It Be on several bands from 1970 onward, and even more you can hear the influence of Paul and John's solo records. However and again, IN MY OPINION, you just don't hear a "Beatles' sound" in the mainstream bands from 1964-1968, and nobody has yet to post any bands that did in fact sound like the Beatles so I am less convinced than before...




I can see a bit of it in the Byrds, but I would also suggest that the Byrds were an influence on the 1960s of their own. Also interesting how some of the best received Byrds cover songs were NOT Beatles songs at all..


Yeah, they responded, but I don't think with a record that sounded like the Beatles, it was a record that sounded even more like the Stones, and I would dare say that looking at who was playing what before 1967, I'd almost say that it could be argued that it was the Beatles were responding to the Stones with Sgt Pepper and not the other way around.


NOW YOU'RE JUST TALKING OUT OF YOUR ASS. The authentic (as opposed to crassy marketed commercial imitations) "psychedelic" bands came from their own scene, and were not imitating or copying anyone but themselves. When this sound got surprisingly popular, it is quite clear that the Beatles radically changed their initial sound to explore the psychedelic style. So I would say that its not that the Beatles greatly influenced psychedelica, rather quite the opposite, that it is clear BY THE CHRONOLOGY OF ALBUM RELEASES that it was the Beatles who were greatly influenced by psychedelic bands. Remember, both John and Paul were completely enamored with Jimi Henrdix, in fact they quite literally gave him his first start, it was Paul who got Jimi the gig at Monteray Pop Festival when he turned it down and suggested Jimi to the promoters as a consolation prize. WHAT IS FUNNY IS Y'ALL KEEP TELLING ME I NEED TO TOUCH UP ON MY ROCK AND ROLL HISTORY, AND YET IT IS CLEARLY Y'ALL WHO HAVE YOUR CHRONOLOGY AND SEQUENCE OF EVENTS MIXED UP. The Stones came out AT THE SAME time as the Beatles first records, and neither were necessarly influenced by each other, because when both were completely unrelated dive-bar bands, they each had their own respective sound which was typified in their first records. Later the Beatles put out records that were less pop, more blues, clearly a response to the rising competition of the Stones' sound.


I AGREE COMPLETELY, BUT I THINK THERE IS A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCE. Inspiration is when a band or artist motivates another band or artist to do their own thing. Influence is when a band or artist directly influences the sound and style of playing of another band. IT IS CLEARLY THAT ALL THE BANDS OF THE 1960S WERE INSPIRED BY THE BEATLES, BUT DEFINITELY NOT INFLUENCED.


Again, there is a world of difference musically between INFLUENCE AND INSPIRATION :cool:

No time to read the whole thread now but wasn't Paul McCartney the Beatle who had the most interest in experimental music, art and literature when the band was still going? I thought it was a well know fact that he was an early fan of VU's first album, attended AMM gigs and his was the decision to include William Burroughs on the cover of St. Pepper's.

Then why was no one that surprised when he did it?

What you are saying doesn't even make sense. Go back, watch Live!Tonight!Sold Out! and 1991: Year That Punk Broke, and once you settle down from laughing your ass off try and convince yourself that Kurt was anything but a jovial dude!
Yes, this is true, it was only later that John went out on a limb. Paul was more interested in all kinds of different things. However, I think eventually John became more directly fixated on experimenting than Paul, sort of like Paul grew out of the phase and John grew into it..

And Lennon requested Alistair Crowley!

SGT PEPPERS (June 1967)



Their Satanic Majesties Request (December, 1967)



Ha!

The Stones are and were and will always be a fucking JOKE. fuck em and fuck their bullshit rip-off crap. Fuck Brown Sugar, fuck everyone that sings that shit not realizing it is about a slave master raping his latest slave girl "just around midnight." Fuck Under My Thumb.
Every single blues-man I have seen footage of playing with the Stones has a look on their face like they are suffering those idiots. Charlie Watts is the man though.