The 1980s band Kurt Cobain never wanted to hear again: “It just got old”
It definitely felt like something changed in the rock and roll world the minute that Kurt Cobain started making music.
As much as Nirvana was meant to be the kind of underground band that no one would ever hear outside of indie circles, the fact that they blew up and had the kind of buzz that hadn’t appeared since Beatlemania was like watching a tidal wave hit the music scene. Every other band needed to scramble to catch up to what they were doing, but Cobain was happier with leaving some of the biggest flavours of the day in the past, where they belonged.
Because as much as Cobain loved the idea of making music from the heart, a lot of what he saw on MTV wasn’t exactly challenging him the way that he wanted to. Some songs are meant to be about having dumb fun every now and again, but when you look at every single band that was trying their best to hike their hair up to ridiculous proportions, it was clear that something needed to change.
The LA music scene had already become a joke, and Cobain was quick to say that he didn’t want any part of it. Guns N’ Roses were one of the tackiest bands that he had ever heard of, and even though Axl Rose claimed to be a fan in the early days of the group, there was no way that Cobain would be caught dead opening for them. He had a reputation to think about, and he wasn’t going to spend his days endorsing hair metal.
Then again, not every band from Seattle was meant to be morose, either. The narrative that’s been told is that everything about the city was about depression and sadness, but Mother Love Bone seemed like they were destined to be stars, and Alice in Chains practically started off as a glam band before they started making heavier music. But if you were looking for everything wrong with the genre, you couldn’t find a better example of it than Warrant.
Granted, that’s not exactly their fault, either. Frontman Jani Lane had talked about how their signature song ‘Cherry Pie’ was never supposed to be made, but since they needed a song for their label, half of the song felt like a poor man’s version of what Aerosmith might have done. But if you look at the matching white onesies that they were all wearing in the video for ‘Heaven’, Cobain had pretty much seen everything that he needed to see in a band like that.
Compared to what the rest of the world had been listening to, Cobain couldn’t have been happier seeing bands like Warrant falling by the wayside, saying, “[Nevermind] was just the right album at the right time. I’m sure there was a collective consciousness. People were tired of Warrant. It just got old. Just like grunge music will be in a couple of years, if it hasn’t already. If we don’t progress, it’s just gonna get boring to people.”
And by the time that Warrant did manage to film a video for their signature hits, it’s not like you couldn’t tell what Cobain was talking about. The sexual innuendos in the video for ‘Cherry Pie’ had just become way too ridiculous by that point, and even if they tried their hand at going in a grunge direction on their later records, it was pretty clear that things were moving in the wrong direction when their label was starting to put all of their collective energy into working on Alice in Chains.
Even before his death, Wood managed to get a few jabs in about Warrant being ridiculous, so it’s not like they weren’t already on the chopping block when grunge took over. They were everything wrong with the genre in a lot of people’s eyes, and Cobain was going to do everything he could to make sure that he had as much authenticity as he could when stomping out bands of their ilk.
