“I respect them so much”: the band Kurt Cobain called well ahead of their time
Kurt Cobain would have always been proud to make something deliberately against the grain. He had no interest in cowering to what the big business suits wanted when making Nirvana’s music, and there was no way in hell he was going to make something that had anything in common with the massive sounds of hair metal. He knew what he did needed to be pure, so when he saw something out in the wild kicking against the norm, he felt he heard a kindred spirit.
Then again, the whole point behind all of Nirvana’s classics was about living up to the punk rock standards. They had been proud of their indie roots since they started, and when looking at how Bleach sounds from front to back, it’s clear that they were working with something a lot more eccentric than anything that would have been heard on the regular college rock stations next to REM and Pixies.
And as soon as the band got big, Cobain wasn’t about to start writing songs about being famous and how he rubbed elbows with famous rock stars. He was always proud of his record collection, and if he was going to reach the top of the charts, he would rather have had people like Meat Puppets and Flipper join him at the top rather than having to share screentime with people like Axl Rose.
So when he started to travel the world, Cobain figured that he would take a look at the artists that were a bit left-of-centre. There had been people trying their best in the local punk scenes across the US and UK, but as soon as he heard what was going on with bands like Os Mutantes out of Brazil, he knew that he wanted to see more about what that side of rock and roll had to offer.
While the band’s late 1960s material might not have been that out of place, looking at what’s available now, Arnaldo Baptista was always looking to push the envelope more. Much of their equipment was homemade when they started crafting some of their tracks, and listening back to their music, some of it comes closer to progressive rock around the same time bands like King Crimson were birthing the genre.
Cobain was far from an enthusiast of the band’s music, but he knew they were miles ahead of their time when doing his fair share of deep digging, saying, “This is a very influential and cool band for the time. I respect them so much. From what I’ve read about them, they were revolutionary. They made their own effects boxes, and they were really controversial too. They had a lot of guts.”
But that kind of controversy was always what Cobain kept coming back to. There were always going to be ways to satisfy the music business, but by backing certain figures at the time and going against the grain of what was fashionable, Baptista was leading the band through one of the greatest musical movements of his time, even bringing in some pieces from psych-pop into the mix on their first two records.
Are they necessarily going to replace the biggest names in psychedelic rock in anyone’s record collection? No, but that was never the point. If anything, Os Mutantes proved to Cobain that good rock and roll has always been outsider music, and the minute that someone starts restructuring their image to fit into whatever new style’s coming in, they’re doing it for the wrong reasons.
