The band Michael Stipe said was lightning in a bottle: “True underground”
As Nirvana hurtled to the very top of the cultural mountain in the 1990s, the circle of trust that surrounded Kurt Cobain began to shrink. While he was safe within the realms of his band, supported by Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, there were only a select few within the music industry who could help support him through the turbulence of his career.
One of those was REM’s Michael Stipe. To Cobain, Stipe didn’t represent some baseless hedonist who bounced between LA house parties; instead, he represented a true custodian of the Seattle grunge scene and the authenticity it promoted.
Stipe experienced his own success as a band, and in Automatic for the People, wrote records that shaped the songwriting of Cobain. But really, he sat back and watched in awe as his close friend defined a new era of American rock and roll.
When given the honour of inducting Nirvana into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame, he said, “I embrace the use of the word ‘artist’ rather than ‘musician’ because the band Nirvana were artists in every sense of the word… It is the highest calling for an artist, as well as the greatest possible privilege to capture a moment, to find the zeitgeist, to expose our struggles, our aspirations, our desires, to embrace and define a period of time… That is my definition of an artist.”
He continued, “Nirvana captured lightning in a bottle. And now, per the dictionary – off the Internet – in defining ‘lightning in a bottle’ as, ‘Capturing something powerful and elusive, and then being able to hold it and show it to the world.’”
Stipe knew exactly how palpable the essence of their energy was, as he rubbed shoulders with them in the heady days of that ‘90s scene. At that point, before Cobain took it into the realms of commercialism, it was about finding connection in a society otherwise disillusioned and creating a sound that spoke to the underground.
Stipe continued, “Krist Novoselic said Nirvana came out of the American hardcore scene of the 1980s – this was a true underground. It was punk rock, where the many bands or musical styles were eclectic. We were a product of a community of youth looking for a connection away from the mainstream. The community built structures outside of the corporate, governmental sphere, independent, and decentralised. Media connected through the copy machine, a decade before the Internet, as we know it, came to be. This was social networking in the face.”
Perhaps what Stipe admired the most was Cobain’s ability to do this without any real discernible lyrical depth. Songs like ‘Lithium’ were based around the repeated yell of “yeah”, tapping into the primal sense of liberation that Nirvana’s fans so desperately craved.
Stipe admired this so much that he tried to adopt the same trope in his track ‘Man on the Moon’, attempting to topple Nirvana by including as many “yeahs” as he could into the verses. It was a doff of the cap to a band who opened that gateway for a new wave of counterculture, bringing a truly primal sense of being back to rock music.
