“Something you can’t explain”: the band that Kurt Cobain called too good for words
When Nirvana first burst onto the scene, many people seemed to attach themselves to Kurt Cobain instinctively. After so many glamorous rock and roll stars trying to make the most of their 15 minutes of fame, Cobain didn’t seem to care one way or the other whether he was forgotten in a few years, usually behaving like the kind of stoner friend that every rock and roll fan had back in the day. He may have had a more snobby taste in music than most, but that didn’t mean he forgot about his pop roots.
After all, there was no way a band like Nirvana was going to get on the charts if they didn’t have great songs. As much as Cobain talked about his constant love of bands like Flipper in the press, the band always modelled themselves after The Beatles back in the day, and when Nevermind came out, it’s hard to think that there wasn’t at least a little part of themselves that was genuine when making the music video for ‘In Bloom’ mocking the traditional Ed Sullivan Show formula.
Then again, Cobain always had a different way of looking at pop songs. Every one of his tunes would be crammed with one hook after the other, but they weren’t always common. John Lennon may have been one of his biggest influences, but that often bled over into how he decided to write his melodies, normally including strange chords that didn’t fit into the key he was writing in.
And when talking about his other favourite bands, he wasn’t afraid to embrace something that was a little bit cheesy. He had loved the poppy sounds of REM, but he was also the same person who would go to bat for tunes like ‘Seasons in the Sun’ and talk about the kind of power-pop that made him love rock and roll like Cheap Trick from back in the day. So, really, a band like Shonen Knife would have been right up his alley.
“You could see everyone fucking amazed by them.”
kurt cobain
Although most people in the US weren’t going to be aware of their approach to music, the Japanese power-pop stars were some of the most tuneful songwriters that the indie scene ever spat out, taking that same British invasion sense of melody and giving it a modern twist. It wasn’t exactly in the same ballpark as Nirvana, but the melodies were enough to hook in Cobain when he asked them to open for his band on a handful of dates.
The all-female group may have been on the verge of pop-punk without knowing it, but Cobain managed to have difficulty describing what made them so good, saying, “When we took ’em on tour with us in England, it was weird because probably 90% of the audience had never heard of them before and instantly they were just taken in by them they were almost crying. You could see everyone fucking amazed by them. I don’t know what it is. It is just something that you can’t explain. It’s something that is sincere and good. You can’t put it in words; they’re just really, really good.”
Even if Cobain struggled to describe his love for Shonen Knife, the rest of the world didn’t have such a problem. Looking back at the massive pop-punk revival that happened after grunge with bands like Green Day, time could have been far kinder to Shonen Knife, especially since their brand of pop wasn’t all that dissimilar from what Billie Joe Armstrong would be doing a few years after Cobain’s death.
But sometimes, that’s the way it works out in rock and roll history. Not everyone will be able to get around pieces of Shonen Knife’s catalogue, but for anyone at least a bit curious and not allergic to the idea of listening to something catchy, their music is among the finest hidden gems that the decade had to offer.
