The punk band Kurt Cobain knew was ahead of everyone: “A dream come true”
There was no real way of preparing anyone for what Nirvana was going to do in 1991.
Kurt Cobain probably didn’t even know what awaited him when he wrote ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, but as soon as the rest of the world heard those opening chords, every single hair metal band seemed old and decrepit, and every teenager had found their next all-time favourite group. But even if Nirvana seemed so much more genuine than any other rock band at the time, Cobain didn’t think that they were doing anything that some of their influences hadn’t thought of much better years before.
Some of the biggest names in the underground had taught Cobain everything he knew, and he felt that it was only fair to hype them up as potentially being the next big thing. There wasn’t a chance in hell that a band like Butthole Surfers was going to be as big as The Rolling Stones or anything like that, but if Cobain could manage to push them over that line even a little bit, it would have been worth it to try.
Because when you think about it, a lot of Cobain’s greatest influences weren’t the kind to sell millions of records. He did still have a lot of affection for people like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin for creating those riffs, but the giants that he loved from the punk movement back in the day had long since broken up by the time that he began woodshedding his songs. But right at the end of the punk movement was Sonic Youth, who had come equipped with some of the greatest tunes of their generation.
Compared to every other punk band coming from New York, Sonic Youth took every single lesson that their idols had to teach and applied it to what they were doing. They weren’t afraid to get a little bit too noisy every now and then, and even when they were making pure discordant noise throughout their records, you could still latch onto different hooks on every one of their tunes, whether it was Kim Gordon’s disaffected snarl on ‘Kool Thing’ or Thurston Moore crooning his way through ‘Teen Age Riot’.
If anything, Cobain felt that Sonic Youth deserved to be more popular than them because of how ahead of the curve they were, saying, “To be asked to go on tour like Sonic Youth was just a dream come true. I still can’t describe what I felt. I was like, ‘What an honour.’ Sonic Youth has helped more bands than any band I can think of. They always know what’s hot and new. They’re really good about things like that.”
Then again, even Gordon probably didn’t know what she was getting herself into when she asked Geffen Records to go after Nirvana. The label even felt that Nevermind was only going to sell a fraction of what Sonic Youth’s Goo was doing on the charts, but as soon as those tides started turning, Nirvana became far too big a monster for any one member to control by the time that the grunge wave fully hit.
Nirvana weren’t necessarily a punk band in the truest sense, but you can tell that they took a lot of their cues from what Moore and Lee Renaldo were doing. He knew that noise could be a lot more exciting that any one riff, and even when he was working on some of Nirvana’s greatest records, it wasn’t out of the question to have a few tracks that featured him getting the most out of his amplifier, whether that was making strange noises at the beginning of ‘On a Plain’ or messing around on ‘Milk It’.
The whole concept of the music industry might not have fully understood Nirvana, but Sonic Youth at least reminded Cobain that the genre was still about having fun to some degree. There was no one telling him that he couldn’t express himself, and he felt that even some of the biggest names in music owe them a debt of gratitude, whether they know it or not.
