Why Wayne Coyne thought Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ was heavily overrated
Everyone has at least one controversial take when it comes to discussing the albums that the rest of the world tends to unanimously agree on as being among the greatest of all time, and for all the people out there who consider themselves fans of Nirvana’s Nevermind, there’s always going to be that one contrarian in the corner claiming that it’s not all that.
There are plenty of widely-hailed records that I personally don’t care for, but Nevermind isn’t one that I feel particularly aggrieved by the praise for. Granted, it isn’t quite as good as In Utero for my money, but I’ve never felt the urge to denounce it for not being as important as people make it out to be.
Nevermind was a pivotal moment in the history of the grunge movement, and the record that thrust the genre into the mainstream by combining the raw guitars that characterised early records in this realm with pop-adjacent hooks. It might seem sacrilegious to use the P-word to describe a record in this vein, but when you consider how much Kurt Cobain was influenced by The Beatles, it shouldn’t be seen as such a slanderous term to describe how the band helped grunge shift towards something more accessible.
However, herein lies the problem that certain audiences have with the album; purists will argue that Nevermind loses the bite that debut album Bleach had, and choosing to add a greater deal of melodicism to something that was meant to be confrontational and abrasive was counterintuitive to the ethos of grunge. Many wanted it to remain an underground niche form of music, and making it more accessible was only going to attract unwanted attention.
One such person who objects to the effusive praise that is lavished upon the album is the Flaming Lips’ frontman, Wayne Coyne. While his band’s early output had a raucous quality to it, they would ultimately achieve a greater level of success later on in their career through a softening of their approach, incorporating more elements of psychedelic pop into their sound rather than leaning on walls of noise. So, why on earth does he feel he has the right to act like he’s above an album like Nevermind?
As it turns out, it’s less the commercialisation of grunge that bothers Coyne, but more the idolisation of Cobain in spite of what he perceives to be a mediocre album that refuses to let its cultural significance die. “You don’t find yourself ever longing to listen to it,” he told The Guardian, “because there were – still are, in fact – so many mediocre bands that sound like it, that you’re constantly experiencing it. I never get out Nevermind and think: what great production, what great songs. Nevermind had a poisonous, pernicious influence.”
His scathing assessment of the album doesn’t stop there, however, and while he was critical of the “sainthood” that Cobain was bestowed as being the albatross around the band’s neck, claiming that both of their other two albums were superior, he suggested that if any other band had been responsible for putting it out, it wouldn’t be given a fraction of the respect it does as a Nirvana record.
“If Alice in Chains had done it, we’d have thought it was a joke,” Coyne argues, “But because it was Nirvana we thought it was oh-so-clever. If you think you’re going to hear an utterly original, powerful and freaky record when you put on Nevermind, as a young kid might, Christ you’re going to be disappointed. You’re going to think, ‘Who is this band that sounds just like Nickelback? What are these drug addicts going on about?’”
While this is rich coming from someone who has spent his entire career making deliberately polarising records, it does beg the question of whether the album would still be as good as it is if Nirvana hadn’t made it. To tell the truth, it probably wouldn’t, but then again, that’s because nobody else could’ve done a record like Nevermind the same justice as Nirvana did.
