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Every artist will make at least one creative mistake throughout their career. These stumbles can either prove useful for the future, or on the other hand, they can become such a difficult obstacle to overcome that they ultimately end up being their downfall. One band that was very used to making mistakes was Nirvana, which proved key to their evolution.
According to the band, particularly its late leader Kurt Cobain, the most significant oversight of their career was It doesn’t matterThis has always been a divisive topic among fans, considering it was their breakthrough release and major label debut that catapulted the trio to the top of the charts and marked the arrival of grunge. Not only was it It doesn’t matter a significant crossover hit, but it also revitalized the concept of a guitar-driven band and reset the cultural zeitgeist, cementing Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl as the definitive Generation X act.
Cobain’s fusion of pop melody and fury, inspired by the Beatles, the Pixies and hardcore punk, essentially created the template for alternative rock that still prevails today. Not since the Fab Four and Led Zeppelin had any group been so popular and instrumental in driving music forward. It doesn’t matter resonated with audiences far removed from the sweaty bars the trio played in at the end of the previous decade, when they were just another Sub Pop cult group.
As is well known, it was Butch Vig’s slick production on the 1991 album that really rankled Cobain and Nirvana, particularly after they grew tired of the songs, which had become ubiquitous almost overnight. The absolute hatred of fame and the intense glare of the spotlight that the cleanly produced record on their third effort, In the wombThey hired punk stalwart Steve Albini to take them back to the darkness and confusion of their formative years.
According to Cobain, it was not just It doesn’t matter That was a misstep in his eyes. When he spoke to DIRT In 1990, during that consecutive period between his debut in 1989 Bleach And on his game-changing next album, Cobain called a classic early moment “a mistake.”
When asked if the group had another album coming out, Cobain explained that they did and that Vig had recorded it. He then spoke about the sound of the new work, maintaining that most of the songs were typically raunchy and heavy in the style of Nirvana, but that it was a bit more varied in that there were a couple of more depressive numbers, and even what he wryly described as “the sample reggae song,” which of course never came to fruition.
The possibility of a cover appearing on Nirvana’s second album arose after the band released a cover of Shocking Blue’s “Love Buzz” as their debut single. BleachCobain revealed that the trio had recorded an unnamed Velvet Underground song and surmised that it might not see the light of day, but promised that the other songs would be generally more pop-oriented, which they certainly proved to be after it came out. This new approach was also not an attempt to get on the radio, Cobain maintained; he simply enjoyed pop music and always had.
It was then that Cobain described “Love Buzz” as a mistake, as he considered it his best song at the time and far better than the original. He said, “We made a mistake with ‘Love Buzz’ because it’s our best song as far as I’m concerned. There’s nothing worse than when a band does a cover that’s better than the original. We basically took the hoop – the bass line – and rewrote that song. We stripped it down.”
However, despite being a great cover, “Love Buzz” would soon be surpassed by what followed, and Nirvana’s propensity for simple pop would change the world.
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(tags to translate)Kurt Cobain
