Now that's an erudite summation. But I still can't get my head around
Cobain as artist of the decade. His creative achievement, though jarring
and influential, doesn't compare to that of the other serious contenders.
Besides, the eight year old who runs my house, his seventeen year old
babysitter and all her friends, the kids at the sub shop down the road, my
ex-girlfriend's 14 year old son and my eighteen year-old sister's boyfriend
are all white kids whose primary musical touchstones are rap and new jack,
even if they own a couple of Garth Brooks records.
These same kids know (but don't neccessarily love)The Beatles, Stones,
Zeppelin, Bowie, U2 and Prince - all artists of lasting influence whose
catalogs are continually discovered by successive waves of college
freshman. I asked my babysitter if she liked Nirvana and she said "didn't
they have that song with the cheerleaders in the video?". The eight year
old looked at me blankly when queried. And my sister's boyfriend was like
"that's the guy who killed himself, right?"
Before y'all kill me on anecdotal evidence charges, realize that I'm trying
to illustrate that the only people listening to Nirvana are critics and
white folks between 28 and 40. Unless someone can convince me that
teenagers 20 years from now will find Nirvana's music revelatory for
themselves (like Abbey Road kicked my ass in 1987, or like my babysitter
really getting into Bowie now) I cannot accept his coronation. It's more
likely he'll be remembered for being Rolling Stone's Artist of the Decade
than he will be for his music.
> The discussion here breaks down along the atomization of markets since
> the mid80s, so it makes sense to say that Gill, Dre, Malkmus (Pavement
> does make sense as the key 90s indie band, though only because they
> democratized Sonic Youth's late-80s innovations) and the Beasties
> (who, for various sentimental-social reasons, I actually would love to
> win the crown, but really can't) all rule different roosts.
>
> And the one figure I think transcends that is Cobain: Nirvana's
> breakthrough changed the music scene irrevocably by destroying the
> previous loyal opposition and thus altering the basic lines of battle
> that had stood since 1977, and pretty much everything that's happened
> on pop charts since has been a chain reaction from Smells Like...
> Cobain is also pretty much the sole zeitgeist-defining personality in
> 90s pop (I'm not sure there is a *single* such figure in hip-hop this
> decade, though there are some contenders, and in country, well, that's
> Garth - which is a whole other story).
>
> As well, Nirvana combined quality and commercial success at an
> incomparable level for the decade - if The Key had sold like a Garth
> Brooks album, Jon W's assertion would hold up better, methinks. (AOTD
> for the 80s by the way is, to my mind, unquestionably Prince.) A
> thread tie-in I meant to throw into the mix yesterday: Smells Like
> Teen Spirit is also, on a craft level, one of the few singles of the
> decade that seems to me to stand up on every level to anything in the
> afore-bandied-about Golden Age of Singles - throwing down a gauntlet
> that pretty much all of Nirvana's imitators were far too chickenshit
> to pick up.
>
> By the way, I assume the Cobain-jeerers are willing to discount every
> other overdose and/or suicide in rock history on the same knee-jerk
> moralism, right? Janis, Jimi, Ian Curtis, etc. etc., all useless
> whiners.
>
> Carl W.
>
>
> Terry Smith-esque P.S.: David C., altho you're basically right about
> Madonna, it seems to me the ground had already been created for her to
> stand on before she arrived - by Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde and
> others. (If I had my druthers I'd give all credit to Patti but I don't
> think we can get away with that...) Yep, Madonna would rank pretty
> high on the influence scale, but she seems to me more a visionary
> opportunist than a revolutionary. HOWEVER: Your question about whether
> Aretha rather than Joni was the key gender-revolutionary in sixties
> pop was already creeping into my head as I wrote that last post. I'd
> certainly *prefer* to say it was Aretha - but I wonder if she had the
> same women-can-be-auteurs impact? Perhaps, but this requires further
> thinking and historicization; I've just realized that maybe before
> deciding exactly whose gender-bar-breaking was the most definitive
> (and I do think this is, as Music Trivia games go, an important one),
> I should read one of those late-90s books about women-in-music that
> I've been semi-avoiding. Any recommendations for the best one?
