Circles of Fire

"Nirvana represented something authentically new, at least to most listeners."

austinkleon:

Jonathan Lethem on originality:

That’s so original!” is something you say when you’re excited by something. 90 out of 100 times, it probably just means the references aren’t known to you, or they’re sublimated, they’re buried.

While Zach Baron starts this piece off with a really funny bit about Billy Ray Cyrus vs. Nirvana, it’s this bit that really got my gears turning:

“Nevermind” synthesized a whole host of punk-derived subgenres into a melodic, well-produced package, and gave audiences an approachable guide, in the person of Kurt Cobain, to the intimidating and noisy reaches of what was just beginning to be called alternative rock.

What made Nirvana different is that they had great, underground taste, but they wanted to be rock stars. Cobain was trying to write pop songs.

A lot of times the ideas of the underground or the avant-garde really blow up when they’re used for “approachable,” popular art. Hugo Wilcken writes about this in his 33 1/3 book on David Bowie’s Low:

…experimentalist techniques often work better when transposed to popular culture, necessarily years and decades and eras after they were first deployed in the avant-garde of high modernism. Burrough’s cut-up method, as he applied it, is philosophically engaging but doesn’t make for great reading (arguably, his best efforts are his more conventional autobiographical works, Junky and Queer). Perhaps something similar could be said about Stockhausen’s electronics or Cage’s tape loops. But modernist ideas, by now very second-hand, when appropriated by people like Bowie and Eno, can result in work that is just as culturally vital or even more so.

Same thing with Green Day—those guys got their sound from the old punk bands, but they wanted to be rock stars. The bands of my youth were really just gateway drugs—you listen to Green Day, then you discover The Ramones, you listen to Nirvana, you discover the Pixies, etc. I never really stopped listening to them, I just made my way up the tree.

(Thx, newspeedwayboogie)

Reminds me of The Shondes, with their roots in riot grrl but their deep love and capacity for rock (not to mention star power).