It talks abou the ten year anniversary death of kurt cobains, but mentions bon jovi twice in this article:
http://rds.yahoo.com/search/news/S=5...3a4500,00.html
How Nirvana changed the world
04 April 2004
By BERNARD ZUEL
Ten years on from Kurt Cobain's death, grunge's pioneers have left a huge impression.
There is a television series at the moment grandiosely called Songs that Changed the World. It's a misnomer of course: no song has ever changed the world, no song ever will.
However, several of those nominated songs did change the course of popular music - shifting the musical axis from polite novelty songs to rock'n'roll; from bombastic rock to raw punk; or from music to listen to in private to music to dance to in giant rooms.
One of them is 1991's Smells Like Teen Spirit by Seattle band Nirvana.
Five minutes of quiet/loud dynamics, menace and release, inchoate anger and pure energy, it did more than send its accompanying album, Nevermind, to No 1 (replacing Michael Jackson's Dangerous).
Like punk it ushered in a movement seemingly purpose-built to oppose the orthodoxy, which at that time was manufactured pop, spangly pop metal and dance music - think New Kids On The Block, the first Kylie incarnation, Bon Jovi and anonymous European producers with interchangeable singers.
Call it grunge or rock or punk, it eschewed flashy for flannelette, synths for guitar/bass/drums and the centralised major labels for regional independent companies. Between 1991 and 1994, when Nirvana's songwriter and singer Kurt Cobain shot himself, the charts, the video shows and the music magazines were dominated by Nirvana and the bands, such as Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, that followed in their wake.
Nevermind has sold 10 million copies; Pearl Jam's first two albums did even better.
Beyond their grunge contemporaries it can be argued that Nirvana made it possible for the so-called California punk bands such as Green Day and Offspring to be taken seriously as potential money-spinners by record companies which had grown fat on Van Halen and Fleetwood Mac but run scared from the original punks and the so-called new wave that followed. Green Day's 1994 album, Dookie, sold 6 million while Offspring have sold more than 32 million albums in the past decade.
It's hard to imagine those Pearl Jam and Led Zeppelin fans from Newcastle, Silverchair, being welcomed in 1994 without Nirvana's breakthrough.
But a decade since Cobain's death, the musical orthodoxy is again manufactured pop, spangly pop metal and dance music - think Australian Idol, the second incarnation of Kylie, the Darkness and anonymous European producers with interchangeable singers.
The major record companies, which bought up all the indie labels, still run everything. Radio is impenetrable for most new artists and Nirvana is being played on classic rock radio alongside Cold Chisel, Led Zeppelin and Bon Jovi.
Did Nirvana really change anything? Was their legacy as brief as their career?
Tim Ritchie, the music director of Radio National and board member of new community-based radio station FBi, is a former Triple J announcer.
He believes while Nirvana's success "was a reaction against dance music, synthetic music and music that didn't come from the heart, but came from the head only", they were more than just a successful anti-band. They did change music in the early '90s.
"Their influence was not dissimilar from the punk influence where it liberated people to make music without necessarily having great skill," Ritchie says. "But it was married with a sense of storytelling that had disappeared a fair bit in the '80s."
Just as importantly, Nirvana showed that, unlike punk, grunge could sell.
"The influence of Nirvana is greater than the Sex Pistols, who influenced other musicians but not mainstream media," Ritchie says.
"The two or three tracks the Pistols got on London radio didn't change the musical world; it changed other players. But what Nirvana did did change what some people listened to in the mainstream."
Triple J's music director, Richard Kingsmill, believes Nirvana were the culmination of a long-running underground movement, a movement waiting for the right band at the right time to be both alternative and marketable.
"The music industry in the '80s was a closed shop. It was hard to get heard, hard to get into the studio, it was expensive because the digital revolution hadn't come along," Kingsmill says.
"In the States and in Australia there was an underground guitar scene that was being ignored by the mainstreams and being trodden upon, and in the early '90s people said enough of this '80s crap and this explosion of youth culture came through. It wasn't manufactured; it was real.
There was no image to it, it was just from the street and all of a sudden one of the bands was pushed to the forefront and that was Nirvana. It was happening because of dissatisfaction."
It's a view shared by Craig Mathieson, who has written two books on the rise of the Australian independent scene in the '90s and its incorporation into the mainstream, Hi-Fi Days and The Sell-In.
"Outside of their music, Nirvana's lasting legacy - generally for the better - was to bring down the barriers between corporate labels and the independent scene," Mathieson says.
"It's easy to forget how stratified the music industry was prior to 1991; the late '80s were abysmal. After Nirvana a far wider range of bands gained access, at a cost, to getting their music heard at a mass level. Record companies were willing to take more of a chance, basically because they were no longer so sure about what would work commercially.
"As a social force punk in 1976 was more important, but Nirvana and co had the weight of commercial acceptance - they sold millions of albums worldwide and rewrote the way that art and commerce interacted in the music business." The explosion to which Kingsmill referred had a significant effect on, but also drew strength from, the fruit of Triple J's expansion into all capital cities and regions in the first half of the '90s.
For a while the station actually broke bands into the mainstream and acts such as the Cruel Sea, Spiderbait, Regurgitator, You Am I and, in particular, Silverchair rode that wave.
Concurrently, the Big Day Out music festival went from one day in Sydney in 1992 to a travelling tour throughout the country. Its reputation had been made in its first year when Nirvana, their album at No 1 in the US at the time, played on the bill - and not even as the headliners.
But Cobain's death effectively marked the end of grunge, says Kingsmill, and in its wake came the return of all the things against which grunge had rebelled.
If anything, it's not unreasonable to say that the return of teen pop (Britney Spears et al), the surge of nationalistic Britpop in the UK (via Oasis, Blur and Suede) and the more recent underground trend of flamboyant rock bands with their roots in the '70s (such as the Hives, Jet and the Strokes) were all in some ways reactions to Nirvana and grunge, the antidote to the antidote. It's the cyclical way of popular culture.
"When Kurt died that whole movement died. It was that important," Kingsmill says.
"Pop returned to dominance because there wasn't anything to replace grunge. The major record companies are always best at working with what they know and that's where the boy bands and girl bands and that manufactured pop came into focus again."
Although most had little to do with grunge, the independent acts that shone in the mid-'90s slipped from the charts and radio play by the end of the decade. In Australia, for example, Spiderbait and Regurgitator retreated to the fringes, the Cruel Sea are on an indefinite sabbatical and Triple J is no longer a significant ratings presence.
But even though their victory was temporary, what the Nirvana years did leave behind was a revived and strengthened underground. It is possible for a band to be both independent and tour Australia profitably; to be based in Austin, Texas, but have albums released in Europe and Australia; to exist outside the mainstream and thrive rather than just survive.
"I feel for every band that was existing in the '80s," Kingsmill says. "If they had come on a decade later they would have made more money.
From the early '90s on it's been easier for those bands who exist in that underground scene - bands who don't get played on Video Hits, bands that don't get widespread commercial airplay. It's easier for them to exist day by day than it was 20 years ago.
"And that has been a lasting impression of the grunge movement in the '90s. It hasn't made the underground more legitimate but the infrastructure that was set up in the '90s is still there."
For all that though, Kingsmill and Ritchie don't claim that Nirvana mean much to a generation of music fans who have grown up since Cobain's death. Kingsmill mentions how when Triple J played a "disco version" of Smells Like Teen Spirit for several months there wasn't one complaint.
"You know what Nirvana means? Everything that Kurt didn't want it to mean: classic rock," he says ruefully. "Nova plays it, Triple M champions it; pulls them out every five minutes and they ran a mile away from Nirvana at the time. It's hilarious, but sadly ironic."
Ritchie puts it this way: "To the people who found that music then, they will live like the Beatles and Elvis etc. To the 17-year-olds now it's that funny thing you occasionally get on Rage."
But Mathieson remains a believer: "Nirvana remain hugely influential. Because they came so far and then were no more, while at a creative high point their music was never sullied. It's got a purity - of anger, self-loathing, a striving to understand - that still radiates. Very few bands encapsulate generational change and Nirvana did that.
Their departure left a vacuum that our culture still tries to fill, often desperately so - remember when the Vines were the new Nirvana?
"Facsimiles don't count. From bedrooms to boardrooms, for vastly different reasons, Nirvana remain relevant."
Your thoughts...........................
I'll start:
While bon jovi music is not as innovative as nirvana/or created a new genre of music, it makes you appreciate that through trends and different musical climates, bon jovi has and will always remain BON JOVI. While the article debates wheter NIRVANA changed music or was part of a cycle of music, I think it illustrates how bon jovi has been able to survive the test of time. Jon Bon Jovi said it best in an interview he did with muchmoremusic in 2002 entitled "The Story of Bon Jovi" (I'm paraphrasing, going off the top of my head)
Jon" People can say that i don't like bon jovi's music, that's fine, I can live with that, but at least it was honest" When all is said and done Bon Jovi will not be remembered for musical innovation/or a social revoultionary band, but for a band who stayed the course through various musical climates and maintained their own sound from which they formed in 1983. At least it was honest.
04-05-2004, 07:57 AM
Intresting Article#1
I am curious as to why you feel that way.
