I was reading an article this week on MTV’s website, about the 15th year anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album, and its cultural and music influence. But since MTV dropped the ball by interviewing a bunch of people who just started listening to Nirvana last year, I figured I would give you my take on the most influential album in rock in decades.

Nirvana’s “Nevermind” came out September 24, 1991, and I was a 14 year old kid, just trying to carve out my musical tastes. As sad it as sounds, I was listening to horrifically bad pop groups like Color Me Badd and C+C Music Factory, but within the previous year, I had been turned onto such rock heavyweights as Metallica and Guns n Roses (thank God for that!). I was listening to 89x in Detroit one night, as they played a new song by Nirvana, called “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. It sounded nothing like the droning, goth-lite college rock plaguing 89x, or the old fart rock and hair metal that WRIF was playing at the time.

I taped “Smells Like Teen Spirit” off the radio, and must have listened to it 15 times that night. Within a few weeks, I had saved a whole ten dollars, in order to go to the record store to buy “Nevermind” on cassette in early October. Yes, I bought it on cassette because I didn’t have enough money to buy it on CD and have enough money to go see “Point Break” at the dollar theatre at the same time. I thought this album might get big in the alternative circles, but I had no clue back then what sort of cultural impact the album would have.

“Nevermind” exploded, hitting #1 in early 1992, and beating the King of Creepy, Michael Jackson, in the process. Nirvana shaped the whole grunge movement, and the generations of good and bad rock music for the undetermined future. Nirvana's lyrics provided a more realistic and cynical take on the world, versus the "party all the time" lyrics of the hair metal genre.

“Nevermind” completely changed the playlist of rock stations everywhere. Poison and Slaughter were wiped off the face of the planet, and Nirvana and other grunge upstarts like Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains soon made hair metal as much as a distant memory as disco was.

Unfortunately, Nirvana met an untimely end when lead singer Kurt Cobain killed himself in April of 1994. Cobain’s death somewhat took away the significance of the album for a brief time to me, for the fact that I thought it was unfair to make Cobain seem like a martyr for the grunge cause. Upon his death and like many times when people died, people want to make the deceased person seem like a saint and the greatest person that ever existed. It is tough for me to make someone a martyr who took his own life and battled drug issues and personal demons.

In Cobain’s case, he was like some of his fans; troubled and unable to handle the pressures of every day life. He just had a way of turning those troubles and battles within his mind into great music. Ultimately though, his inability to handle those troubles became too much and he ended his life.

I’ve had debates over the years, to see if there was or will be another Nirvana, and I’ve had some weird suggestions thrown at me in that time. A few years back, one friend of mine tried to dispute that the Backstreet Boys were the next Nirvana. After spitting out my beer in sheer amazement, he explained it to me that the Backstreet Boys spawned all of the boy bands and the pop offspring that still runs through Top 40 radio today. He had a fairly good point, but the Backstreet Boys were just one of many manufactured groups that all sounded the same, and pissed out at the same time (like hair metal). So, it was close but no cigar…

Another person I knew said that the Strokes were the next Nirvana, and again, I almost went into convulsions over the statement. The garage bands have never had the album sales and cultural impact that Nirvana did, so that conversation ended quickly. And don’t even get me going on the guy who thought Diddy was the next Nirvana, because he thought that he started the talk about jewelry and the high life in rap songs…

I thought these people were way off course, but they all had a point. All of these people had their moment in the pop culture sun, and influenced some people. But Nirvana influenced nearly EVERY rock album out there from 1993 to right now. From indie rock to heavy metal to garage rock, Nirvana’s gritty sound and lyrics has shaped the way rock is heard today, for better or for worse in some cases.

Over time, “Nevermind” has become the album that people look at as a watershed moment in music history. It is seen as a time, where the excess and stupidity of rock was shown for what it’s worth, and replaced by a more honest and raw form of music.

Will there ever be another “Nevermind”? I am sure of it. There will be some moment that people are just tired of the processed drivel that they are hearing right now and something will come along and demolish everything you hear on the radio today. Will this band or group sound like Nirvana? I highly doubt it, and I have no idea when it will happen. But when it does, you can be sure that things won’t sound like they do now for a very long time.