Greentext

I saw them before they exploded into fame, and absolutely couldn't imagine that music becoming popular. There were like 30 people at the show, they were touring in a little van, all the way to Florida! My little brother's friend had given me a tape with a bunch of grunge bands on it, Tad and Mudhoney and Nirvana among them so when they came to play here I went.

Was absolutely dumbfounded when they started getting radio play, it was so different from everything else being played on the radio.

I think I'm probably older than most of you - it's hard to overstate how weird and countercultural this music sounded before it became the norm.

At least Kurt never lived to see toddlers in high street Nirvana t-shirts.

we dressed like trash before nirvana.

nirvana just gave grunge an easy label.

I love Nirvana and was a huge fan immediately... But....I think people overestimates their reach. Me and my altern-rock friends were marginalized at our school. I'd say less than 5% of the kids at my high school were into the grunge scene. Most of them listened to Eurodance and pop, hip-hop was starting to become mainstream. People kind of knew of them because of MTV, but most started to listen when Kurt Cobain died.

well, first, you have to understand, MTV used to play music

I wasn't in that first wave of fans.

But it was a massive shift that was partially driven by backlash against the pop of the era, and the pop/hair metal scene.

Since what the grunge bands in general, and nirvana in specific were doing was relatively unknown to the general populace, and that first wave of grunge (again, with nirvana in specific) being really good, and the first songs reaching for the whole wave of depressed realization of how fucked the world was getting from the generation that was in their late teens/early twenties then, it was the right thing at the right time.

Hell, I didn't really like a lot of grunge at the time (and I'm still picky about it), but I don't think you can underestimate how hard Smells like Teen Spirit hit. Even those of us familiar with the punk influences of nirvana could tell that shit was fresh. It was an explosion of a new expression of rock that hadn't been explored in the public at large yet.

Yeah, it got vacuumed up and churned out by later bands as labels went crazy trying to shoehorn other bands into the style, or unsigned bands tried to copy it, but the first few years there were pretty exciting, even for a non fan just because it was obvious that a new genre was forming.

There's times I regret that I didn't click with nirvana at the time ( it took years for that to happen), but there's also a good bit of satisfaction that I didn't because when I did click with them, it was a powerful thing, and I could do a deep dive rather than having to explore their music one album at a time.

older millennials can remember a pre internet time where culture was a little easier to heavily influence by record labels and shit because where else could teens go for culture? like now you have the internet and you can go on tumblr or reddit or whatever and any of the million sub communities there to develop culture. Corporate influence is still very much there of course (see the part with reddit, tumblr, and the massive advertising industry that drives it all, etc) but itll never be as concentrated as it was in 1994

Thats probably why corporate interests are trying to ruin the internet. You know how people say the internet is only 4 websites now where people just share clips and screenshots of the 3 sites over and over? Condense it down and you get it a lot closer to that 1994 effect. You lose the charm of having a bunch of geocities pages about putting cats in jars and peoples weird looney tunes fetishes and shit but then you have a sanitized advertiser friendly internet thats easy to browse and much more contained

Surreal to imagine from 2024 POV.

Modern fast fashion allows literally everyone you see to wear stupid fad garbage of the week, every week. The only difference between then and now is the absence of homogeneity. There are just too many fads to chase

Start with a generation that doesn't feel listened to, introduce band that talks about them but that makes music that isn't as rough as punk music so it's actually played on MTV and the radio, have much smaller musical scene in general, success!

We used to have shared cultural events. If you wanted to watch a thing, you had to watch it at its designated time (or record it to watch later, I got pretty good with my VCRs timer functions). With streaming and with some shows being dumped all at once, we lost that. I much prefer the weekly schedule for this reason.