posted on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 3:23 AM
by
Endie
Cobain is no Elvis
With Forbes reporting that Cobain made more money, posthumously, than Elvis over the last year, there was a whole "ha ha boomers, we da boss now" thing. This was daft for two reasons. One is that Kurt's meteoric rise was largely a one-off, due to the wicked witch of the west coast Courtney Love selling a share in his back catalogue to a rights management company (look forward to hearing Nirvana advertising iPods and coffee real soon now).
The other reason is that, if we are going to put someone up against The King, then why don't we pick someone better than a junked-out smackhead who made one-and-a-half really rather good albums? Look, I was there with my plaid shirt and my goatee and my ripped jeans, but Lithium, Smells Like Teen Spirit and In Bloom are up therewith Guns'n'Roses' November Rain for most annoyingly overplayed track of the last twenty years. Why? Because if you want to play a Nirvana track on MTV2, it has to be those, Heart-Shaped Box or You Know You're Right, with an honourable mention for the unplugged session's The Man Who Sold The World. The Mighty Cornholio will back me up on this: you can't put that up against even the first three or four years of Elvis' recording career. I, personally, might be rather fond of Nirvana's work (even Incesticide), as well as the stuff by Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and the Stone Temple Pilots it helped popularise. But I wouldn't claim that his impact will be anything like that of the man who changed the face of rock music.
Anyway, here are my High Fidelity-style top 5 albums released in 1991 that were better than Nevermind:
The Teenage Fanclub - Bandwagonesque.
My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
Massive Attack - Blue Lines
Primal Scream - Screamadelica
Soundgarden - Badmotorfinger