What band will be the next Nirvana for rock music?

Jeff,

Good point about NIN, although I would argue that it was the 5 years between The Downward Spiral and Fragile that really prevented Reznor from becoming huge. In 1994, it seemed like everyone I knew was into NIN (although I wasn't myself). But people have short memories when it comes to entertainment, and Reznor pretty much wasted all his momentum.

I'm not convinced that their are really any black artists who feel they aren't capturing enough of the 14-24 white male audience. Most rap albums are already bought by white teenage males anyways. And the remains of the diehard alt.rock crowd is too small to be of much concern.

Funny enough, there is a rap duo in Houston (Freedom Sold) who mixes Sonic Youth-style white noise with its hip-hop grooves and rapping. It's not the easiest of listening, but definitely something different.

 

and still very, very good. in fact, the stones era coma references, their 4-album blitzkrieg of beggar's banquet, let it bleed, sticky fingers and exile on main street, is as fine an example of a rock band being absolutely, positively on its game as there's ever been. and yet... were they really doing anything unique? different? no, just great, great, GREAT rock-n-roll; and sometimes, ya know what? that's all we need.

to that end, the strokes' cd is, quite possibly, the best pure mainstream rock-n-roll cd to come out in years. at the very lest, it shouldn't be dismissed merely because it's a tricked-up regurgitation of well-worn territory.

(and ric steps off his soap box...)

i think you nailed it when you mentioned "timing." nirvana undeniably tapped into, and helped usher in a new spirit; and their success undoubtedly forced a musical revolution, even if the industry had squeezed it to death within four years.

but musically.... i think they're a convenient starting point, but i'd argue guns-n-roses and the black crowes laid the groundwork for nirvana's ascent to mainstream popularity, and that nirvana itself was nothing uniquely original. frankly, as much as i like nevermind, give me surfer rosa every day and twice on sunday.

thanks. and i am working on it! our sources are telling us david carr is looking more and more likely to be the first pick... you heard here first.

 

These kind of questions are fun. Arguably, Radiohead was the "next Nirvana" if you define that to be music that is left of center and still is popular. Not many weirder albums have gone to number one than "Kid A." But, Radiohead has more of rabid fanbase, than the demographic-bursting one that Nirvana had.
Anyway, I think Nirvana represented the end of a cycle of music, not the beginning. They were in the same line of influence and growth as Jane's Addiction, the aforementioned (and, yes, brilliant) Pixies, Jesus and Mary Chain, Black Flag, The Germs, Butthole Surfers, Buzzcocks, REM, p***y Galore, Sex Pistols, Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Replacements, Big Star, Dinosaur and Velvet Underground. There are many others. Nirvana just burst the dam that had already been builing on the indie scene since throughout the '80's..
I think there is now a similar kind of build-up as there was in the early ninties. There are all sorts of interesting rock bands bubbling to the surface all over the place. Besides the Strokes, you have the great Hives from Sweden, The Black Rebel Motorcylce Club, an exciting Australian band called The Vines. I am probably leaving somebody out. There also great American indie bands on the Elephant 6 label and brilliant Welsh folks like the Super Furry Animals and my favorite band in the world, Supergrass.
With all of those potential Nirvana's, will there be another one? Probably not. The music industry has changed and the next band to change the industry- for good- will be worthy of the "next Nirvana" label. That was their main significance, however shortlived. Rock is probably less relevant than it was 10 years ago, too. Maybe "the next Nirvana" will be in the genre that most needs a breath of fresh air, hip hop. Drop the bling bling and bring back the revolution(s).

 

As someone else said, the Strokes really remind me of Television even more than the Velvets. I like them, myself. And The White Stripes are great. (But I even like Andrew W.K. because he makes me laugh, and I think Kylie Minogue's latest album is terrific fun, so what do I know?) Actually, I really hope The Hives save rock and roll, and no one's mentioned them yet. They're cute and loud and punky and catchy and Swedish - and they dress well!

Another thought: the electronica thing is still relatively 'underground' here, but it's virtually 'establishment' everywhere else already. It's been one of 'the sounds of the future' ever since Kraftwerk and Can and Neu... the crossover in the States will probably be, as Jeff says, a fusion of hiphop and R&B and but also techno-ish stuff as well as rock - something like Miss E...So Addictive, maybe? Timbaland's skittish beats are certainly a step in that direction... of course, maybe the market is so fragmented that there's no real 'crossover' potential any more...

Creed need to have the crap beaten out of them. But if you did that you'd have nothing left. I hate that earnest whiny bollocks. And when are Fred Durst's 15 minutes up, dammit? What the hell do all these white middle class boys from the suburbs have to b**** about? His entire career is based on 'my girlfriend's a b****!' Oh, what a tragedy...

I always loved the Pixies and the Throwing Muses more than Nirvana. When Nirvana broke I resented them for a while because all these annoying little bandwagon-jumpers very briefly supported bands I was dedicated to for the long haul. This was back in my snobby teenage years, of course. Now I really enjoy them and wish I hadn't been so snotty about them. Sorry, Kurt.

 

saw supergrass open twice for pj in october, 2000. in fact, caught the drummer's drum sticks the first night and handed it to a huge SG fan behind me. my wife loves 'em.

i'd add to your list the white stripes, and i'm kinda partial to ultra baby fat, a crunchy breeders meets veruca salt combo out of atlanta. also, trail of dead's exciting, and aren't they from austin to boot? and here in dallas, there are still some really cool, beneath the surface bands, like slobberbone. damn! i wish the draft wasn't saturday -- i have to miss fry street fair!

 

Ric,

My only point here is that if I had to choose, I'd choose the Stones. Lyrics are an integral part for me.

I can't imagine trying to write music for the sole purpose of 'being different' and trying to 'revolutionize the music world.' But if I'm going to listen to a band that has the same sound as a million of other bands, I'd like some substance to the lyrics. Speaking of writing music for the sole purpose of evolution of music, this is exactly what Axl Rose has been doing for the past 7yrs. I was able to listen to some unfinished tracks from his supposed 70 songs that he has, and this stuff is amazing. I'll stop here before I write a 2 page essay on why I think Guns N' Roses is so ****i' amazing!

 

ahhhhhhh.... well, that explains your user name. email me if you have access to any of the tracks -- very intrigued.

 

IMHO, it's a very thin line between a great album and a horible one. Much of it is in the recording/mixing/mastering. The Pixies, for instance, were a potentialy great band that was destroyed by bad mixing, as was Concrete Blonde.

Listen to the ponderous psudo-punk/metal that was Nirvana's Bleach, and then listen to the much more articulate Nevermind. What's the difference between the two? Producer Butch Vig. Without him, Nirvana'd be just another band on the perhipery, like their influences, like the Meat Puppets.

I think the closest thing to a next big thing since Nirvana is/was the 'metal/rap/hip-hop' fusion, started by Rage Against The Machine, and reflected poorly through bands like Limp Bizkit.

This leads me to something similar to a 'Primal Scream' model. Some sort of fusion of Blues/Soul, Rock, and Techno. Think perhaps the techno-Rolling Stones.

 

Ottoman:

You make a good point. To me, an album really requires both critical and commercial success (at least in the rock and pop world) to classify it as a great record. This is the entertainment business and, if no one is entertained, what's the point?

I mean, Exile on Main Street (Stones), Blood on the Tracks (Dylan), Sgt. Pepper's (Beatles), The Wall (Pink Floyd), Nevermind (Nirvana), Van Halen I, Led Zepplin IV, Yellow Brick Road (Elton John), Hotel California (Eagles), etc. etc., were all great records. I don't like all of the one's on the list, but they are undeniably legendary recordings.

It is different in jazz, for example, because there isn't the mass audience as in pop music. To be successful in rock and pop, it requires the combination of critical success, respect among peers and popularity. It is that combination that makes the difference which is why N'Sync won't ever make a "great" record. However, as great as some rock and pop records have been, they also cannot be in the legend class without popularity. There is a reason they call it "pop" music.

 

Someone PUH-LEEZ explain to me why Nirvana are so revolutionary? If Cobain wouldnt have busted a cap in his mouth, Nirvana would have slowly fallen off of the radar as its target audience matured and grew older...And as far as the style of music trend the band started, it seems to me as if things the grunge-era are often referred to as 'trends' or 'fads'. There are LOTS of trends in music, even today. NSync and Backstreet Boys started a trend in the music industry for a few years...Thankfully it's dying down now, but I still fail to see whats so great about Nirvana and how they totally revolutionized music.

 

There's a theory that because punk 'broke' elsewhere but never really became huge here, that Nirvana is the fifteen-years-late culmination of the punk revolution in the United States. Hence that documentary "The Year That Punk Broke". So the point is that they *weren't* revolutionary - it was just that Nirvana caused the rest of the United States to finally understand what punk was about, and briefly made some other talented bands really popular. It was a weird time, the early nineties...

Additionally, as Dave Grohl says, Nirvana looked like someone you might buy pot from. They were appealing because they were like us, as well as unpretentious and sarcastic and funny, and because we were disillusioned with a lot of things... it seemed like maybe stuff would change because they were popular. It didn't, of course. Everything still sucks.

Ottoman: the Pixies weren't a 'potentially' great band. They *were* a great band. I don't understand your point about production - they were *aiming* for that surfer/noizepop sound, right?

 

Do you think they'd have been popular without the Butch Vig sugar-sheen? Listen to Bleach and tell me if that kind of band has an album of the year? When I'm speaking of 'great' I speak in the sence that Nirvana took all of the intresting things from Punk, put a few catchy pop riffs in there, and repackaged it in a way that was both 'musically intresting' and accessable enough to be wildly popular. There wern't anything new -- there were plenty of bands like them before, except for the fact that none of them made them a commercial success.

Go back -- this is the story of 'great' rock band.

Elvis - black southern blues, spead up, an made slightly more palitable for racist white audiences.

Rockabilly (The Blue Caps, etc) - country swing, made more danceable, and given attitude.

Rolling Stones - Elvis' formula, the English version

Chuck Berry - again, black music for cleaned up for white audiences with themes that appeal to middle class teenagers.

Beach Boys - they've basically said that their formula was Chuck Berry, California lifestyle, and smooth harmonies.

70's 'progressive rock' - Repackaged Jazz sensabilities in a pop package for the maistream.

Re: The Pixies

I like the Pixies. I have all five studio albums, as well as Pixies at the BBC, and EP's for Dig For Fire, Head On, Planet of Sound, and Velouria. All of the albums are great but the only one that is accessable is the live album, Pixies @ the BBC.

If they were going for the garage/surfer vibe, running every single damn precussive sound through long gated reverbs with a heavy hand on the treble was not a good idea. Garage Rock sounded good because their crappy recorders had no recording capability above about 12hz. Applying the same technique here just gives you a pale '80's copy.

Take, as an example, the derivitive spinoff band, the Breeders. They poorly copied the Pixies' formula, but recorded it right, 'pop'ed it up a bit, and with a lesser 'product' got more airplay out of two albums (Cannonball, Divine Hammer, Iris, and to a lesser degree Drivin' on 9 and Gloreous) than the Pixies did out of all their (higher quality) stuff. The only Pixies song I've ever heard on mainstream radio was Monkey Gone to Heaven.

 

double --

my bad

 

Ottoman:

Um... aren't you and I saying exactly the same thing about Nirvana?

Re the Pixies: I thought surfer music was all about 'long gated reverbs'. Dick Dale anyone?

I'm not sure why 'accessibility' equals 'greatness' in your argument. There are plenty of great bands who aren't accessible. Actually I would argue that the Pixies are much *more* accessible than a lot of bands who got major label contracts during the same general period - Sonic Youth and the Melvins, for example. The general 'sound' is more important than the production 'sheen'.

Besides (Elvis is calling this point out from another room), even if we agreed on your argument about production, Steve Albini produced both Doolittle *and* In Utero precisely *because* Cobain wanted the same 'sheen' the Pixies had...

*And* I don't agree that the Breeders were more 'poppy' than the Pixies - 'Here Comes Your Man', the first Pixies song I ever heard, is ridiculously catchy, even more so than 'Cannonball' - or that the Breeders were 'derivative'. Since Kim Deal was in both bands, they had obvious similarities, but I think Kim and Black Francis were aiming for different sounds and results...

It's not production/arrangements that made the difference here. It's Nirvana. The Pixies did their best work before Nirvana broke, so they weren't huge. The Breeders did their best work *after* Nirvana broke, so they managed to have hits on MTV. Nothing to do with the relative 'greatness' *or* 'accessibility' of either band.

 

They were hugely popular because they were different and they reflected something that was innate in kids at the time: pissed off apathy.

There is a difference between a manufactured pop music trend like NSync "pop stars" and an organic progression like Nirvana. They distilled the feeling of being 19 and pissed off to the point of not caring.

Beyond the simple feeling of that, they altered the way the music industry sounded. Just prior to Nirvana, Cherry Pie by Warrant was on the charts. Everything about the latter stages of pop heavy metal was about looks, guitar chops and parties. Nirvana was the absolute antithesis to that, almost a reversal.

As a result, the rock music industry went from heavy slick production, perfect hooks, heavy guitars and overdone vocals to live-sounding production with plenty of mistakes, songs driven by the rhythm section rather than guitars, walls of noise as opposed to perfected studio sounds and vocals more about immediacy than accuracy.

I mean, just the way bands dressed alone should signify the change - from spandex and big hair to long shorts, flanel and NO make up.

It was as dramatic a change as new wave and punk brought to music in the late 70's and early 80's out of the horror of disco.

 

Again, Dick Dale created his reverbs/delays with things like Echoplexes, plate reverbs, and Western Electric tube mixing boards with a dynamic range between 100 hz and 12khz. The Pixies were run through transistor amps, and digital delays. Gated reverbs didn't even exist when Dick Dale recorded.

Can you at least hear the why I find the somewhat alike sounds of the Pixies and the Breeders are not both the same to me? Can you here the differences through the stylistic philosophical differences?

 

you need to reverse these QUICK-LIKE; the stones idolized chuck berry -- he was a major influence over their music. and i'm not sure what you mean by the elvis formula...? elvis was not in any way, shape or form an influence over the stones.

besides, your story contains massive amounts of gaps and just plain inaccuracies if i'm reading it correctly, and you're trying to tell the story of nirvana.

i mean, no beatles? how can any story of rock not include the beatles?! no ramones? no black sabbath? no KISS? plus, the usual suspects: husker du, the pixies, the melvins... those bands all played a greater role in shaping nirvana than any of the bands or eras you mentioned.

onto other topics....

jeff, well-said, even if SCF deservs a slap upside the head for even asking. i realize he was 8 in 1992, but.... come on!

D-E-A-D O-N. the breeders' first album, which is quite good, btw, was virtually ignored. it, like the woefully underrated stuff from the pixies, happened PN (pre-nevermind). sure, it helped that cannonball was almost sickeningly catchy, but yeah, no question, they were a band that rode nirvana's wave of success.

 

Sigh... this thread is making me feel my age. When I was in college I was pissed if I didn't have at least 10 of the top 100 albums listed on the back page of Rolling Stone. Now, I could care less about most of the acts these days.

Too many groups, not enough bands. Too much formula, not enough originality. Too much rhythm, not enough melody. Too much technology, not enough music.

When Nirvana came on the scene, I was reaching middle age, but they made me listen. I grew to like the music after some initial apprehension and I think a good number of the songs hold up well. However, I haven't been as enamored with their contemporaries.

I have heard a Strokes tune or two. I think they are comparable to Hootie and the Blowfish in that they have decent melodies in an age of really depressing sounds.

By the way, don't be too hard on an old guy-- the six cds I have in my car changer right now are:

The Who--Live at Leeds
SRV--Texas Flood
Benny Goodman--Best Of
U2--Rattle and Hum
Joe Ely--Live Shots (The guy just makes good music. I think the reason he hasn't been a commercial success is that he refused to be bound by categories and genres.) and,
Stevie Wonder--Disc 2 of boxed set. (The one with Superstition, Livin' for the City, Higher Ground, You Haven't Done Nothin', and Boogie on Reggae Woman.)

 

I was reading about when "Nevermind" broke and I think that one reason for the impact of Nirvana was that nobody had any clue how big the album was going to be. It was a total surprise to their record company Geffen and it had little Mtv or media support in the first few months after it was released. Compare this to The Strokes, or Andrew WK (much less Eminem, D12, the boy bands and the Brittney's of the world) and I think this is why their impact was so big. Nirvana struck an undeniable chord with a lot of people.

 

coma -- I hear that new "GnR" stuff will be out sometime around the year 2012.....I look forward to hearing it.

Seriously.....when is the new Axl Rose solo album coming out? I pray to God it's better than "Oh My God" was.

As an aside -- I have no problem with saying that if you don't have/like the YO-YOs album "Uppers and Downers", you don't like rock-n-roll. There are plenty of great rock bands out there right now, it's just that nobody knows about them.