Editor’s Note: One of our readers (hey, we have readers!) sent us this. We neither endorse nor opposite-endorse the messages within. If you have something to say about one of our brackets, send it our way, and if it’s good enough to meet our (pretty low, if we’re being honest) publication standards, we’ll run it. Might make fun of you, though.
Nirvana released Nevermind in 1991, when I was three years old and MTV was still exclusively playing music videos. By the time the iconic album was on my radar Kurt Cobain was dead (burnt out, not faded away(1)). Therefore my appreciation for Nirvana has been retrospective.
Listening to Nevermind is exhausting. I strain my ears for forty-nine minutes to understand Cobain’s growling lyrics. Some of what I understand, I wish I could forget (2). Still, the raw and relentless songs never fail to reward me – energizing me and purging me.
When I think of 90s music, I think of listening to Casey Kasem counting down the top forty on Sunday morning. Later, I would settle for watching the top ten videos of the week on TRL. By the time the 90s ended, TRL was showing 30 second snippets of videos; the decade had completed its distillation of popular music into its most consumable, least offensive form.
Maybe music, like politics, is downstream of culture. Maybe helicopter parents and participation trophies are the reason MTV served me and my millennial friends bite-sized junk food every afternoon. And there is no denying the catchiness of the majority of pop songs in this bracket, just like there is no denying the deliciousness of a Three Musketeers Bar.
Smells Like Teen Spirit losing to one of these candy-bar songs was inevitable – so inevitable that I wrote this essay in the second round, after the song squeaked by Matchbox Fucking Twenty. Something tells me that the man who did this:
https://youtu.be/DzRAZ1uS-Ao when the British MTV asked him to lip-sync would find some humor in that.
Enjoy your candy bars. I’m going to head-bang.
-Craig Buettell
(1) https://www.nme.com/news/music/neil-young-68-1258313
(2) https://wespeakmusic.tv/the-story-behind-polly-by-nirvana/
Hey Craig, do less