How Nirvana Changed Everything

To mark the 30th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, we’re taking a closer look at Nirvana’s extraordinary legacy—from spearheading a pop-cultural revolution to the mainstreaming of independent culture and beyond.

On April 10, 1994, two days after the news broke that Kurt Cobain had been found dead in his Seattle home, thousands of grieving kids gathered for a candlelight vigil at the foot of the Space Needle. They wept and moshed, shouted profanities and set fire to flannel shirts, all while Nirvana songs played from a loudspeaker. In a message recorded earlier that day, Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, read to them from his suicide note, which he’d addressed to his childhood imaginary friend, Boddah, but written with his family and fans in mind. “I haven’t felt the excitement for so many years,” Love read. “I felt guilty for so many years. The fact is I can’t fool you, any one of you. The worst crime is faking it.” No, Love interrupted, through tears: “The worst crime is leaving.” In many ways, that vigil mirrored Nirvana’s music: a wild and sometimes frightening flash of humanity, equal parts rage, melancholy, innocence, and humor. In the weeks that followed, MTV—the same network that made them famous seemingly overnight by airing the similarly anarchic video for their 1991 breakthrough single “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—would continue to broadcast footage of the event, as well as clips of the band’s now-legendary MTV Unplugged in New York set, recorded almost five months earlier. At the time of the Unplugged taping, Cobain had insisted that the set be decorated with black candles and white Stargazer lilies—imagery made all the more haunting after his death, as though viewers were watching a living funeral, as though he hadn’t left. That Cobain’s suicide was felt so acutely speaks to the outsized impact that he and Nirvana—bassist Krist Novoselic, drummer Dave Grohl, and, later, guitarist Pat Smear—made in such a short period of time. In life, he was reluctantly cast as the voice of a generation in need of catharsis, a figurehead for an entire way of thinking and being. But in death, we often remember him as he was that now-mythical night in New York, on the Unplugged set: frozen in time at the age of 27, candlelit in a cardigan. (That sweater, still unwashed since the performance, recently raised $334,000, making it the most expensive ever sold at auction.) Our fascination is due, in part, to the way Cobain died—interpreted by any romantic with a self-destructive streak as dying for one’s art. Though he’s been deified over three decades, the irony is that he was resonant not because he was some god, but rather a highly sensitive mortal. In fact, the vulnerability with which he wrote songs was inspired by the emotional directness of John Lennon and the incandescent fury of punk. Cobain may have kept the world at arm’s length, but he was a bridge: never shy about the music he loved, be it the melodic splendor of The Beatles or the sludgy malevolence of Black Sabbath, the LOUD-quiet-LOUD of Pixies or the childlike freedom of The Vaselines. We pore over his every lyric and outtake, his home recordings and private journals—not just because it’s all we have left, but because every time, it opens a window to a world of influence (and worldview) that’s made his songs continue to feel so prescient and alive.

On the night that Cobain’s death was confirmed, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder paused to speak to an arena crowd during a show just outside of Washington, D.C. “I don’t think any of us would be in this room tonight if it weren’t for Kurt Cobain,” he said. Though Nirvana and Pearl Jam had been presented as rivals by the press, Vedder knew that his band and that audience likely wouldn’t have found one another like they had without the success of Nirvana, and Nevermind in particular. When “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit the MTV airwaves on September 30, 1991, a week after the album’s release, it turned popular culture upside down. Its sales numbers would jump exponentially, week after week, until, four months later, in January 1992, Nevermind famously dethroned Michael Jackson’s Dangerous from atop the Billboard 200. It was a clear sign that a tectonic shift had taken place. If rock in the late ’80s had been defined by the surface-level excesses of hair metal, Nirvana offered an alternative wherein authenticity and candor and raw emotion were the standard. Their success created instant demand for like-minded bands, especially those from their adopted hometown of Seattle, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains among them. Suddenly, that city’s sense of style and sound (see: the self-mocking “grunge”) became a major pop-cultural export, inspiring kids around the world to dress in the same flannel shirts that were common among loggers and punks alike in the Pacific Northwest. And “alternative” culture simply became pop culture, as forward-thinking rock bands and similarly angsty, left-of-center artists began rushing the charts—from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Radiohead, PJ Harvey to Smashing Pumpkins and Rage Against the Machine. By rewriting the rules, Nirvana had cleared a path for all of them. “Nevermind came out of nowhere, and people were hungry for something like that,” the album’s producer Butch Vig told Apple Music before its 30th anniversary. “And I think because Kurt was thinking about pain and feelings and confusion that he couldn’t quite articulate, the audience listened to him and, I think, commiserated with him. They felt, ‘I don’t know what he’s singing about, but I feel that way, too.’ There were no records like that in the three or four years leading up to it, emotionally giving that bare-naked expression.”

Part of that cultural transformation also extended to artists who, like Nirvana, were products of the underground. From the moment he became an unlikely pop star, Cobain famously used his newfound influence by promoting his favorite outsider artists, turning band T-shirts into statements anytime he stepped in front of a televised audience: Flipper on Saturday Night Live, Daniel Johnston at the MTV Video Music Awards, Frightwig under said cardigan for Unplugged, where Nirvana also covered and included Arizona psych-punk outfit Meat Puppets. His taste quickly shaped the entire record industry’s and, briefly, by extension, the world’s. Influential bands who’d come before Nevermind (The Breeders, Bikini Kill, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Mudhoney) were able to find a larger audience. And artists who would have never, under normal circumstances, seemed palatable enough for the mainstream found themselves on major labels (Melvins, his mentors and heroes) or even the subject of bidding wars (Johnston). You can follow that influence to the world of film—where auteurs like Quentin Tarantino found a similarly receptive mainstream audience—and elsewhere. One of Cobain’s most enduring qualities was his commitment to speaking up for minorities and fellow misfits, anyone who’d also been rejected by the mainstream he’d just subverted. He was an ally before allyship became a popular term. “At this point I have a request for our fans,” he wrote in the liner notes of 1992’s rarities collection Incesticide. “If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”

Though countless bands had sprouted up in Nirvana’s wake, rock and popular music quickly moved in a different direction after Cobain’s death. Eddie Vedder insisted that Pearl Jam retreat from the spotlight, leaving a vacuum where he and Cobain had once stood as openly progressive figureheads. And while you could still hear Nevermind’s influence on the sonics of mainstream rock throughout the ’90s, on a spiritual level, Nirvana was soon replaced by a wave of less radical post-grunge outfits and hypermasculine nu-metal bands. But punk was still alive and well, and it continued to take on new and vibrant shapes, often in the Pacific Northwest: Dave Grohl’s DIY rebirth as the lead singer and guitarist of Foo Fighters, Elliott Smith’s quiet bloodlettings, Sleater-Kinney’s elevated riot grrrl. And as rock reimagined itself in the 2000s, Nirvana’s presence could still be felt. While The Strokes’ look and sound may have suggested that they’d come of age on a diet of Television and The Velvet Underground, the truth was that they’d grown up on grunge. Later on, it was easy to draw parallels between Cobain and Jay Reatard, whose cyclonic garage-punk welded together insistent melodies and ferocious noise in much the same way. Then there’s My Chemical Romance, whose wildly ambitious, arena-friendly emo can be traced back to Nirvana through the pioneering post-hardcore of Seattle’s Sunny Day Real Estate.

Even though Nirvana worked in traditional rock forms, Cobain’s songwriting resonated on an emotional level that transcends genre. It’s why, decades later, you can easily detect his influence in younger artists who connect with younger audiences on similar terms. Take Billie Eilish, whose moody, atmospheric pop seemed also to speak directly to kids in search of a different feeling. Or the tuneful vulnerability of rappers like Kid Cudi, Juice WRLD, and Lil Peep, all of whom have professed their love of Nirvana—in song and in their tendency to romanticize self-destruction. You can hear it in the poetics of Arlo Parks and the gravitational pull of Lorde, whose withering breakthrough single “Royals” earned her an invitation from the band to join them for a performance of “All Apologies” during their 2014 induction ceremony at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, in place of Cobain. But there will always be rock artists and bands who feel inspired to draw from Nirvana’s blueprint. In Cobain’s journals, he famously wrote, “I like the comfort in knowing that women are generally superior and naturally less violent than men. I like the comfort in knowing that women are the only future in rock and roll.” That prediction has largely proved true, as many of rock’s most vital new voices are those of women, whether it’s Blondshell or boygenius, the latter having paid tribute to Nirvana’s iconic 1994 Rolling Stone cover with one of their own. After also being invited to join the band at the Rock Hall ceremony, for “Lithium,” St. Vincent mastermind Annie Clark enlisted Grohl to play drums on her album All Born Screaming, a title you can easily imagine being plucked from the pages of Cobain’s journals, if not some Nirvana album that never got made.