Nirvana by Michael Azerrad

Author:Michael Azerrad [Azerrad, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

It’s Who Does It Second

Kurt was remarkably savvy about Nirvana’s marketability, anticipating the band’s appeal with astonishing prescience. In November 1990, before Nevermind was fully written, much less recorded or released, he was talking, with no apparent irony, like a canny marketing guy to Raw magazine’s Liz Evans. “We feel that we’re diverse and accessible enough to try to infiltrate into more than just one market,” he said. “We feel we can appeal to more than just the metal or the alternative rock market. We want to try to be mainstream, too. We want to reach the Top 40. Even if the whole of the next album can’t get across to that type of audience there’s at least a hit single or two in there.”

The cognoscenti of the indie community were also well aware of Nirvana’s commercial potential long before Nevermind was released and before the major labels really caught on: the Smart sessions tracks got spread around via cassette—copies dubbed one by one, in real time—so lots of people probably had crappy-sounding second- or third-generation dupes, and they still loved the music.

Nirvana’s T-shirts were really popular in the indie scene at the time—possibly more popular than the band—and surely contributed to the buzz, too. As ever, it pays to advertise. The graphic featured an illustration of the first five Circles of Hell from Dante’s Inferno—“Upper Hell.” The second ring of the seventh circle, by the way, is reserved for suicides, who are turned into gnarled, leafless trees that bleed painfully when their branches are broken. “They are the image of the self-hatred which dries up the very sap of energy and makes all life infertile,” wrote noted Inferno translator Dorothy L. Sayers. That ring is also home to those, in Sayers’s words, “who dissipated their goods for the sheer wanton lust of wreckage and disorder.” Like smashing guitars?

But the mainstream rock audience was a different thing entirely. They were increasingly aware of this new music that spoke more directly to them—they just didn’t know what to buy or where to buy it. That’s where Geffen/DGC came in: they got Nirvana on the radio, as well as in ads and stories in national magazines. Geffen parent company MCA’s massive Uni Distribution Corporation distributed Nevermind; so if you wanted to buy it, it was definitely at a record store near you.

Media also played a big part in Nirvana’s breakthrough and the whole alternative rock boom. Underground culture was transmitted through DIY media: college radio, fanzines, word of mouth, cassettes sent through the mail, flyers on telephone poles, public access cable shows. Then came MTV. Keen to fill twenty-four hours of airtime with new, hip content, the cable music channel popularized indie and alternative musicians such as Hüsker Dü, Robyn Hitchcock, Faith No More, X, the Sugarcubes, XTC, Echo and the Bunnymen, and They Might Be Giants, bands who otherwise never would have made it onto national television.

But MTV had a homogenizing effect. In the early ’80s, “people were inventing their

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