Kurt Cobain once said that REM were the greatest band ever and for a brief time in the early 90's you could have made a strong argument for the case but a couple of decent years out of the 31 REM were around with a total of 3 or 4 songs that could be described as classic songs is not a brilliant return for anyone with ambitions of being the greatest.
It is a quirk of the rock circle of life that REM have decided to pack away the instruments for the last time to much glorification of their career at the same time as we are unable to open a newspaper without pictures of Kurt Cobain grinning back at us and columnists showering Nirvana with toe curling platitudes in the midst of the 20th anniversary celebration of Nirvana's Nevermind album.
Michael Stipe of REM is the godfather of Cobain and wife Courtney Love's only child, Frances Bean, and after years of a public mutual-admiration society between them, an REM/Nirvana hook-up was in the planning when Cobain took his own life but was either band worthy of such admiration?
Nirvana's Nevermind album was majestic and the singles from it almost perfect but the follow up 'In Utero' was disappointing, the first album 'Bleach' re-released in the aftermath of Nirvana's success was weak and the MTV unplugged album a huge mistake.
Just like REM, Nirvana just had enough decent material to ride the wave of greatness for a short time and then just ran out of steam and never got close to those dizzy heights again.
Nevermind was a classic album and Cobain, Grohl and Novoselic all deserve praise for it, especially the song Smells Like Teen Spirit, but both Nirvana and REM fall way short of being 'the greatest'.
Neither were trailblazers in the way of The Sex Pistols or The Beatles or were consistently churning out chart hits year after year like Queen or ABBA.
Both were creators of a few albums that should rightly be celebrated on the anniversary of their releases but i'm left wondering if Nirvana & REM were both punching seriously above their weight for a brief, brilliant period of time or were genius's who just lost their musical way after their success. I would strongly suspect the former.
6 comments:
very informative..
keep blogging
Uniqueness Country
I wasn't that much of a Nirvana fan and i only really noticed REM during the automatic for the people and out of time albums so neither would be in my contention for greatest band. Apart from losing my religion, i can't think of any other REM that would be considered classics.
More musical disagreement from me, I'm afraid!
I think most indie fans would claim that the true 'classic' REM period was actually between the Chronic Town EP(their debut) and Green.
They released a ridiculous number of great songs during this period, including Welcome to the Occupation, Disturbance in the Heron House, Fall on Me, Driver 8, Wendell Gee, Gardening at Night, World Leader Pretend, Turn You Inside Out, Finest Worksong, So Central Rain, Carnival of Sorts, Shaking Through... and far too many others to remember... One of the great 'runs' by any band in rock history, I would say.
I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that Kurt Cobain was probably talking about this period. He was known for his great taste in bands (e.g. Stooges, Pixies, Mudhoney, Daniel Johnston, Meat Puppets, Magazine).
What followed from REM (i.e. Out of Time and Automatic bla bla bla) wasn't exactly bad, but I thought these albums started veering dangerously towards MOR territory... They still produced the odd great track (e.g. 'Leave' from 'New Adventures in Hi-Fi') but I started slowly tuning out during the 90s.
As for Nirvana, I think you're being slightly unfair here too. While In Utero was slightly disappointing, I thought Bleach was utterly brilliant. Incesticide (demos & out-takes etc.) was a great album too - have you heard it?...
I think it's wrong to just assume Kurt had, erm, 'shot' his load by the time that he died. Other 'great' artists have gotten away with producing album after album of shite, so I think we should let Nirvana off for one slightly sub-par effort.
If they were still going, I'm sure Nirvana would be a helluva lot more interesting than the (occasionally fun but supremely unimaginative) Foo Fighters.
REM songs i would call classics Chris are Losing My Religion, Man On The Moon & Everybody Hurts. I do have a liking of 'End of the World as we know it' as well.
REM never crossed my radar until Out of Time and Automatic for the People and it is probably rose tinted glasses that i saw them as part of the great early 90s period. As these two albums were so good, the standard was so high that they were never going to live up to it which is probably the same as Nevermind. I probably am being too harsh, blaming them for raising expectations with great first albums (or in the case of REM first as is when they came to my attention).
I do own Incesticide but it has long gathered dust laying forgotten in the bottom of the CD rack along with the Nirvana Unplugged CD.
As for Foo Fighters i have never really taken to them.
I can understand why some people aren’t into them very much, but I think the thing I loved about both ‘Bleach’ and ‘Incesticide’ is that songs like Been a Son, Molly’s Lips, Floyd the Barber, Negative Creep (and several others) seem to capture the true spirit of punk in that they all sound perilously close to breaking down entirely and completely losing their form. Whereas ‘Nevermind’, good as it was, didn’t quite have this feel – it had more of a produced ‘sheen’ to it. Come to think of it, my real interest in indie guitar music died with Kurt… I moved onto electronic music in the mid-90s and have never really made my way back ‘home’!
The thing about R.E.M. is that they were a huge inspiration to artists like Nirvana and Pavement, but also popular during the same time as those bands. Not many artists that were big in the 80's managed to become popular in the 90's too, but R.E.M. were one of them, so were Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.
And for Nirvana, well, not much is needed to be said. They may have been the most original group since Black Sabbath.
Post a Comment