A few days ago I was watching television and came across something that tied into one of my major musical tenets. Within a few hours of each other I watched a Classic Albums documentary on Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and I then watched the full video for “Come As You Are”. This is really important to me because most people claim that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is the song that ended hair metal but I don’t believe that it is true. It hurt it, definitely, had hair metal on the ropes but it is “Come As You Are” that put hair metal away for good.
It’s a little difficult to imagine what the music world was like fifteen years ago. It was a time when Skid Row was on the cover of every music mag and we weren’t that far removed from Wilson Phillips and Nelson ruling the charts. Sure, you also had Metallica and Guns N Roses as the two biggest bands on the planet but for the most part, music still seemed to be glam and style over substance. There was an underground scene and everyone had heard Losing My Religion more times than they could remember but it still seemed to be separate from everything else.
That’s what Nirvana broke into but to be honest, from Smells Like Teen Spirit you didn’t know if they were going to be a huge band or just another one hit wonder. It was different and unique but that is not unusual in music. So were the Crash Test Dummies and no one gave a damn about them before or since. And that’s the way I view Smells Like Teen Spirit, it was a warning shot and an indication of a different type of musical movement beginning. But it wasn’t what broke everything.
That’s where the opening bass line of Come As You Are comes in. That song and video were so completely opposite of what you would see from Motley Crue or Bon Jovi that it forced you to wonder what it all meant. You had the band playing behind a wall of water so that you could never quite make out what they looked like, as opposed to being able to name the brand of lipstick the band members were wearing. There were images of cells and babies, which screamed that this was about a new form of music rather than being mainly about strippers (which is what every third hair metal song was about). There was the dog with the satellite dish over its head that symbolized, ok, I don’t have a freaking clue what it was supposed to mean. Other than it and the image of Kurt swinging from the chandelier tended to stay with you for a very long time.
But it’s the final shot, the last thing you see as the guitar feedback fades, that said this is a different world now. The camera seems to be lying on a lawn with the band looking at it. And slowly, so slowly, Kurt leans forward to kiss the lens. Again, I don’t know if I can explain how different this was than everything else you would see on MTV. We weren’t that far removed from Home Sweet Home ruling the nightly request countdown for a year. Or Warrant’s Cherry Pie video, which involved a fire truck, pastries and probably something else that I’m forgetting. None of it was about showing vulnerability but that is what Nirvana did in those few seconds. Everyone knew that they could rock, hell, a lot of people considered them to be a metal band in the beginning., but it’s that one moment that changed everything.
It’s hard to realize that we are fifteen years removed from my first seeing that video. It makes you wonder if what you’ve done in the meantime has been worthwhile. But more than that, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to pinpoint a time when I’ve seen a culture change due to something as simple as a song.
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