A young man in my neighborhood has been doing odd jobs for me. He wants to earn enough money to buy some Nirvana CDs. That brought back a memory of how Kurt Cobain’s suicide impacted my son and a huge following in 1994. Then, as now, I am reminded of my own reaction to the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison within ten months of each other. I understood how much the Cobain’s loss meant to a younger generation. I understood considerably less about what they had heard in the music.

Listening now, I hear a band that plays professionally, though much of the music leaves me restless. Some lines seem to be there because they rhyme with the ones before them. Then a line makes me stop. “Teenage angst has paid off well,” Cobain sings at the beginning of “Serve the Servants.” There’s a career in those seven words. Cobain said the opening reflected his experience of grunge in the preceding few years. The feeling that helped make him famous had become something the record business could sell. [1]

I wondered whether Nirvana had spread disillusionment. In April 1994, a Washington Post reporter spoke to young people outside a Pearl Jam concert. Chris Scales, twenty-two, worked two jobs and still worried about rent. Christie Sobers, eighteen, described anxiety dating back to high school. “No one understood me,” she said. “Nirvana understands.” Others in the same crowd rejected the idea that Cobain spoke for them. I keep coming back to Sobers’s present tense. She was speaking after his death, and the music still gave her a sense of being understood. [2]

On “Sliver,” a child left with his grandparents keeps asking them to “take me home.” Rivers Cuomo first heard the song in 1990 while working at Tower Records. He remembers hearing the aggression he liked in metal alongside major-key chords and a melody that carried something sweet and painful. It touched something he’d been trying to express in his own songs. Win Butler remembered a different effect. As alternative rock gained a wider audience, some of the kids who had seemed out of place at his junior high found more room among their peers. Nirvana was one of the bands he associated with that change. [3]

Music theorist Walter Everett analyzes the four chords of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the blues-like relationships among their roots. The riff keeps returning to F, which gives the ear a home even without the kind of dominant-to-tonic resolution familiar from classical harmony. The arrangement does a great deal with that repeated pattern. The bass carries it through the quieter verse. In the chorus, the distorted guitar returns, the drums hit harder, and Cobain pushes his voice forward. I can follow how the band builds that moment even if I don’t particularly look forward to hearing it again. Josh Shepperd’s essay for the Library of Congress adds another part of the story: production, MTV, and major-label distribution brought that sound to a much larger audience. [4–6]

I had wondered how the band came to call itself Nirvana. In Buddhist tradition, nirvana is the ultimate goal of practice, liberation from suffering and the cycle of rebirth. When Tina Caruso asked about the name in 1990, Cobain said it “just sounded nice.” Asked whether it described a state he wanted listeners to experience, he spoke of the energy he sometimes felt onstage and of the name’s association with freedom from pain and suffering. Both answers interest me. He liked the sound of the word, and he could connect its meaning to something he felt while playing. [7–8]

The title still doesn’t seem right to me. Albeit Sobers felt understood. Cuomo heard something he could use in his own work. Butler remembers kids finding a place among their peers. Those are modest kinds of release, and they give me a better question to ask the young man buying the CDs. When he puts one on, what is he listening for? I’d like him to pick the song.