Monday October 8, 2001

Phil Leckman

Has it been 10 years already?

The anniversary hasn't attracted much attention in the wake of Sept. 11, but it was this time of year in 1991 when an obscure band from Seattle called Nirvana released its major-label debut. The album was called Nevermind, and for a relatively brief period of time, it seemed like it would change the music world for good.

Take it from an old geezer - well, a slightly older geezer - at the time, Nirvana was like nothing else going.

I remember the first time I heard Nevermind. My little brother had a friend named Martin, one of those angry kids who spend their free time making Molotov cocktails, spray-painting "FUCK" on churches, and actively, aggressively hating the culture of their peers. One afternoon he came by our house with a self-satisfied sneer and a blue cassette tape in his hand.

"This album," he proclaimed with the smugness that comes with an awesome new discovery, "is really going to fuck people up."

Given what would happen a few months later, and what was indeed probably already happening, it may seem hard to believe that Nirvana was so radical that our neighborhood's self-proclaimed Angry Young Freak would endorse it as an anti-social masterpiece. But in a world ruled by Poison on one hand and Color Me Badd on the other, Nevermind dropped like a bomb.

I wasn't completely clueless at the time - my cousin Chuck, who had a three-foot Mohawk and lived in our garage - had already given me a taste of punk rock. I had heard the Misfits and the Descendents. I knew about underground Fugazi shows in old warehouses, but was still too afraid to attend. I was hip to the Pixies.

But my musical consciousness was ruled by higher-profile - and lamer - names. I was an active participant in my high school's fierce Queensryche-vs.-Guns 'n' Roses debate, and spent weekends cruising the suburbs blasting Warrant, Winger, Whitesnake and a host of other bands too embarrassing to mention.

Then Nirvana hit. The punk fury of "Teen Spirit" burned through pop music's bloated glam-metal underbrush like a Northwestern forest fire, consuming spandex and retarded rock-star posing and leaving unexplored open country in its wake.

And Nevermind was just the beginning. By bringing alternative rock into the mainstream, Nirvana opened my eyes to Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and a bewildering carnival of thrilling new sounds. For me, the music world was torn wide open. And it would truly never be the same again.

For the music industry, however, the impact of what was quickly packaged and marketed as "grunge" took another form. The major labels jumped on the alternative bandwagon, supplanting Nirvana's angst with polished, media-friendly clones like Bush and Candlebox. Poor, angry Martin got angrier and angrier as his cherished underground was mined by the mainstream, sanitized and marketed at the Gap. By the time I graduated from high school, "alternative" was just another brand name.

To some, the rapid commercialization of alternative music in Nirvana's wake means the revolution sparked by Cobain and company was ultimately a failure. In a recent article, for instance, Entertainment Weekly's Jeff Gordinier inquired, "If Nevermind really did change the world, how come the world changed back so fast?"

To be sure, the lasting effects of the alternative revolution are hard to spot. Today's sophomoric, testosterone-fueled rock scene, split between thuggish aggression and burnished candy-punk, barely holds a candle to Mštley CrŸe or Whitesnake, let alone Nirvana or Pearl Jam.

But so it goes with any revolution, be it Seattle 1991 or Paris 1792: The radical fringe becomes the comfortable clichŽ. The "alternative" becomes the establishment. Everything new is old again. The lack of creativity that characterizes today's music is no more an indictment of Nirvana than bland 1970s rock was of the innovation of the late 1960s.

For most people, "alternative" may have been just a passing trend. For a few, though, it opened new doors, laid out new paths. The fringes are still out there, still producing exciting, vital music. And just like Nirvana did in 1991, one of these fringe artists will one day reignite rock 'n' roll's sputtering flame.