"Nirvana Mania"

Nirvana. Perfect image. Perfect time. Perfect place. Perfect crowd. To many people, those four factors were key to Nirvana and Kurt Cobain�s success. Whether society knew it or not, at the time Nirvana "hit big", for every outcast grunge fan buying a Nirvana album, there were screaming girls buying Beatles LP�s (thirty years before) for the exact same reasons as Nirvana fans. The reasons why Nirvana was huge were the same reasons The Beatles always had a top ten hit.

Nirvana was put together by it�s founding members Krist Novolesic and Kurt Cobain, Nirvana rose in the late 80�s to early 90�s and became the biggest influence in the music industry during the 90�s. Nirvana�s fans were devoted to the band and its unique Seattle based sound for six years until the sudden death of Nirvana�s lead man Kurt Cobain.

The key to Nirvana�s success had little to do with their image, with the image of their music, but more with the secrets hidden in the music itself. Listening to Nirvana�s albums, a quick dissection of the "new" sound reveals the skeleton of many bands of the past. In simpler terms, Kurt Cobain put little to no original ideas in the initial song writing process: his songs began with a verse, followed by a chorus that starts on the tonic note (maybe after the occasional pre-chorus). Then another verse, a chorus, maybe a bridge, a verse, end it with a chorus (with the title line repeated at the end). This simple format fit just about every popular song Nirvana had. There was nothing new about it, just the same format everyone has always used, from rock to pop. So maybe the form of their music was appealing, but that doesn�t explain the giant impact they had on music. Think, if you take a Roy Orbison song, slow it down, and distort the hell out of it, well you got a completely different song now. That is initially what Kurt Cobain did. He would write a song that followed the same rules as a Roy Orbison song, but where his artistic "character" came in was when he decided the mood of the song , what would it sound like (which was usually dark, depressing, or teen related). Nirvana wasn�t doing anymore than following the path that was laid out fifty years before, only Nirvana did not stroll the path, they ran it.

So who laid out the path? It was the combined efforts of blues, pop, and jazz influence to make the road, though it was still bumpy and in some places to perfect. Who was the first to walk the path? Well that would have to be the early pop singers of the fifty�s. Who was the first to walk the path in a completely different way? A group of four men from Liverpool, known as The Beatles.

The Beatles came along in the sixties in a cloud of excitement. The Beatles were doing nothing more than what so many others had done as song writing goes, followed the same format as blues and pop artists many years before, but the Beatles had something very different. An image, an idea of how to play music that no one had thought of before. The Beatles sang their songs with four part harmonies that sounded (then) like women singing. They had long hair, they were British, and they had immense talent that overwhelmed their first audience (hence girls crying at the sight of them). The Beatles headed a revolution. They walked the path like never before, smoothing out the rough parts and changing the perfected parts.

The Beatles handled the intensity of their success very well. They wrote songs for the people, but they also wrote songs to reflect who they were. Releasing a song to the public and having the public love it was a positive experience. So if the Beatles lasted twenty years how come Nirvana didn�t? Simple. When Nirvana released a hit single, the fact that it was a hit went against their image. They were joining the masses by having people like them. Overtime Nirvana was musically "reduced" to a "pop" band, hence Kurt Cobain�s rumored quitting of the music industry.

In conclusion, Nirvana shared so many similarities to The Beatle�s song writing and controversial image that it was a wonder they did not last as long. When image is taken too seriously, a pre-revolution can be reduced to a negative and destructive force. Nirvana thought of their music as a religion, not an art form. I quote Kevin Smith�s Dogma, in which Rufus says "People should not have beliefs, they should have ideas. Ideas can be changed, but it takes a many lives to change a belief."