Nirvana's influence on music sucked, and The Stones are more important than The Beatles

There, that ought to be clickable enough

Nirvana was a bad influence on music.

When I was fourteen I think I listened to one of Nirvana’s studio albums basically every time I showered, which, if memory serves, was about once every two weeks. I listened to enough Nirvana that my stepmother once insinuated that Nirvana was the reason I was depressed, but, in reality, the music mostly just convinced me to never try heroin, and really just stay away from downers altogether, even to the point that I developed a stimulant dependency probably out of a sheer desire not to be opiated. The Sacklers won’t get a dollar out of me! Although I did significantly contribute to the coffers of whoever makes Vyvanse, and, additionally, I think I probably paid for a Hell’s Angel’s kid’s college tuition.

Nirvana is a great band. Uncontroversial take, right? A handful of the greatest rock records ever made, some great (and weird) extended material, and an incredible episode of MTV Unplugged that basically justified the entire existence of that stupid fucking show. There at the forefront is Kurt, the greatest poster boy for suicide since Young Werther, The Last Great Rock Star in the truly classic sense of “Star.” And yet, tragically, someone who also failed to live up to his own pretensions. Kurt Cobain was a guy who clearly saw his colleagues as being more, say, The Breeders, Meat Puppets, Bikini Kill, even Beat Happening—one of his great career regrets was not being able to attend the International Pop Underground Convention—you know, the tasteful stuff. But that was less Seattle and more Olympia, Seattle’s cooler sister. It didn’t matter how many Riot Grrrls Kurt boinked, his kind was always going to be shit like Alice in Chains. A good band, yes, but… Beat Happening they are not. Beat Happening fans read poetry and shit. Alice in Chains fans do donuts in strip club parking lots. This forms at least part of the problem. Still, Nirvana was able to achieve something those Olympians never could, a kind of superstardom since unrivalled, swimming in both commercial success and critical acclaim. As Sam Jennings pointed out in a note a little while ago, you can even look back to shit like contemporaneous MTV footage to see just how mythological Nirvana already was even just off the heels of Nevermind, like in this MTV Year in Rock special from 1992 (fast-forward to three minutes in):

The initial post-Nirvana rock acts weren’t necessarily a problem. Even some of the more “watered down” pop-leaning fare like Gin Blossoms were actually quite good bands—Polaris was literally sound-tracking a children’s show and put out an incredible album while doing so—but this wouldn’t last. Even some of the more tolerable early mainstream rock acts to be so clearly heavily-influenced by Nirvana, like Weezer, Pearl Jam, and The Offspring, quickly descended into becoming some of the most annoying bands of all time.¹ Dave Grohl’s own successive project, Foo Fighters, after a couple decent albums likewise plummeted directly off a cliff and sank into a sea of bloated buttrock. It’s like there was a memo to every band influenced by Nirvana: please remember to start sucking now.

Who were the big acts leaning on Nirvana’s influence going forward from there? Nu metal shit like Linkin Park, bland radio alt rock like Three Days Grace, and post-grunge phonies like Nickelback. Crap! Crap! Crap! They even contributed to a sample on the first truly terrible Jay-Z album. Then consider the now-canonical rock bands of that same era—do the most celebrated offerings from bands like Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Animal Collective, Vampire Weekend, Modest Mouse, or Radiohead sound anything like Nirvana? More guitar-oriented bands like The Strokes were looking back before Nirvana for inspiration from bands like Television.²

When I think of my favourite guitar bands who produced most or all of their work in the post-Nirvana era—Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Women, Neutral Milk Hotel, Sunburned Hand of the Man, The Flaming Lips, Dismemberment Plan, Tortoise, Sparklehorse, Broken Social Scene, Silver Jews—there isn’t a lot between them that bears much of the mark of Nirvana. Or at least not sonically. Kurt’s greatest contribution was probably not the actual music he put out, good as it is, but the influences he promoted. I know plenty of kids—myself included—for whom a tour through the “favourite albums” pages of Kurt’s journals became a sort of musical education. Leadbelly, Daniel Johnston, Half Japanese, Butthole Surfers, Public Image Ltd., MDC, I got all that shit from Kurt. I reckon a lot of the best music of the new millennium has been made by people who loved Nirvana, got turned onto that kind of stuff in the process, and went on to make stuff themselves that sounded more like Kurt’s influences than what he made himself.

It’s sort of the curse of the band’s overexposure as well, right? They were just too popular, they inspired aspirations from a lot of dumbasses as a result who likely worshipped Kurt (especially after his death) and wanted to be just like him without necessarily actually understanding what he “was.” Exposure can really nerf your influence! It’s sort of like how

The Rolling Stones were a way more influential band than The Beatles.

No matter how hard The Beatles may try to win their propaganda war against The Stones, your ears can hear the facts for themselves: who did rock music sound more like following 1970? The Beatles or The Stones? Line up the biggest rock acts of that decade, for good or for ill: Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, Neil Young, Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, Allman Brothers, AC/DC, and so on and so forth. Throw them onto Maury Povich. Who’s the father? Come on. The entire punk movement, meanwhile, was basically predicated on pissing on everything ever associated with The Beatles—“phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust.”³ Who was still holding the line for Beatles influence in the 1970s? XTC? ELO? Fucking Badfinger? If anything their influence was most seen in schmaltzy 70s cheesy crap like Paper Lace.⁴ This situation would not improve for decades, and in fact when a band does heavily cite The Beatles it almost feels like a novelty, like when Oasis did it (but even they have more of The Stones in them, really), or when people were saying Kevin Parker sounded “just like” John Lennon. It’s quaint.

Still, The Beatles have one thing The Stones don’t, which is their own record label to assign the single task of rewriting music history in The Beatles’ favour—the twelve-hour Beatles catechism that is their Anthology documentary that played on BBC, along with the innumerable books and compilations and tie-ins and promotions, all working toward a narrative of a spotless Beatles historical record and their position as The Most Important Band Ever. Growing out of all that like a tumour is the oft-repeated claim that The Stones were just a band hanging off The Beatles’ coattails, particularly memorable in Jann Wenner’s Lennon Remembers, a rambling extended interview in which John, in his typical narcissistic manner, spouts off in reaction to his anxiety that The Stones were still “cool” while The Beatles by the 70s were absolutely not. Here’s Lester Bangs just a couple years after Lennon Remembers, in 1975:

I am constantly hearing people say, with minor perplexity, that they can still play early Stones albums, but old Beatle records (like old Dylan records), and particularly Sgt. Pepper, gather dust on the shelves. As with Dylan singing about Hattie Carroll, the Beatles celebrating the explosion of Love as a Way of Life amounts now to an artifact, just as today’s Heavy Statements will prove to be just about as ephemeral.

The snide Beatles partisan position is to always point out how “interesting” it is that The Stones “stopped evolving” after The Beatles broke up—the insinuation being that The Stones were merely copying whatever The Beatles were doing—but if The Stones copied The Beatles as much as these people suggest, then you’d think they’d be fungible, so why did The Stones still have cultural capital in the 70s when The Beatles didn’t? The truth of the matter is that the only time The Stones truly came close to “imitating” The Beatles was on Between the Buttons (and I still find The Stones’ use of vibraphone and harpsichord to round out their sound on tracks like “Yesterday’s Papers” to be as incredible as any of the best moments on Rubber Soul). Ignored in equal measure is how The Beatles themselves followed The Stones in turn, such as on the rather Beggars-Banquet-esque Let It Be. I personally prefer The Beatles at their loosest—the aforementioned Let It Be or songs like “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” “The End,” “Hey Bulldog,” “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)”—or, to put it bluntly, when their energy comes closest to being like The Stones. And evidently most of music history agrees with me, whether it wants to admit it or not—use your ears, the truth is in the music. The Beatles ideological apparatus, fueled by residuals from teeny-bopper chart dominance and the hagiography of post-assassination John Lennon, feeds you LIES. Ringo Starr did not deserve to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist!

Hey Eris, you say, you mentioned Between the Buttons as derivative of The Beatles but didn’t mention Their Satanic Majesties Request, which critics generally agree borrows even more heavily. Mm. Yes. Well, you see, I might make a bit of an exception there, because the thing is

Their Satanic Majesties Request is a much better album than Sgt. Pepper’s.

I’m obviously not the world’s only guy to prefer Satanic Majesties. We are a small but vocal and passionate minority. Some of us even go on to start entire bands predicated on the idea that Satanic Majesties is a great album. Their Satanic Majesty’s Request is a more interesting psychedelic rock record than Sgt. Pepper’s because The Beatles are ultimately not loose enough to pull off real psych rock. It’s a very good record—a terrific record, really—but it’s a pantomime of the kind of psychedelic rock the band was trying to emulate. They just don’t have it in them.

Throughout Sgt. Pepper’s recording, McCartney allegedly claimed “this is our Freak Out!,” referring to the album by the Mothers of Invention. I would like to go back in time and remind McCartney that Freak Out! is not an album made up of tightly-written pop ditties, and it ends with the twelve-minute long sound-collage/jam that is “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet.” Yes, I’m aware that, during the Pepper sessions, The Beatles recorded “Carnival of Light,” something of their own attempt at this, but, notably, every source we have on this infamously-unreleased track says that it totally fucking sucks. Even George Harrison and Ringo Starr thought it sucked so much that they vetoed every attempt to release it—and think about all the crap those two did release. But of course it sucks. The Beatles are not that kind of band. You watch a documentary like Get Back and you see how The Beatles jam, and it’s really just them pushing rope until they arrive at “a song.” It’ll often be a great song, mind you (you get to extensively watch “Get Back” get composed through this process, and it’s heart-stopping), but their jamming is a process of refinement and not spontaneity, which means they fundamentally lack the highest virtue upon which truly great psych rock sits: can you lose yourself?⁵

Satanic Majesties is a more authentic psychedelic rock record in this respect. The thing is far more indebted to The Byrds, The Yardbirds, and Jefferson Airplane than it is to The Beatles—Beatles sycophants would do well to remember that The Beatles didn’t invent psychedelic rock—in fact, Airplane’s Marty Balin was a noted fan of the finished record. It also deals with actual psychedelic subject matter rather than something like, say, Pepper’s “When I’m Sixty Four” or “Getting Better,” which are cute little radio songs for grandmas. The only songs on Sgt. Pepper’s that comes even close to resembling anything on Their Satanic Majesties Request, either in form or content, are “Within You Without You,” “Good Morning Good Morning,” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.” Hell, “Fixing A Hole” sounds more like something off of Between the Buttons than any song on Between the Buttons ever sounded like anything by The Beatles. If anything, there’s far more of Freak Out! on Satanic Majesties than on Pepper.

Some of the conspiracy theorists look to the “similar” cover photos—Michael Cooper, the photographer for both records, was already the Stones’ unofficial photographer before he took the photo for the Sgt. Pepper’s cover. The Beatles references on the Satanic Majesties cover are just a nod to the Rolling Stones reference on Sgt. Pepper. What’s more, the cover for Their Satanic Majesties Request is just cooler. The record itself, both a parody and celebration of psychedelic rock, is an all-consuming journey for the senses (that’s right, senses plural—I smell that shit, and it smells good!!!), and when I listen to it I feel like I’m flying through space on a little Day-Glo space ship with Timothy Leary, only he’s not annoying and I totally, like, get it, maaaan. It makes me understand hippies, something I consider almost impossible in my day-to-day life, and emphasizes one of The Stones’ greatest strengths, which is their ability to totally transport a listener and embody an ethos or an age—when I listen to something like “Gimme Shelter,” for instance, I can feel the turmoil of the late 60s—and I don’t feel like there’s anything by The Beatles, in spite of their ostensible identification with that period, that does much of the same, something which immediately comes across in Julie Taymor’s jukebox musical Across the Universe, in which the attempt to colour in a “typical” story of “The Sixties” with Beatles music just sort of falls flat.

The Stones’ is a legacy of defeat on all fronts. They are condemned to live in the shadow of a band that in truth they were doing very different things than, and Satanic Majesties continues to receive mixed reception. It hasn’t helped that, since then, Keith Richards has chosen to agree with the critical consensus that Satanic Majesties is a Pepper rip and that it sucks, something Beatles partisans point to as all the evidence they need. I would like to rebuke this position by pointing out that Keith Richards’s brain is a wad of chewed up gum frosted with cocaine, and that he additionally referred to Pepper itself as “a mishmash of rubbish.” Richards is completely off-base with that one, obviously Sgt. Pepper is a remarkable record, but for all of its four-track innovations I do think the album’s actual quality is pretty over-hyped when compared not only to Satanic Majesties’s unequaled psychic depths but also earlier albums like Pet Sounds and Velvet Underground & Nico, which did more to make the album a “work of art” than Pepper ever did, and even just other Beatles records like Rubber Soul or Revolver.

And for further reading:

1. Weezer has somewhat bounced back from this because those first two albums were just that good. Neither Pearl Jam nor The Offspring ever put out a record as consistent, and so I think their later crap has helped overshadow the fact that songs like “Even Flow” or “Self Esteem” are actually still very good.

2. Sire: Was this take chiseled out of a strata of Paleozoic rock? Could we clone an ‘00s indie guy from the DNA trapped in this amber? None of these bands debuted after 2008! I think what you’re identifying here is that there was a legitimate turning away from Nirvana and the grunge sound in general in the early ‘00s because… that’s what happens when a sound becomes overwhelmingly popular, and then watered down by terrible derivatives (in this case butt-ass post-grunge bands like Puddle of Mudd and whatnot). But by the mid-’10s and the early part of this decade, once the bad taste was out of people’s mouths, alt. rock was absolutely back on the menu. Every fucking rock band is back to having at least a coupla Pixies/Nirvana walking bass line quiet-LOUD songs per record.

Also Modest Mouse definitely has at least a bit of Nirvana in them, though with a band so clearly indebted to the Pixies it is admittedly hard to distinguish.

Eris: “that’s what happens when a sound becomes overwhelmingly popular”—except for when it doesn’t, like with the aforementioned Stones. I think there is a certain saturation point where the threshold lies, I think the Beatles and Nirvana crossed that threshold and became too saturated and so inevitably culture turned on their direct influence. As for stuff since the mid-’10s, none of that really matters, because that’s just stuff from the era of Spotify algorithm junk. You can find anything these days, so sure, there’s some Nirvana-inflected music that’s come back, but it’s just part of the same soup that has resurrections of every other musical tendency. It isn’t indicative a natural trend, it’s just content maximization.

3. Ron Asheton of The Stooges was a complete Beatles maniac, but it doesn’t ultimately come across in the music—The Stooges are if anything more Doors (regardless of how many rock snobs would like to refute that).

4. Sire: This is all clearly demented. The reason that fewer bands sound exactly like the Beatles than the Stones is because the Beatles covered so much more stylistic ground. Virtually every song from their halcyon run of records basically spawned (or at least popularized) an entire subgenre. No one sounds like the Beatles in total, but tens of thousands of bands that followed them sounds to some extent like a specific Beatles song. “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey,” “Helter Skelter,” “Hey Bulldog,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “In My Life,” “The End,” “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” “Strawberry Field,” “Let It Be,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Tomorrow Never Knows”… whether it’s a hugely popular song or a deep cut (to the extent the Beatles can even be said to have those), they were so big and so formative that rock music is practically unthinkable without them. They are the most covered band of the past century (Dylan perhaps is closest, with the Stones probably third), not only in rock but in soul, folk, and even in various world musics.

There were other bands of the era who, after taking in the formative influence of the Beatles, created their own towering landmarks which the Beatles then reabsorbed—“Helter Skelter” might be the most locked-in proto-metal track of its time and it came about because Paul wanted to top the Who in volume and violence; the Byrds do not exist as we know them without the Beatles (they were the first rock band that Roger McGuinn covered during his acoustic sets, and the initial common interest of McGuinn and Gene Clark) but George Harrison wouldn’t have picked up a twelve-string or started listening to Indian music without them.

The Stones themselves covered an incredible amount of ground by any other standard, and it is perhaps true that the signature loose, soulful blues-based sound they figured out by the end of the ‘60s might be more imitated than any single era of the Beatles—but that is at least in part because it’s easier for drunk assholes playing in a bar to do! (Though of course difficult to perfect.) The Stones are at worst like, the fourth greatest rock artists of the ‘60s and early ‘70s—and you’ve won me over on Satanic Majesties, it is more to my taste than Pepper’s.

Eris: Oh come on, you know Beatles influence when you hear it, and I named specific examples—Electric Light Orchestra is Beatles down to the marrow.

5. The closest thing we get to an actually released jam from The Beatles is I think “Dig It,” which is a nothing track and ultimately a jam that I could pull off myself with the requisite number of properly-trained house cats. As another aside, The Beatles once jammed with Elvis, of which no recording exists—I think you can just assume it sucked, though.