With all due respect: Golden Earring are overdrumming it here ...

[Pilgrim]

Lots of minor third and fourth chord patterns under very poppy melody lines.  I think they owe their success more to Butch Vig and Steve Farmer than to Kobain's quirky songs.  He should never have wandered outside of intimate bars.  He was not equipped to handle fame, and that was something everyone around him knew.

I wish his ex-spouse were convinced that she wasn't suited for fame.  Just seeing her on TV makes me think I need a VD shot.

[westen44]

Lots of minor third and fourth chord patterns under very poppy melody lines.  I think they owe their success more to Butch Vig and Steve Farmer than to Kobain's quirky songs.  He should never have wandered outside of intimate bars.  He was not equipped to handle fame, and that was something everyone around him knew.

Right now I'm more focused on who he was as a person.  I've got to say I still don't know much about Nirvana's music, but it never appealed to me very much.  But for the past few weeks I've been reading about personality types.  (Myers-Briggs.)  Cobain was an INFP, a type which tends to be a natural social outcast.  So, were John Lennon, Jim Morrison, and Ian Curtis.  The INFP tends to have an idealized inner world which rarely coincides with reality.  There is a yearning for perfection which is almost always frustrated.  Out of these four, it doesn't surprise me that two committed suicide.  In general, INFPs don't even seek fame in the first place, although there can be exceptions.  Many are too introverted to be able to handle any attention, much less fame.  Of course, Myers-Briggs has many critics.  There will never be a consensus on something like this.  Personally, I do believe it so far, although my reading on it is still in the preliminary stages.  

As for John Lennon, I'm sure there would be those who said he did handle fame well.  After all, he was in the world's most famous band.  But the Beatles were a special case.  And I think an argument can be made that he didn't particularly handle fame well after the Beatles.  In my opinion, Paul McCartney was the only one who did really well with that and is, in fact, still going. 

[westen44]

I wish his ex-spouse were convinced that she wasn't suited for fame.  Just seeing her on TV makes me think I need a VD shot.

LOL

[Dave W]

I wish his ex-spouse were convinced that she wasn't suited for fame.  Just seeing her on TV makes me think I need a VD shot.

Kurt's last words: "Hole's gonna be big..."

(Dave ducks for cover)

[uwe]

Decorum plummets to unprecedented lows. Sigh.

[westen44]

A tasteful version of "Slow Down" by Golden Earring.  I like it.   

[nofi]

my kids and were interested in the meyers biggs thing several years ago. most of the tests they did on family and friends were wrong. not a surprise to me. some things you can't quantify.

[westen44]

my kids and were interested in the meyers biggs thing several years ago. most of the tests they did on family and friends were wrong. not a surprise to me. some things you can't quantify.

There is much about it that I dislike, too.  But nobody has been able to come up with anything to successfully debunk the theories of Carl Jung.  That's essentially what this is about.  So far, mostly what he appears to have gotten wrong is predicting that certain genders would be more prone to belonging to certain types.  There is much more to it than that, but I'm not planning on spending enormous amounts of time studying this like some people do.  It just isn't that important to me, but I do find it somewhat interesting. 

[Granny Gremlin]

Lots of minor third and fourth chord patterns under very poppy melody lines.  I think they owe their success more to Butch Vig and Steve Farmer than to Kobain's quirky songs.  He should never have wandered outside of intimate bars.  He was not equipped to handle fame, and that was something everyone around him knew.

LOL, Butch Vig is actually not a very good producer (his Nevremind demo mixes sucked; Andy Wallace mixed the record that was released and saved it as best he could).  Vig just got hot on the grunge wave by producuing a few bands before they blew up.  Look at what he's done since: Jimmy Eat World and AFI.  Bands your kids won't even listen to. I am amazed that he didn't screw up those Sonic Youth albums that much (again, he wasn't engineering or mixing so the possible damage was minimised with a more experienced band that knew what they were doing and how they wanted things to be vs the relatively green Nirvana).

He also did a horrible remix of The Cult's She Sells Sanctuary, which I own as the 12" B side. Just terrible.

Anyway, the point is that Vig got big because of Nirvana, not the other way around.

[westen44]

NME named Vig the 9th greatest producer of all time.  Whether it's justified or not, there it is.  Of course, being subjective in these matters is the nature of the beast. 


http://www.nme.com/list/the-50-greatest-producers-ever/262849/page/5

[Granny Gremlin]

Yeah, there's a lot of Nirvana love (and that can get you pretty far) and not even music journos know what a producer  actually does.

... also the NME has been pretty irrelevant since the mid 80s, despite the push to pull up their socks in the early 00s.

Notice who isn't on that list:  Steve Albini, Chris Thomas, Bob Clearmountain, Flood etc... and who is (Rick Rubin; sure not bad, but doesn't deserve to be on this list if those others aren't, I even put Bob Rock above him; there are people, as in in the music and audio engineering community, who really hate the work of both of them, though I ain't one of them).

edit:  OK so some of those other guys are there just much further down; thought it was a top 10 only.  Still pretty whack.

[Pilgrim]

Decorum plummets to unprecedented lows. Sigh.

The Douglas Neidermeyer vote.....

[westen44]

Yeah, there's a lot of Nirvana love (and that can get you pretty far) and not even music journos know what a producer  actually does.

... also the NME has been pretty irrelevant since the mid 80s, despite the push to pull up their socks in the early 00s.

Notice who isn't on that list:  Steve Albini, Chris Thomas, Bob Clearmountain, Flood etc... and who is (Rick Rubin; sure not bad, but doesn't deserve to be on this list if those others aren't, I even put Bob Rock above him; there are people, as in in the music and audio engineering community, who really hate the work of both of them, though I ain't one of them).

edit:  OK so some of those other guys are there just much further down; thought it was a top 10 only.  Still pretty whack.

I can still remember how it was when Nirvana was big.  I never quite got it.  I probably like them better now than then, though.  Part of this has to do with a friend's band who covered "Smells Like Teen Spirit" not too long ago.  I'd often analyze their songs and I found myself liking the song better than I realized.  But a lot of it had to do with the fact that my friend (who is female) was doing so well on the vocals.  It was obvious she was hitting the high notes much easier than Kurt Cobain did, probably not surprising since he was a male.  I tried to tell her how well I thought she was doing.  But I think she might have been skeptical, thinking I was just a friend trying to be nice.