Another Nirvana fan among us, obviously!
May I confess something utterly uncool? When I first heard Nirvana in the early nineties my thought was: Whoever writes these songs has absolutely no grasp of harmonic structure of chords, he is just sliding chords around on the guitar. (I felt about Soundgarden much the same way, I still wince at radical key changes within a song.)
Ever since then I have attempted to come to terms with people writing songs where the verse would warrant other chords being used in the chorus than the ones actually employed and vice versa. Call me narrow-minded, but it was hard work for me. I still find a C major chorus following an A minor verse more pleasant to the ear than a B minor chorus following an A major verse, but that is just me.
A lot of Nirvana - with all due respect to Kurt C. and his unlucky aim - still sounds to me like a beginner sliding power chords around on a fretboard in savage (some might say: revolutionary) disregard of where he should actually go. That can sound interesting sometimes as it builds up tension and has its charm if used sparingly (like playing D major, F# minor, C major and A major rather than D minor, F major, C major and A minor, but with a lot of grunge it was overdone.
Uwe
