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Originally Posted by Severian
Sonic Youth hasn't been the *only* band to change my life. Nirvana had already done so in many ways, perhaps having a greater impact on my future than anyone else. But I realize now that part of my fascination with them was due to having a father whose love of the Beatles was like a deeply engrained personality trait. I grew up listening to the Beatles, and hearing the old man (when he was kind enough to grace me with his presence) tell stories about seeing them in the '60s, and being on the front lines of the greatest pop culture phenomenon in history.
I saw something of the Beatles in Nirvana, being just old enough and just interested enough to understand that they were occupying a position of similar significance, though on a much, much smaller scale.
So, like any good son of an absent alcoholic father, I took shelter in denial and hero-worship, and I emulated him. I really did fucking love Nirvana, and still do (more so than even, actually), but looking back on it, I can see how some of my Nirvana infatuation may have been a result of environment and circumstance. A coping mechanism. And therefore not entirely "me" or my own. And while I was sincerely smitten with that music, and I certainly felt Kurt's death shake my worldview like an earthquake, there was something archetypal about the whole thing.
But my experience with Sonic Youth was different. knew that there was no universality to their sound. I didn't have friends who listened to them... I knew that to some (many?), much of their music was virtually unlistenable. But I also knew that there was a large community of people who felt that they made perfect music. I already enjoyed the first few albums I'd picked up, but I would never have played them alone in the car for a long drive. And to be fair, they were fairly challenging records. This was back when albums like Antichrist Superstar and Life is Peachy were more or less what teenage boys wanted to hear. So I think SY was special for me from the get go because I couldn't talk to my friends about them, and if I put their music on, it was in the background.
Daydream Nation was definitive and personal and my love for it was unique, something I'd never felt in response to music before. I knew that plenty of the bands I loved when I was 13 simply wouldn't wouldn't appeal to me in adulthood.
Daydream Nation was very different. The maturity of the music was palpable. I was responding to the music and the aura and the hue of the sound; I wasn't just relating to some angsty lyric about divorce or the status quo. I was appreciating art on my own, in my own way, independent of the influence of friends, siblings, MTV, radio or any other warped and market driven notion of what was or should be "cool". There was something really pure about it, and I loved the idea that I was having an authentic reaction to something, and it had nothing to do with marketing, or trends, or high school, or what anyone else thought I "should" be doing.
In this way, I associate SY and Daydream Nation in particular, with a key phase in the development of my identity and my path to independent self discovery.
Yes, that was from my memoirs, Severian's S'Very Awesome Rise & S'verely Shitty Subsequent Slip into S'nility
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To me SY came first and after that Nirvana. I heard GOO first time about half year itīs release. But reason why I like it so much is that it reminds me many of the sixties stuff I loved. So the reason I started to love it wasnīt any "this is music Iīve never heard before" itīs more like "really great some todayīs band have made an album that is so much the music I love".
But I also really remember when I heard "Smells like teen Spirit" first time. It had pure energy that I hadnīt heard a long time. My brother bought Nevermind and I brought it to some our schoolīs party. Of course the most of the people didnīt understand it at all, but there were maybe three guys who went absolutely grazy about it and asked me whatīs this, itīs really great! Even that song has become some kind of Stairway to Heaven of grunge, I still remember that my first feeling always when I hear it. Later of course I met guys, who had been Nirvana-fans already in Bleach-time (you know there are always guys who heard great bands from their first demos, Metallica was playing in a very small Place in Finland after they had made Kill Em All, there were guys watching it, but not me).
I think those were great times, I think grunge was the last true youth movement. Year after hearing Smells like teen spirit like many other fans in Finland I went to see Nirvana in a Ruisrock-festival. It was a little bit disappointment to me, but I think I will remember it rest of my life.
Anyway Nirvana become a band almost everybody of my friends listened, SY was never as popular here. But even I liked Nirvana then and has liked it also later, it never became as important to me as SY.
About Nirvana & the Beatles, I have always thought Nevermind is kind of Beatles-album made in the nineties way.