KURT COBAIN
He’s widely celebrated as a songwriter, but the Nirvana mastermind also changed everything for a new generation of guitar players.
Four chords. That’s all it took to shatter the world order of electric guitar. Leading out Nirvana’s watershed second album Nevermind in September 1991, the brittle intro to Smells Like Teen Spirit was almost laughably prosaic. The presiding lords of the hair-metal scene wouldn’t even have deigned to play it as a sound-check warm-up. None of them could have realised they were hearing the gunshot to kill their careers stone-dead.
“They were ripe for the picking, for a cull, for death, and that was exactly what happened next,” wrote Seb Hunter in Hell Bent For Leather, his memoir of life as a late-80s metaller. “I fell in love with Kurt Cobain straight away. I got it all, saw it all and knew that he was right – we had to die.”
From a technical viewpoint, it seems perverse to wave Cobain into the pantheon, to the exclusion of history’s blandly brilliant slew of shredders, with their highly evolved claws and dizzying modal solos. By his own reckoning, the Nirvana frontman was only a notch or two above a rank amateur (“We’re just musically and rhythmically retarded,” he shrugged). The context of the times only amplified his brutalist style, built on power chords and infrequent early solos that often simply aped the vocal melody (see Come As You Are).
But Cobain possessed something more valuable than warp-speed fingers. He had a magical ear, always finding the perfect chords or fusing the perfect notes, and so leaving behind a catalogue of guitar gold worth more than a thousand dead-eyed finger-tapped solos. Revisit the indelible lick that slinks through All Apologies, or the Beatles-on-11 riff that rises from the cacophony of Serve The Servants.
Consider the addictively angular verse of Lithium: a part that anyone could play, but nobody else had the vision to write.
Even the strum of About A Girl was more than the sum of its parts, Cobain’s chord choices – dour in the verse, dreamy in the chorus – dovetailing perfectly with his vocal melody.
Whatever Cobain played, it was always steeped in attitude (“We play so hard that we can’t tune our guitars fast enough,” he said). And despite gear that looked like a rusting tugboat in comparison to the era’s tiger-stripe super-Strats – “Junk is always best,” he told Guitar World of his taste for beat-up Fender Mustangs – his tone was jagged and commanding. Consider the thrilling moment when he stomps the overdrive in Rape Me; the sickly sheen of hairmetal had never sounded so dated. “It was shocking to see Nirvana play,” Billy Corgan once noted, “because it was like: ‘Here’s this little guy with a monster guitar sound.’”
Above all – and in parallel to the prog/punk gear-shift of a generation before – Cobain made the role of guitar hero seem attainable. He hardwired a generation to believe the instrument was not a magic wand but a means to achieve the ends of a killer song. In his hands the guitar was little more than a hammer or a wrench – but few used the tools of their trade better.
Listen to this: Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana, Nevermind, 1991)