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Smells Like MTV: Music Video and the Rise of Grunge

MTV's central role in delivering grunge to a national audience in the early 1990s demonstrated the network's power as a creator and definer of culture.

                                      
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        The Sad Rest of Kurt Cobain
    
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MTV's central role in delivering grunge to a national audience in the early 1990s demonstrated the network's power as a creator and definer of culture.

Nick Soulsby tries to crack the case of Nirvana, the watershed band that very few saw coming.

Twenty years since the world learned of Kurt Cobain's death, what impact does he have on rock music today?

There are times when you hear Kurt Cobain sing that you believe no other voice has ever told the truth about suffering. But it's more complicated than that, isn't it?

I gazed a gazeless stare. We walked a million hills. As the 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death approaches, Counterbalance takes a look at Nirvana's landmark acoustic performance.

This is an exhaustive, if exhausting analysis of the debauchery and bad decisions that link the most famous members of the "27 Club".

Over time, it has become clear that this is an album about the feelings of one man (not a generation), and his struggle between rock purity and pop sensibility is what makes this classic.

In the wake of Amy Winehouse's death, record industry types and music journalists dusted off their Rock 'n' Roll 101 handbooks, revisiting the chapter on how to report on a Young Rock Star's death. Has it been handled any differently this time around than in the past?

In the latest Between the Grooves series, Sean McCarthy undertakes a track-by-track examination of the concept of change in Tool's 1996 classic, Ænima, this time looking at "Eulogy" and "H".

Didn't Kurt Cobain perform as a teenage girl? If Nirvana did inspire an entire generation, then we really should be receiving Miley Cyrus' cover performances in a much more educated fashion than we are.

Why did the Robert-Pattinson-as-Kurt-Cobain myth take in more people than any April Fool? Because it seemed too uncomfortably true to be bullshit.

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Sub Pop's first lens on the grunge scene offers an early look at the signs of flannel to come, and the distinctive regional imprints on the sounds that followed punk.

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In this excerpt from PopMatters' new book Rebels Wit Attitude, Iain Ellis discusses how Nirvana were a rocking perfect storm of punk’s attitude, metal’s riffs, and pop hooks.

Lady Lazarus is a naked lunch. The circuit is closed. The simulacrum ironically, paradoxically, signifies everything.

Schnack has gone to great lengths to humanize Cobain and offer more than the usual icon worship usually attributed to such a tragic figure.

One of the author's major assertions, expressed through quotes of others, is that Nirvana remains a powerful entity owing much to the fact that Kurt Cobain is gone.