Counterbalance No. 3: Nirvana's 'Nevermind'

Our Counterbalance team takes on the "Greatest Albums of All Time". This time it's Nirvana's Nevermind. Dust off your flannel shirt... it's going to be a grungy good time!

                                      
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Our Counterbalance team takes on the "Greatest Albums of All Time". This time it's Nirvana's Nevermind. Dust off your flannel shirt... it's going to be a grungy good time!

Patty Schemel's Hit So Hard is one of the most honest -- but moreover, one of the most useful -- addiction memoirs in recent history. Courtney Love should read.

Twenty-five years on, the populace gets a renewed look at Soundgarden’s contribution to the year punk broke with a fully loaded reissue of their career-changing Badmotorfinger.

Nevermind, while containing most of the hits for which Nirvana is celebrated is, of the four primary releases, the least emotionally and aesthetically complex.

The fifth and final part of our examination of the 100 Greatest Alternative Singles of the '90s, includes Portishead, Blur, Björk, R.E.M., Nine Inch Nails and more.

Nick Soulsby’s interview book for completists is not meant to entertain -- it's a 500-page death march.

Persona -- the “I” of the song -- has evolved, broadened, and expanded to more fully represent a diversity of experiences as well as emotional, political, and cultural orientations.

Sturgill Simpson successfully covers Nirvana by lowering the intensity, which somehow deepens the impact.

Just imagine songs this extreme making the American Top 40, let alone the Top 10… unthinkable.

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

Sheila Nevins, president of HBO Documentary Films, called the production “the most unusual biopicture I’ve been involved in”.

Cobain’s witty self-awareness is one of many new and heartrending sides of him brought to light in Brett Morgen’s new HBO documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck.

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The successors to Radiohead and The Bends are a generation who liked how the film started, but lost the script halfway through.

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

“Rape Me” was intended as a razor-sharp anti-rape anthem, an emblem of the feminist messages Kurt began channeling during the last two years of his life. That's not how it was taken.

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.

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Self-appointed judges judge more than they have sold. They agree though, that Nirvana's 1993 swan song is the 126th most acclaimed album of all time. All in all is all we are.

Four days, six stories, one column, dozens of tweets and nearly 10,000 words later, I'm still wondering how we define success at SXSW.

As the featured speaker of this year's music festival, the Nirvana drummer, Foo Fighters lead singer reflects on what it took to get where he is today.

On Wednesday, the former Beatle teamed up with the surviving members of Nirvana for charity and debuted a heavy Zeppelin-esque jam live on stage. Kurt Cobain would have been jealous.

It’s Fine By Me may appear to be a slim book, lacking a flashy storyline or extraordinary characters. But this is precisely what makes the novel so special.

The genre once tied to college radio and indie record companies became mainstream in the '90s. Some of those icons of “alternative” are making comebacks – or never went away. Is this 2012 or 1996?

For the longest time, I’d auto-choose Nirvana's In Utero over its catchier predecessor Nevermind. It’s not embarrassing I chose In Utero for so long. But what is embarrassing is how I reached that conclusion.

Gen X’ers may still want their MTV, but the version they loved is as distant a memory as Valley Girl speak, parachute pants, and leg warmers. Wake up and smell the VEVO.

Not every band borne out of a great predecessor can measure up. Here are five that do.

Letters to Kurt is an angry book: about American society, the vagaries of fame, the inability to shake a past that “has a way of seeping up through the floorboards when you least expect it.”

Actor Jack Black recently joined a long line of prognosticators shaking the death rattle for rock 'n' roll. However, Foo Fighter Dave Grohl says, "There will always be rock 'n' roll." If saltine crackers are any way of judging, I'm with Grohl on this.

Career suicide albums fall into two camps: Those that were released ahead of their time, and those that set new standards in awful. The best thing that could be said about the later category is that these albums are oftentimes just as fascinating as an artist’s best work.

Down With Valentine’s Day! A Playlist for the Rest of Us.