For a while, it seemed there were nothing but grunge bands: Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Green River, Screaming Trees-- and virtually all of them hailed from Seattle. On the surface, it makes sense that Nirvana, with their flannel overshirts and ripped jeans and greasy hair, would be lumped in with the movement. Yet I can't think of a single Nirvana-influenced band that ever got airplay in the 90s, or a single Nirvana song that carried all the actual attributes of true grunge music. Grunge, as we came to know it through MTV and commercial alternative radio, consisted of craggy and/or heavily reverbed, jangly guitars, mumbling ponytailed vocalists, and giant stadium drums not all that far removed from the hair-rock whose cultural relevance the genre supplanted. Grunge begat Collective Soul, Creed, and Nickelback. Where do Nirvana fit into this legacy?

Well, maybe they don't. With all the facts laid out, Nirvana begins to look much more like a plain old punk band that happened to exist at the heart of a cultural movement they wanted nothing to do with. Their influences-- not the classic rock roots of their Seattle brethren, but 70s post-punk and 80s college rock-- spoke to this categorization. Approximating Nirvana's sound with the time-honored [band] + [band] = [band] equation leads you to such dazzling dream-sums as Buzzcocks meets Sonic Youth, Vaselines meets Melvins, or Pixies meets Raincoats. Sure, there will always be those who insist that Nevermind was more of cultural import than musical, but they will also be full of shit: Nirvana are, a decade later, still regarded as the greatest and most legendary band of the 1990s. This band proved to a whole new generation that technical prowess has no bearing on quality, inspired their fans to seek out the music that slipped beneath the commercial radar, and then had the balls to be ridiculously, unthinkably fucking brilliant. Anyone who hates this record today is just trying to be cool, and needs to be trying harder. --Ryan Schreiber / Pitchfork.com