Also The Smiths, The Cure
Also 99% of so-called 'indie' music

U2,The Fall, Jesus & Mary chain. Just don't like them.

Nirvana didn't register with me at all and I was living in America at the time, it's the same thing for me with 99% of Radiohead and Pink Floyd. Still, after trying, Zappa and Beefheart are just noise.

Nirvana were phenomenal. Great pop song writing wired up to the most raw, elemental, visceral music imaginable. Give In Utero, or the live album a spin. Unplugged revealed even more depth, showing that they were pretty far from one-dimensional. Cobain was also a fantastic singer and better at delivering sarcasm than anyone I can think of other than Dylan.

In terms of bands I just don't get - it's got to be Pink Floyd. Apart from Breathe, they just sound like protracted Dire Straits songs to me - all a bit Ford Mondeo

Nirvana

I didn't get it. Massive band and leaders of a whole movement. Just sounding like poorly recorded sludgy heavy metal of no great distinction. I watched a Making Of Nevermind doc and couldn't see what was so special about the band.

Watched the doc again and a critic (from Rolling Stone magazine?) said, "It was all about melody. Everything was in the service of the melody. The lyrics didn't really meaning anything. It was just the way they sounded that mattered. Hidden underneath the Black Sabbath guitars are pop songs. Proper pop songs with proper catchy, hummable melodies."

This was like a bullet to my brain. Listening to them again I specifically paid attention to the ebb and flow of the melody. And the songs really came together for me. Now the band made sense. It's a pop band with a heavy metal sound. Brilliant.

I'm still not convinced by Nevermind, but the self titled Best Of is sequenced like an album, with a real flow and style to it that I love. If you want to give them another chance try the Best Of. Or watch a music video on YouTube and hum along to it.

LOUD

quiet

LOUD

quiet

LOUD

quiet

LOUD.

I tried, dear Lord I tried...21 at the time. Maybe I was 5 or 6 years too old? Morrissey and Curtis were, and still are, my chosen purveyors of misery.

So...Nirvana....Nothing there, nope, nada, zilch. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing that hadn't been done before, only better. Bleach - rubbish. Nevermind - sheened up rubbish. In Utero - better....I just don't get it or see just why they have been so influential.

Whiny vocals, transparent plagiarism and a dollop of self indulgence. I realise this is also a template for Oasis' entire career but at least Oasis gave us the rebirth of Ocean Colour Scene and The La's. From Nirvana you can draw a direct line to Nickelback. Ipso Facto!

Is this what hair metal died for? Would we really prefer to see moping greasy haired men in plaid shirts and ripped jeans instead of David Coverdale in lipstick and spandex?

I don't get Fairport Convention,sorry folks, sounds like a load of Geography teachers at a Harvest festival.
Also
Nick Cave
And any American "Hair Metal" band:Motley Crue,Cinderella,Poison etc.
Nirvana Unplugged is a fine album ,full off raw emotion and Soul.

It's not easy being omniscient.

I liked the first album, very sixties, in a poppy way, and so very British. Of the later albums, I think I prefer 'Local Anaesthetic', which is pretty much a Campbell-Lyons solo album. Best album cover has to go to 'All Of Us', which at the time seemed very dark and threatening. I also like the late compilation called 'Songs Of Love And Hate', but it's only available on CD as an expensive Japanese mini-LP sleeve edition.

What's that? Seattle? Never heard of them. Surely they weren't insular and ignorant enough to even steal the band name? You're kidding me. Grubby little oiks.

have one of the 1st picture discs. Awful sound quality thou - all heil end and no oompah

Decemberists
Arcade Fire
Devendra Banhart
All claptrap and codswallop.

I don't get....
nearly all of Dylan, Springsteen, Joni, post-Syd Floyd, Notorious Byrd Brothers, Nick Cave, The Stone Roses, Oasis, Kid A and The Clash.

I don't mind Nirvana, but I don't get why they are so revered.

Which kind of puzzled me, since I was the right age and liked most of the other bands that my Smiths-loving friends liked.

I just thought (still do) they were dull, whiney and irritating. In fact, what Peterthecook said about Nirvana applies very well to The Smiths, as far as I'm concerned.

And I have to agree with Retropath2's list above. Hmm, most young musicians with bumfluff beards are usually crap as well. But I digress.

Couldn't stand them in my 30s, now I rather like them, warming slowly even to solo Moz.
Funny old world!

I find almost all of Nirvana's output to be negligible. With three stellar exceptions: Teen Spirit, Heart-Shaped Box, and Where Did You Sleep Last Night. For my money, Kurt's performance on Where Did You Sleep is not only his best moment ever, but it's the definitive take on that song, as he renders it in hauntingly agonized banshee wail. The earlier (Leadbelly, Dock Boggs, etc.) versions were all dark implied threat while Kurt's has an added vulnerability and anguish that make it transcendent. I think it says something that his finest moment is a cover of an old folk song rather than one of his own compositions.

because isn't this just 'i hate (insert band name)', 'nah, bollox, i think they're great'

i mean, i could list thousands of bands i don't like - doesn't mean they're crap, just means i don' like 'em.

nirvana - yep, did some good stuff (heart shaped box) did some rubbish (first album's not great)

now tell me a band of whom the 'yeah, did some good stuff, did some not so good stuff' statement cannot, objectively, be made, and i'll call you a liar.

(not to your face, like...)

and at the time I thought they were bloody excellent. There was such a buzz going round the room that night; people were expecting a lot and weren't disappointed.

However I feel their music hasn't aged particularly well... the only album I still play is the MTV Unplugged one. I really like that... stripped of the wall of noise guitars the fragility in Kurt Cobain's voice really came through.

... sound like a group of Young Christians who have formed a musical society to me.

.. make that Trendy Vicars. They even look the part..

...but let's add Madonna to the list. Personally, I've always loathed her and her music. (Posters, please bear in mind, too, that this remark is from an urban gay male exactly the same age as the old hag.)

As for Nirvana, I agree there too, though without the vehemence I reserve for Madonna. It was some years ago now that Joni Mitchell (a fearless iconoclast if ever there was one) began to question this very notion of Kurt Cobain being the voice of a generation and lamenting what this seemed to indicate.

"Sweets for my breakfast, sweets for my lunch, sweets for my supper too. Round ones, square ones, chocolatey eclair ones, all for me to chew." - The Tweenies

Come on, sing it in a Sheffield accent with the amp turned up to 11, and that's a pretty daring satire of childhood obesity.

I saw Nirvana play in Melbourne years ago and thought they were perhaps the dullest live act I had ever seen. Kurt stood motionless at the mike for the whole show and the whole set seemed like an endless drone. I was right pissed off - I was expecting the second coming.Then I saw was the Arctic Monkeys set at this year's Big Day Out Festival, and a new title holder emerged. Thank god Neil Young came on after and returned some credibility to the evening. To be fair though, I saw the Arctic Monkeys on their first Australian tour in a much smaller venue and they were pretty good, but they have obviously burnt out or fallen prey to megastar ennui.

..and I hold them directly responsible for all the spoilt brat music that followed in their wake.

which isn't to say that Kurt dying made me like them, just that I didn't care before but have come to love the shoutiness of much of what they did - there's nothing wrong with a bit of shouting, though I am not sure that they were the voice of a generation since I am supposed to be that generation and I was not nearly so depressed, in retrospect, as I thought I was. And the generation they were meant to represent were all 15 years younger than them.

Post Kurt's death, of course, we got the Foo Fighters, who everyone says are great but, let's face it, they're not, any more than the Chilli Peppers are. They are alright, but distinctly average I'd say.

I am mystified by people loving the Smiths/Morrissey, but not nearly so mystified as I am by people who insist that Pink Floyd were better WITH Syd Barrett. Maybe you had to be there or something but I have to say that a lot of it sounds like insufferable twaddle to someone who only discovered Pink Floyd when they first saw The Wall.

A desperately average band borrowing heavily from a limited number of sources, who have not produced anything half decent since the early 70s. Worse than that, they continue to inflict themselves upon us when they are old enough to know better. They are now a cabaret act and a sad joke. Give up.

If you go back far enough in any artistic movement, you will find someone who definitely had the genius in the room, but no-one really got it. Musically we're probably talking about someone like Robert Johnson. Then there are people who latch onto it and adapt it into something which is both technically excellent and highly listenable. Sticking with the blues I might suggest Muddy Waters. Then the cat's out of the bag and other people with less imagination start copying it right, left and centre, and you end up with an ocean of crap that (sorry, here it comes...) muddies the waters of how good it was at first. Gary Moore, for example.

Nirvana were good musicians who adapted a lot of inspirational stuff from the obscurity of European heavy metal and the oddity of David Bowie, put into to simple pop-song structures and did it very well indeed (though not particularly to my taste). Then they became much copied, and the copyists undid the magic, to some extent.

Listeners' and critics' main mistake is to imagine that anything in popular music is actually new. But the fact is, like it or not, Nirvana, Radiohead, U2, you name it - are all making variations on the 3 minute pop song, just like everyone else.

Don't get them at all, find them rather calculating and cold. Got the first lp, and thought it rather dull, but was willing to be proved wrong, Second one confirmed it though.

There is just something about there forced artiness that grates on me