Nevermind - 15 Year Anniversary

Never Your Old Mind Again

When Nirvana first released Nevermind, I didn’t even own a CD player. Soon after the release, though, I bought one of those all-in-one 5-disc changer/tape decks from Circuit City, and I was on my way to amassing quite the CD library (don’t get me started on the process of ripping them all to mp3 format).

The first CD I owned? Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. Why? Well, it was on the shelf near the cash register at CC; it had a parental warning sticker on it; and my mother offered to buy me any CD I wanted so I could test my new equipment out.

The second CD I owned—Nevermind; though, it did come as part of the first 12 CDs I ordered through Columbia House. But for the purposes of the quasi-myths of your youth, it was number 2, alright?

Up until the Nirvana era, my musical tastes ranged from the skaterpunk music I picked up on from the neighborhood baddies to the heavy metal noise I picked up on from the other baddies (the alcoholic versions, though there was a lot of cross-pollination) to the rap music I was turned on to by my city-dwelling wigger cousin to listening to Lite 102 torch songs and ballads, calling in to make requests for songs to be played for all those girls in my class I had quiet crushes on.

Then came Nirvana.

And never again did I stay up late at night making embarrassing requests. Crushes: “oh well, whatever, nevermind.” It was time to accept that the prettiest girls in class (even the mid-range ones I settled for—in my mind) would view me as nothing more than an odd curiosity (not to be confused with a curious oddity: that came about when I discovered Aphex Twin years later)—a rather short-lived odd curiosity.

Instead of hanging my head in dejection, my head would be bowed only out of spite, a disdainful gesture for all those I now considered unworthy of my time. If I’m invisible, then so are you.

This attitude (which has been oh-so all been done before, has been commodified, has been ironically vilified, absurdly embraced, etc.) still didn’t change the fact of how alone I was. Nirvana’s Nevermind was the soundtrack that made it all too clear that ‘alone’ was just an illusion; I was alone because I was around all the wrong people; I was trying too hard to be part of all the wrong people.

Nevermind helped the Disaffected find each other. Say what you will about Nirvana’s artistry, or lack thereof: paradoxically, Nevermind, Nirvana, and particularly Kurt Cobain probably inspired FEWER suicides.