[NOTE: The following was also posted at the PMS newsgroup as a response to a dialogue from posts regarding Nirvana and their impact on the music scene in the early '90s]

Okay, this was going to be a much smaller part of my next "flavors" column, but I'll go ahead and [tell you what I'm thinking], now, since it seems to be the "flavor of the week" (hmm) to talk aboot, here...
First things first. I am a Nirvana fan... I am not the planet's biggest Nirvana fan, nor am I a critic of them (somewhere nicely in between, actually)... Secondly, this is NOT an attempt in ANY way to discredit their impact, or to slam anyone who thinks Nivana were "it," or anything like that... Yes, Nirvana did a lot of things to help change the face of music in the early '90s... but they had a LOT of help along the way...
For the record:
*>>>Alice in Chains' "Facelift" was out and the singles "We Die Young" and "Man in the Box" were receiving HEAVY airtime on radio and Mtv more than a year before Nirvana's "Nevermind" was released...
*>>>Pearl Jam's "Ten" came out a month before "Nevermind" and the single "Alive" charted and made Pearl Jam a household name a couple months before "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was starting to be heard (actually, "Smells Like..." didn't receive a lot of airplay until it was released a second time as a single, three months after "Nevermind" was released (while "Alive" and "Evenflow" videos were both already hitting pretty hard in the Mtv late-night rotation) - the first time it was released b/w "Even in His Youth" and charted #7 in the UK... two months later, it was released b/w "Drain You" and charted #6 in the US, the video took hold on Mtv within about a month of that, as well).
*>>>Soundgarden had two EPs ("Screaming Life," "Fopp") and two full-length albums ("Ultramega OK" and "Louder Than Love") released and were very alive in music before Nirvana was even a band. "Badmotorfinger" was released the same week as Pearl Jam's "Ten" and the single "Rusty Cage" actually was out and receiving radio/video acclaim two months before the album was released...

Not to mention bands like Sonic Youth (who might actually deserve the credit for "grunge" going back about 8 years before the Seattle grunge), Motherlovebone (who, after the untimely passing of Andrew Wood, spawned the likes of Temple of the Dog and Pearl Jam), Mudhoney (also a by-product of Motherlovebone), (Cincinnati's own) Afghan Whigs, Tad, L7, the Melvins, Screaming Trees...
But, yeah... Nirvana did tons to help a really sketchy music scene and thankfully helped bands like Trixter, Pretty Boy Floyd, and really nasty, SCARY stuff like that fade away into oblivion... but they were part of a primordial ooze (that consited of a whole mess of bands) that evolved into something that changed the way a lot of people looked at and felt about music. A lot of people will say that Nirvana paved the way for a lot of bands in the future (and in many aspects, they sure did), but I tend to think that it was the other bands around them at the time that helped really "pave the way" for them to shine in the way that they did. Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and all the other bands on the cutting edge of the day made it "okay" for Nirvana to be who they were (not that they needed permission or something, those other bands were pretty massive in the "underground alternative college" scene all over the country - I mean, I had two different friends here, in this tiny midwest town, that had "Bleach" on vinyl long before anyone knew who the heck they were, and when I turned around and they were huge all the sudden, I was like, "incredible...").
Something REALLY worth NOT overlooking, here, as well... Who controlled music back then (and still try to, to this day, although I feel with much less success)? Who REALLY made Nirvana so huge? Yeah... Your favorite corporate whores and mine, Mtv. Big at the time was INCREDIBLE amounts of self-serving overindulgence on the behalf of rock stars (just recall Axel Rose running around in a white tux and swimming with dolphins in his outrageously over-produced spectacles/videos and goofy stuff like that). Do you remember Kurt Cobain showing up on "Headbanger's Ball" in the big yellow dress-device? ...and Riki Rachtman's jaw just kinda flapping in the breeze? And do you also remember what happened shortly thereafter? Riki had transformed from complete hair band goofball (fringy leather jacket, tight ripped bluejeans, steel-toed cowboy boots), to comeplete plaid-clad grunge goofball (wrinkled flannel shirt, baggy ripped blue jeans, steel-toed combat boots) and would later chop off all his hair and try to distance himself from "his roots" even further, aligning himself with grunge and super-heavy bands almost in an attempt to act like hair-band goofball Riki never existed. But my point is, Mtv latched onto the grunge thing and rode it all the way to a really, really big bank. Half of the VJs became "grungy" people and... well... y'know, they managed to screw it all up for us (again) in the long run, and secure their place in the "who cares what you think?" aspect of today's music...

NIRVANA NOTE: People have been talking about a Nirvana boxed-set tentatively scheduled to be out sometime in 2004 (which, I think there's still some legal wrangling going on with you-know-who, maybe?)... BUT DID YOU KNOW that there IS a SIX CD Nirvana boxed-set that was released in November of 1995? Okay, it's just a CD single boxed-set, but still... :)
Track list can be found here.

...and finally, while I'm thinking about it, I haven't owned a Pearl Jam CD since "Vitalogy," but their new CD is out next Tuesday (the 12th), so... make your plans to rip it off the web now, I guess... D'oh!