And yet, even in an era of omnivorous musical consumption and boundless genre tourism, the sight of a computerized Kurt Cobain belting out Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" in a recent Guitar Hero 5 demo reel was enough to revert the good/bad taste divide back to 1988 borders. The line between cool and uncool has never been less defined: We live in a world where Hall and Oates have become as influential to emergent indie-rockers as Joy Division, and Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" has become as much of a hipster-bar last-call anthem as "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out". Originally recorded over three sessions with producer Jack Endino at Seattle’s Reciprocal Recording Studios in December 1988 and January 1989, Bleach was released in June of 1989 and remains unequivocally and unsurprisingly Sub Pop’s About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators. Marking the 20th Anniversary of Nirvana’s debut album, Sub Pop expanded the album with special packaging & a never-before-released live performance.
Tracklist: 01 Blew 02 Floyd the Barber 03 About a Girl 04 School 05 Love Buzz 06 Paper Cuts 07 Negative Creep 08 Scoff 09 Swap Meet 10 Mr. Moustache" would make of indie's current facial-hair fetish.)Artist: Nirvana Album: Bleach Deluxe Edition Released: 2009 Style: Grunge Format: MP3 VBR Size: 141 Mb. (Though one can't help but wonder what a guy who once skewered alpha-male behavior in a song called "Mr. Few artists treated record collections as an extension of personal politics quite like Cobain having him sing a hair-metal hit is not just contrary to his musical taste, but his entire value system.
Had covered Peter Frampton, the Butthole Surfers were dropping in not-too-subtle Black Sabbath and Zeppelin references- but rather than using post-hardcore noise to desecrate their traditional FM-radio influences, Nirvana used it to give their dinosaur rock more teeth. By 1989, indie rock was already making a rightward shift across the radio dial- Dinosaur Jr. When it first emerged 20 years ago, Nirvana's debut album, Bleach, represented an equally heretical notion to some indie aesthetes: Flipper-grade sludge-punk molded into Beatles-schooled pop schematics. And yet, Cobain was no stranger himself to challenging accepted notions of cool.
At that point, Nirvana had yet to divest itself of its Pete Best: drummer Chad Channing, whose scrappy style wasn't fully suited to the band's growing propensity for crater-inducing stompers. Upon its release, Bleach was a modest indie rock success at 40,000 copies sold, and the album's low-budget legend- it was recorded for a scant $600, footed by the band's temporary second guitarist, Jason Everman- often overshadows the music within. This expanded CD/double-LP will include a never-before-released live performance, special packaging and the first run of the double-LP will be on 180g white vinyl.But unlike most rock bands who divided pop history between before and after, Nirvana's impact was not immediate.
It's a testament to both Endino's live-in-the-room production style and Nirvana's raucous onstage energy that Bleach and the bonus concert set sound like they were cut in the same session. The bonus live performance included here (recorded in 1990 at Portland's Pine Street Theater) suggests as much, mostly ignoring Bleach's side B to showcase important transitional tracks: the scabrous pop of "Sappy" (later to emerge as "Verse Chorus Verse" on the 1993 No Alternativecompilation) "Dive", a blueprint for Nevermind's plutonium-grade rockers and "Been a Son", which bears the influence of Cobain's beloved Vaselines (whose "Molly's Lips" is covered here). Original producer Jack Endino's new remastering job gives Bleach a much-needed boost in fidelity, but there's an intrinsic, primordial murkiness to this album that can't be polished- while Axl was welcoming the masses into the Sunset Strip jungle, Nirvana dragged the Sub Pop set into the bleak, chilly backwoods from which they came.Though briskly paced, Bleach is a front-loaded record, the maniacal/melodic contrasts of its stellar first half- anchored by the epochal anti-love song "About a Girl"- ceding to the more period-typical grunge of its second.
And most pertinently, both concerts capture the band at crucial, between-album turning points: where the Pine Street Theater set shows a band burnishing its pop appeal, Live at Reading betrays Cobain's eagerness to tear it down, dispensing with the obvious Nevermind hits by the mid-set point, while reserving the encores for seething covers of 80s California punks Fang's suitably sardonic "The Money Will Roll Right In" and the Wipers' "D-7". In retrospect, the concert crystallizes the moment when Cobain stopped serving his servants and started serving himself, pointing the way to 1993's notoriously caustic In Utero.Given its long-standing popularity as a bootleg, you can't help but wonder why Live at Reading wasn't officially released back in the mid-90s instead of the live compilation From the Muddy Banks of Wishkah certainly, Reading makes for a more appropriate, electrified complement to the band's other career-defining performance, 1994's Unplugged in New York release. And even when playing to the biggest audience of their career, Nirvana blast through the 25-song setlist with a barrel-down, no-bullshit intensity that suggests it didn't matter if they were playing to 100 people or 100,000. And yet, despite Cobain's cheeky show-biz entrance- rolled onto stage in a wheelchair by music journalist Everett True, singing a line from Bette Midler's "The Rose", and then mock-collapsing- the Reading set shows a band that hadn't changed all that much fundamentally from that Pine Street Theater gig two years previous.Cobain's newly acquired, generational spokesmen duties didn't make him any more fond of engaging the audience with stage banter, ceding emcee duties to the jovial Novoselic during guitar changes. If Bleach contains just trace evidence of the band that would, almost overnight, force radio stations to flip formats and record stores to open up "alternative" sections, the Live at Reading CD/DVD provides formidable evidence of perhaps the last rock'n'roll band to transform the monoculture in its own image. Amid rumors of Kurt'n'Courtney drug problems and inter-band acrimony, the trio took to the stage for their headlining Sunday-night appearance at the Reading Festival, effectively cementing their status as the biggest- and most gossiped about- rock band in the world.
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