NIRVANA (with Bandsplain's Yasi Salek)
Pop Pantheon
DJ Louie XIV
4.7 • 630 Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2024
⏱️ 95 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bandsplain’s Yasi Salek joins DJ Louie to trace Nirvana's brief, iconoclastic trail through pop's mainstream in the early 1990s. Louie and Yasi unpack the group's origins in Aberdeen, Washington, their time on famed indie label Sub Pop, known for popularizing the "grunge" sound, and their bleak, sparse debut in 1989, Bleach, which garnered them a cult following. Next, they tackle Nirvana's breakthrough smash, the generational anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, and 1991’s unexpected blockbuster Nevermind, which briefly remolded the pop charts in their image and became one of the biggest albums of all time. They then discuss Kurt’s infamous marriage to Hole front woman Courtney Love, prickly relationship to his own fame and success and how his heroin addiction spun out of control during the promo cycle for 1993’s darker and grittier In Utero. Finally, Louie and Yasi detail Kurt’s tragic death by suicide in 1994, encasing the group in amber and forever giving their legacy a grand tragic air, before ranking Nirvana in the official Pop Pantheon.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Pop Pantheon, the podcast where we completely overanalyze all of your favorite pop stars and then rank them in the official Pop Pantheon. |
| 0:17.2 | This is your host, DJ Louis X. |
| 0:18.7 | It's reminding you to rate, review, and subscribe to |
| 0:22.4 | this podcast wherever you're listening to it now. Follow us on social media at Pop Pantheon Pod, |
| 0:27.4 | merch at Poppantheonpod.com, Patreon, where we do weekly bonus episodes of this show, |
| 0:33.2 | patreon.com slash Pop Pantheon, or you can subscribe for the audio only directly in the Apple Podcast app. |
| 0:39.4 | Okay, gorgeous, gorgeous. My queer pop party is happening this weekend in Los Angeles at Los |
| 0:44.6 | Globos. This is on Saturday night, April 20th. And it is happening on Friday, May 10th at the |
| 0:51.9 | Sultan Room in Bushwick. Tickets for both of those is available in the show notes of |
| 0:55.9 | this episode. Most importantly, though, tomorrow night is Pop Pantheon presents Taylor Mania. |
| 1:02.3 | This is our dance party. I'm going to be DJing Taylor all night on the day of the release of her |
| 1:07.2 | new album, The Tortured Poets Department, which comes out tonight. So get in there, |
| 1:11.9 | buy your tickets. Come see me at Parkside Lounge in the East Village in New York for Taylor Mania. We'd love to see you there. Russ will also be in town. Come dance to Taylor with us. Come celebrate the album before our live show, which is also happening on Monday, which is sold out at the Bell House. So a lot of Taylor stuff going on this week. |
| 1:09.2 | Come to the dance party if you don't have already have tickets. |
| 1:12.1 | All right. So we're taking a bit of a left turn this week. This is an episode that's been in the works for a long time, something I've really wanted to cover. I know this is a little bit outside of our normal purview, but I felt like this band spoke to so much about the sound of music in the 1990s and of course released one of the most popular and influential albums of all time. So I felt like it was only fitting for us to do |
| 1:47.9 | a pop pantheon Nirvana. |
| 1:58.3 | I feel pretty unsure about whether Kurt Cobain would have been happy having his band Nirvana |
| 2:02.6 | featured on a podcast called Pop Pantheon. Sure, Nirvana unexpectedly made one of the biggest |
| 2:07.5 | albums of all time with 1991's Nevermind, a record that not only sold 30 million copies and produced |
| 2:13.0 | one of the defining hits of the decade, briefly remolding the mainstream pop charts in their |
| 2:16.5 | image with their disaffected growl and pummeling grunge pop anthems. But after this deep dive, |
| 2:21.5 | I'm struck by how Kurt seems defined by his dualities. Someone caught between his instincts for |
... |
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