6. NirvanaBleach

Bleach came into my life in high school, just as a lot of grunge was bubbling up at college music stations. There was a music station at Carnegie Mellon that had really good underground DJs, and I could get the station if I wrapped a piece of foil around the antenna on my radio and pointed it in a certain direction. They were playing stuff like Mudhoney, and I remember hearing ‘Floyd The Barber’ and being like, “What is this? What is going on here?” Shortly beforehand, a friend had given me a mixtape of stuff like Minor Threat and Bad Brains and a ton of DC punk stuff his older brother had introduced him to, so I was already going in that direction. Bleach became this record that I and my weirdo fucking art friends loved. 

Two or so years later, Nevermind came out, and I remember hearing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on the college radio station and realising, “This is that band”, and having this definite feeling of, like, “Don’t tell anybody else about this. Don’t let ‘the normals’ hear this.” And then ‘the normals’ heard it, and Nirvana turned into what they turned into. And it feels weird saying that Nirvana is a foundational band for me, because the correct response to that is, “Well, duh”, because they were for so many people. But being a part of a DIY scene, when Sub Pop and all of this music was definitely underground, it showed you that you could have your own scene, you could make things the way you wanted, you could press your own seven inches, you could make your own tapes – you could have a whole little society of friends who all did that, and it just felt cool. And it’s weird that the word “alternative” later got stapled onto it, and then alternative music became this super-mainstream alternative to nothing. But at the time, it was definitely showing another path.