I think its Radiohead, easily. Nobody sounds like Nirvana today. Almost everyone sounds like Radiohead.

True Story.

When Nirvana "Nevermind" came out I was a 19 year old ski bum. CDs existed but were not yet very popular. Most cars still had tape decks in them unless they were something a 19 year old ski bum could not afford. A friend gave me a tape recording of Nevermind. He had made it on a blank tape, in a double cassette recorder. The tape was the only one I had in my car for the winter.

I grew up listening to heavy metal and punk rock music. I suddenly had a new favorite band. I could not believe how good Nirvana was. I though it was the most kick @ss punk rock album ever made. It was so fast and tight. I could not believe the singer could keep up with the band.

I was living fairly isolated in the mountains of Colorado. I did not know that Nirvana was becoming very popular. After listening to the album for a few months. I was visiting a friend. He had MTV on. The DJ announced they were going to play a video from Nirvana. I thought, "wow, MTV is going to play this kick ass punk rock band!! All they play is top 40 crap." The video started. I was so disappointed. Nirvana sounded so slow and drawn out. It sounded like they were playing under water. I was thinking "What the Fu<k?, Why would Nirvana sell out and play such slow pu$$y music just for MTV?"

I played my tape for my friend. He laughed at me. The tape I had been jamming to was not recorded at the correct speed. For some reason when the tape was made it was recorded to fast. It was just a little slower then chipmunk speed. I was so bummed. My all time favorite album by my favorite band did not even exist. It took me a couple of years to get used to the real Nirvana.

Until the tape died. I would put it on for people in my car. I got a lot of good laughs out of it.

I'm not a fan of either band, but Nirvana were much more culturally significant. I think that should be apparent to anyone who grew up in the 90's... I have to wonder how old the people that voted for Radiohead are.

My guess would be younger than 32.

Some good stuff ITT, especially dave and nunnehi.

"Influential" is a pretty loaded concept. The Beatles and Elvis had huge cultural influence, while Charlie Parker and the Velvet Underground had a deeper and more resonant influence on a smaller group. Musicians like James Jamerson and Earl Palmer had immense influence behind the scenes, and their influence is felt far more than commonly known. Les Paul and Phil Spector had more influence than most musicians, through their technological innovations. Then there's the matter of chronology and exponential effect: does Brian Wilson have more influence than the Beatles because Pet Sounds influenced the Beatles when they made Sgt. Pepper?

Hell, Barry Gordy and even that vacuous twit Madonna have had more influence than the two bands cited. They had huge influence on the industry, and, until the recent digital revolution, the industry had a firm (and some would say Draconian) grip on the prevailing music aesthetic, through their marketing and distribution controls. The business environment was a huge factor in determining "influence".

Few artists were able to stretch across more than one or two areas of influence. Those who did were, more often than not, unconscious innovators (although "influence" and "innovation" are not wholly synonymous). Bird and Hendrix, to name two, were artists of astounding emotional expression, and needed to expand the musical vocabulary in order to fully convey their ideas.

That said, Nirvana was the last great "influential" band, I think, in terms of being a band/artist of such breadth, depth, and collective acceptance. Music, due to the advent of digital technology, both as a method of creation and distribution, has simply become more factionalized. So while a band like Nirvana, which peaked when methods of musical exposure were narrower, and thus held more clout, will be heard by listeners who normally would not choose them as a listening option, today's bands have more niche marketability. It is simply easier to avoid bands you otherwise would have been "forced" to listen to. The universality that used to exist in pop music, on the radio dial or in the music press or on television, is far, far less prevalent than it was when Nirvana came along. The options now are just too vast and easily malleable to individual tastes.

While that is, I think, more of a good thing than bad, it does tend to discourage more adventurous and active listening. What hath Sirius, Napster, and Pandora wrought?

Nirvana also sparked a musical revolution, neatly bridging the punk bands they loved with more mainstream leanings. And it wasn't merely musical, although they were more successful than anyone previous, in terms of merging melodic structures and pop sensibilities with abrasive tone and general cacophony. They were the first band to successfully adhere to a punk rock ethic while largely stripping it of irony (especially regarding emotions and experience that reinforced the genre's naturally angry state), allowing for a more immersive and emotionally diverse experience. No mean trick, that.

Nirvana gets points for influence just through the fact that the poppier Nevermind being so successful made the mainstream success of In Utero, a meaner and more harsh (and better, to my ears) album, possible. Nevermind, in fact, may be the most "important" album of the last twenty-five years. It really opened things up, a lot more than one might initially think. Nevermind's cultural and commercial success Kicked open a door for bands like Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, and Nine Inch Nails, to walk through. Were it not for Nirvana, Journey-imitators, hair bands, and the usual teeny-bop would have dominated mainstream music, even more so than usual, and the White Stripes and Arcade Fires of the world, to cite two bands who benefited from Nirvana's stylistic innovation as well as their commercial success, would probably never have achieved what they did.

Of course, that wasn't purely a good thing; they also made the word safe for meat-headed, style-over-substance practitioners like Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots and Alanis Morissette to sneak through.

Historically, stylistically, and commercially...Nirvana was hugely important.

Still...Nirvana's influence was as much as result of sudden juxtaposition, a stream switch in which the ripples are felt today, Radiohead had less immediate impact; "influence" is as much a result of luck and timing as talent. Radiohead's body of work, and their ability to evolve, is damn impressive regardless of how "influential" they are. Few bands are able to achieve what they have done.

oh hell, I ain't reading all that. This thread is dead to me now, as dead as Kurt Cobain!

Wow. A post to tell us what you're not reading. As fine a lesson in narcissistic superfluity as the Lounge has ever produced.

Bravo, sir.

I hate to disagree with a guy with such an awesome avatar, but who are all these bands who sound like Radiohead, exactly?

P.S. This thread makes my head hurt. Both bands have some great stuff. Enjoy it.

I would give your post an A+ kudz, except that I'm pretty sure Nine Inch Nails was already hugely popular in alternative circles (1989 debut record if I remember correctly), prior to the release of Nevermind. Also, I'm pretty sure that Smashing Pumpkins had already begun to be an indie darling around the same time Nevermind came out. Did Nevermind pave the way for Siamese Dream? Absolutely. Also, Nevermind is an absolute gold standard of production techniques in that style of music, even though it took a lot of the edge off of the music. Some of the stuff on that record is exactly the sounds I would strive for today.

Also, nice on putting Phil Spector in there. Wall of sound is a definite production technique I used to use when working on the UK indie type stuff. These days, if I mix any music, I don't record any of it. The advent of the tools that are available to aspiring and even professional musicians is an unbelievable turn of events. It means we're faced with a lot more crap, but it also means that some really good stuff can get out there cheaply, often by people who never would have had a chance. If you pair good technical talent, with a good musician(s), you can sometimes make something really special, without any of the constraints or cost of being in a studio. Sure, the sound quality isn't as good as working in a great studio, with a million dollar console, and lots of time to experiment with really expensive microphones, but you can still hit the same "nerves" or whatever it's called that makes people love something, and with the right people it can still sound really good.

I loved your post, though.

You're right, NIN and Smashing Pumpkins had both put out albums before Nevemind, and both had already achieved some underground notoriety when it came out. I don't think that the albums that came out after that, though, (particularly Downward Spiral and, as you mentioned, Siamese Dream) would have been as successful in a Nevermind-free environment.

In retrospect, though, NIN may have been less swimming in Nevermind's wake than tacking an independent course, regardless of the chronology. So, yeah, probably not the best group to cite in that context.

Narcissistic Superfluity, now there's a great band. Very important and also very influential.

Radiohead or

I quit reading here

I actually don't think you're far off about NIN. If I remember correctly (I was already not into them anymore by the time Nevermind rolled around), NIN had really begun to fizzle by that time. Reznor was a really talented guy, though, and probably would have found his way back to some sort of popularity, regardless of what happened in the rest of the alternative scene. NIN probably still benefited heavily by alternative music becoming much more mainstream by that time. I remember thinking it was really cool that the song Creep by Radiohead was on an episode of Beavis and Butt-head, at the time, because I had broken that song at least in the Northeast, even though I only played it once, due to language (could have gotten in a lot of trouble if anyone had noticed, too...lol).

I think that Smashing Pumpkins is a very good band for you to throw in there, because their sound was significantly different on the song Siva than it became. Unlike Cobain, Smashing Pumpkins embraced all that production allowed, at that time. I said it in an earlier post, Cobain didn't like being overproduced, but if they hadn't been, for that one perfectly placed in time album, it's fairly likely Nirvana would never have been more than a blip on the radar (relatively), and probably would have ended up at like Mighty Mighty Bosstones type fame level. Commercial alternative radio (every commercially viable song I broke on my radio show ended up on WFNX, in Boston, and they pilfered a few groups from me that commercial radio almost never would touch, PJ Harvey being a major one) didn't want to play something as raw as Bleach, and if you can't at least get heard on local radio, you aren't going to be anything other than an underground band.

Plus, once anyone really heard what Nirvana's potential was, it's pretty unlikely someone wouldn't have wanted to pick them up and really produce them, anyway. I think they're quite lucky they ended up with Butch Vig, who actually was thoughtful about their sound, while also overproducing them. Steve Albini was not thoughtful at all about their sound, he just made them sound like an Albini produced group. It's the nature of the beast, but I don't really think anyone could have predicted how popular the album would become in the mainstream. If they had come out in the last few years, they probably would have had a similar trend, because the internet makes music you never would have heard much more accessible.

They were no Lovin" Spoonful, though.

Exactly. Is this even up for debate? How 'bout Nirvana or Guns N' Roses. This would have at least been debatable, with Nirvana obv still being the more influential band.