During the mid-1980s, rock and roll didn’t have much to be proud of anymore. Although acts like Guns N’ Roses were making amateur inroads in the California rock scene, the mainstream had gravitated to many artists who had nothing going for them besides the looks and the ability to hold a guitar correctly. While Kurt Cobain was responsible for knocking down the hair metal regime, he considered one of the founders of alternative rock to be the greatest ever to reach the big time.
When Cobain was first putting bands together, he never would take the usual approach to becoming a musical icon. Throughout the first few years of Nirvana’s development, Cobain was known for making songs that were a dissonant take on punk music, idolising bands like Flipper during the recording of albums like Bleach.
Outside of the group’s massive fixation with noise, there was one outlier on the record that shined above anything else they had done. Inspired by his girlfriend, Cobain wrote the song ‘About a Girl’, featuring a singalong chorus that could have come from any Beatles record from their early years.
Although Cobain had a knack for melody all his own, he admitted that R.E.M. was the primary influence behind his melodic sensibilities. Coming from the underground music scene in Athens, Georgia, the alternative rock four-piece was known for bringing some of the most obscure rock and roll ever made above ground in the 1980s, notching up sleeper hits like ‘Radio Free Europe’ on the album charts.
Throughout the rest of the 1980s, the band would continue to develop their unique sound, all while the fans tried to piece together whatever the hell Michael Stipe was trying to say on songs like ‘Don’t Go Back to Rockville’ or ‘Camera’. By the time Cobain had become the biggest name in music off the back of Nevermind, R.E.M. was quickly being celebrated as one of the forefathers of the grunge movement.
Since they never changed their initial sound, Stipe and the band continued experimenting with different sounds across the rest of their albums, building to different sonic heights on Automatic for the People by putting different orchestral arrangements behind them. Even when working on the album In Utero, Cobain still claimed to be a massive fan of the group, claiming that R.E.M. ranked among the best rock bands in the world.
During one of his final interviews for Rolling Stone, Cobain discussed wanting to make their career lineup like what R.E.M. had done, saying, “I have a pretty good idea what [our next record] is going to sound like: pretty ethereal, acoustic, like R.E.M.’s last album. If I could write just a couple of songs as good as they’ve written…I don’t know how that band does what they do. God, they’re the greatest. They’ve dealt with their success like saints, and they keep delivering great music”.
While Stipe would have a mutual respect for Cobain’s music, the world would never get to see what that next Nirvana record would be after the lead singer was found dead in his home in 1994. Although Stipe had never been able to know Cobain as well as he would have liked, he would eventually write the song ‘Let Me In’ on the album Monster in honour of the fallen icon.
