For any great songwriter, everything normally comes back to the melody. You can have the greatest guitar tone ever heard or a set of lyrics that will hit you in the heart the minute that you hear them, but if there isn’t some type of throughline connecting them together, you’ve got absolutely nothing. While Kurt Cobain knew that you didn’t even need to have coherent lyrics to make a good song, he knew that Young Marble Giants were among some of the prettiest sounds he had ever heard.
When you listen to the first few seconds of any of their music, you wouldn’t expect this glossy take on post-punk to be up Cobain’s alley. If anything, this should have been the kind of music that Cobain stood against once grunge hit, but there were still more than a few synthesised artists who squeaked by at the time.
Sure, grunge may have killed hair metal at the time and wasn’t exactly kind to classic metal, either, but names like The Cure were still massive at the turn of the decade, and Depeche Mode were on the cusp of releasing some of their darkest masterpieces on albums like Violator.
And let’s not forget about shoegaze. At about the same time that Cobain released his magnum opus Nevermind, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless was still gaining traction as one of the best indie releases to come out of England, with its walls of guitars and endless amounts of reverb and distortion blaring out of every speaker.
It was Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth that got to Cobain first, saying, “This music relaxes you; it’s total atmospherics. The drum machine has to be the cheesiest sound ever…I don’t know much about them. I first heard Colossal Youth on the radio after I started getting into K music when I lived in Olympia. It was a year before I put out the Bleach album”.
Compared to what Young Marble Giants were doing, what Cobain was producing with Nirvana was miles away from the laconic sounds of the K band. He had already begun writing songs, but no one’s going to look at a track like ‘Negative Creep’ or ‘Paper Cuts’ and say that Colossal Youth was one of its main influences.
If you listen to Cobain’s more mainstream material, it’s clear that he did at least have a passing interest in learning about those melodies. ‘About A Girl’ may have been the most commercial piece of music Cobain had made at the time, but if you listen to the way that Alison Statton sings, Nirvana had the same sense of dynamics.
The only difference was that Cobain began pushing his voice that much harder, usually leaning into the gruffer side of his scream that most audiences ate up once Nevermind began tearing up the charts. Cobain’s music may have indirectly fallen under the category of grunge, but Nirvana was far too eclectic to be limited to just one passing genre. They were fans of all kinds of music, and they were going to make sure that all of their musical heroes showed up in their catalogue sooner or later.
