Nevermind, an album on major chords
62 lozzo 53 5/4/2025, 12:37:52 PM farina00.github.io ↗
Here is a thing.
If you are okay with HTML, you might want to write an article using GitHub pages instead of any blogging platform (e.g. medium.com)
The only constrains then become your skills instead of what your chosen platform has decided to support (typically embedding videos, code snippets, ...)
It’s neither major or minor, because you need the 3rd to establish that
And nearly every punk and metal band uses predominantly power chords, without any real care in the world as to what the progressions are. It just sounds good to them. There aren’t any rules because punk is a DIY genre. If you told him he was doing a thing, he’d do the opposite just because. And it would still probably slap.
Kurt cobain was a fantastic song writer but you see these types of articles come out now and then propping him up as a genius. His own quote refutes that, and anyone who listens to punk music will agree that trying to analyze it using classical western tonality is silly and pretentious
Power chords were quite heavily used by some of the bands Kurt liked and were easy to play, hence the stuff that sounded good when he was noodling used a lot of that. Nirvana weren't innovators in tonality, but they had great crunchy guitar tone, catchy hooks and a singer with a raspy voice - exactly what you'd expect a band that didn't care about music theory to potentially excel at, and exactly what was needed to breaking the trend in layered reverbs and guitar hero solos of the 80s ...
Also part of what made him so good was how he played vocal melody and rhythm off of chords. So in some songs you might have plain power chords but the melody hits important major or minor notes.
I don’t know what your definition for genius is but the guy wrote some of the best songs in human history and did so without a primary collaborator or big production crew of cowriters and collaborators. I think we can call him a genius.
I think, and as this post suggests, it's much more the case that "Kurt Cobain had very good instincts for someone completely untutored" which is a different thing altogether.
I'm remembering a scene in Hampton Hawes's autobiography where a well known piano teacher was telling him his students were starting to ask how to play like Hampton. He tells him he wants to give him lessons to help his technique, which he thinks will help his natural talent even more, but Hampton finds it boring and never goes back. The teacher framed Hampton's check he used to pay for the lesson and put it on his wall. All that's to say having great ears can bring you a long way.
I am very clear though, that "genius" and "intelligence" are unrelated but sometimes coincident.
1. Where Did You Sleep Last Night Unplugged
2. Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle (or, interchangeably, "Rape Me", though the "blanket of ash" line gets me every time with Frances Farmer).
3. Lithium
4. Heart Shaped Box
5. Dumb (unplugged).
It's not fair to make the #1 song a cover, but that performance merits it.
I think this was the statement he/she was disagreeing with. No doubt a genius, but when you phrase it like that it's more than genius.
When I hear people call Cobain a genius I feel the way I do when I'm hear someone say they've never seen The Wire. Listen to Surfer Rosa and Rid of Me!
None of this is to say Nevermind and In Utero aren't good; they're very, very good, I listen to them all the time 30 years later. But like, I still listen to Soundgarden every once in awhile too. They're not geniuses!
I think of Kurt Cobain like an accidental Elvis Presley. Perfect for the moment, and (unlike Elvis) mostly organically grown, but with very clear antecedents.
I cannot point to strong antecedents of Pixies, Sonic Youth, Throwing Muses, PJ Harvey, Cocteau Twins, Bauhaus, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Slits, Bongwater, Kate Bush, The Cure, etc. In a couple of these cases, I suspect my own ignorance. In others, I could (and might) argue all night! :)
But I cannot assemble a case for not recognizing David Bowie as a (musical|performance) genius. I don't even enjoy his recordings very much, but he was artistically sui generis and enormously influential.
Influence might not be a requirement of genius (I'm not sure), but surely a novel creativity is at the root of it?
Sonic Youth was the Velvets and The Fall; I found a list of setlists from '70s CBGB and made a playlist, and you can hear Sonic Youth all over it.
Throwing Muses (a favorite of mine) a little harder to pinpoint, feels to me like the product of a scene more than a direct evolution of clear antecedents, rather than an act like Dinosaur Jr. was a perversion of Neil Young. A good contrast to Nirvana, which was.
PJ Harvey is the Pixies antecedents plus Patti Smith. People say Beefheart; I don't know Beefheart well enough to say and have a deep suspicion of people who bring up Beefheart.
Kate Bush is prog rock.
Einsturzende is Can (or like a violent response to Can).
The Cure is radio-friendly post-punk; their early stuff, which is the only stuff that comes close to holding up, is basically Wire.
There's no shame in that!
I do hate how he (and the whole generation, and some of the punks before him + no wave crowd as well) pretended that they didn't know any music theory or practice at all. That was quite destructive for so many of us who aspired to play music in our teens, especially if you weren't exposed to music theory and practice in childhood through other means.
I suspect this is true of many great songwriters, maybe even most of them. I would even argue that studying music theory may even make you a worse songwriter, because the most innovative songwriters don't seem to follow some clearly established rulebook, but rather they bend/break the "rules" unknowingly because their focus is on what they are feeling/hearing rather than something more analytical.
For example, McCartney tells a fun story about The Beatles traveling across Liverpool to learn a single B7 chord in their early days: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_r5B1AhP1Fo
I was referring more to being well read in music theory in the academic sense. I am doubtful McCartney ever picked up a book on the subject. Traveling to meet someone so they can show you how to position your fingers so you can play a B7 chord is a bit different than that in my opinion.
Theory can explain it after the fact, and can extend your options (or at least save you time knowing what you want). I know a lot of "untrained" musicians had a fair bit of theory, but I don't know about Cobain.
What a ridiculous statement.
Melodies will be in a key, using a set of notes. That’s kinda unavoidable. By his own statement he wasn’t aware of any tonality and didn’t even care to. That folk come along decades afterward and try to fit it into various boxes is good for them, but shows a complete misunderstanding of what he was doing as an artist. I’d imagine he’d shake his head at this entire thread.
In fact, the ability to tap into mass media only makes the impact of a song greater. Access to electric instruments and effects only gave them more ability to create interesting music.
I’m a fan of all kinds of music old and new. But anyone saying German leders or old timey civil war ditties are better than Smells Like Teen spirit are high on their own supply.
Most of history humans expressed an extraordinarily limited range of emotion in song, in rigid form. Kurt Cobain wrote more than one song that you could play for a toddler and they’d love it. He wrote more than one song that hundreds of millions of people are listening to 30 years later. I’m sorry but your favorite Gregorian Chant is just not very good in comparison.
Even the first sentence makes no cogent sense, especially when read alongside your original comment:
> When it comes to cultural significance and catchiness the fact that people have been doing it for a long time doesn’t matter.
You've apparently changed your argument. "Best in human history" does not mean "most culturally significant and catchiest."
If "the fact that people have been doing it for a long time doesn't matter," then why did you mention all of human history?
If what you mean instead is that you care only about contemporary, present-day cultural impact, then, again, why did you mention all of human history? You've already decided that no time period other than the present matters.
To be fair, "best" has no correct definition.
What's yours?
Just not whatever that guy's is.
Less cheekily, I agree with you that, in the case of something like music, the concept of "best" has no correct meaning. It's literal nonsense.
Most definitions of genius are more liberal than a 1 and a million talent and he was at least that.
Actually try a definition and see what happens.
Rolling stone made a best list. SLTS was number 5.
He’s written some of the best songs ever by many definitions. That makes him a genius. Both terms are ambiguous, debating that is boring.
Schoenberg has entered the chat.
I suspect something similar about bitonality. We hear one of the keys and then try and interpret the other notes in relation to that.
(warning. I am neither a music theorist or an expert in the psychology of music perception. But this is HN so yolo...)
Is it the case that much of this is influenced by individuals having grown up listening in an environment with music already structured around a central key and modulation around that? With the same idea also applying to an understanding (or feeling) of rhythm?
Somewhat true for punk, mostly incorrect for metal. A lot of metal is very analytical, deeper in musical theory than most popular genres (rock, pop, rnb…), they care _a lot_ about it. Metal is often very technical, it bred some of the top musicians in the world, it’s no surprise they give a shit about it: it’s their craft and a hard one.
In fact I remember the singer of Gojira in a French interview, saying (iirc, surely not quite remembering his point) that metal is in many ways closer to classical than rock, as it values composition so much more where rock is all about interpretation (closer to punk)
Also, there's nothing particularly unusual about not having any minor chords. In fact, here's a thing that may surprise some people: most African music for example has no minor chords of any kind, and we're not talking about power chords etc just only major and no minor triads. In African music it's really common to have the first inversion of the 4th degree triad function as the relative minor (so in the key of C that would be A-C-F instead of A-C-E).
They aren't major chords, they're mostly power chords, which are neither major nor minor (no third and the third provides the major/minor tonality). They often function as minor chords because of the melody or other parts, or just because of how the progression fits together. They aren't unique or new with Cobain, he was part of a long history of punk and rock and roll.
Cobain was a good songwriter in the rock and roll tradition. He was not particularly innovative or doing something technically unheard of, and he wouldn't have claimed to be. He wanted to be a good songwriter, and he succeeded. That's it, don't make up bullshit about it.
He wasn't even that. He was a pretty bad songwriter. His music was by and large mopey, plodding monotonous work that is dreary to listen to. Apart from Smells Like Teen Spirit, I don't think he wrote a single song worth listening to.
I don't know why the article claims this was a Nirvana discovery. It started in the 70s. Discharge, Wire then Fugazi, Minor Threat. These people are smart, just raw, and they like blunt aesthetics.
But also, it was just a (counter-) cultural thing to feign lack of music theory knowledge or practice at the time. Quite a destructive one, I might add.
A nice video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWY4YYmSTWg
The Kindle version is $3 right now.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B091Q9VCP4/
It's also worth mentioning the way Kurt often played power chords, using his index for the bass note and barring the rest with his ring finger. This often leads to major chords when the root is on the A string and non-major ambiguous-sounding chords with the root is on the E string. It's obvious as early as the 3rd chord in the intro to Teen Spirit; it has the notes Ab Eb Ab Db (NOTE: Db, not C). It's inconsistent in Kurt's playing (edit: whether or not his strumming makes that 4th string, 4th interval sound come out), but the subtlety is a signature part of Kurt's guitar sound.
Also some of the chord analysis in the site (ex. In Bloom verse) is just flat out wrong.
https://www.musictheoryacademy.com/how-to-read-sheet-music/c...
For some reason, people who don't know music theory say things like this about the Beatles because they think because they haven't heard something before it must be new.
> Careful music analysis was left for other bands.
I'm sorry... but lol what.
> And it's fascinating to think that Kurt Cobain was unaware of any musical composition's rule he was following, but just trusting his musical instict (sic).
This doesn't come as much of a surprise. A good deal of my friends who are musicians (particularly those who could sing) found themselves writing music at a pretty young age before they had any real understanding of music theory.