I had a super fun time returning to the Paper Machete show this past Saturday to talk about Nirvana, 1991, and 2011's inevitable 20 year anniversary retrospectives in the media. Something happened where not all of the show ended up being recorded, so my piece won't get podcasted, and so I wanted to post it here:
Only a month into the new year, 2011 is already a significant one. It's the year of the most hyped and possibly also the actual worst snowstorm in Chicago history. It's the year that, along with the very last few days of 2010, people turn old enough to drink that have never lived in a world without continuous, uninterrupted new seasons of the Simpsons on TV. It's the last year before the end of the world, of course. And it's the year that, this coming September, will mark the 20th anniversary of the song that changed everything, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," by Nirvana, and their album, which also changed everything, "Nevermind," and so many others.
The year 1991 reads like a book of saints in the alternative canon. There's the two other wings of the late-'91 alternative rock power-triptych, Pearl Jam's "Ten" and Soundgarden's "Badmotorfinger;" there's REM's "Out of Time", Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Blood Sugar Sex Magik", the Pixies' "Trompe le Monde", to name just a few, which will make 2011, in addition to all those other things, a landmark banner year for documentaries and retrospectives.
By this fall, we can expect to see . . .
