A Band from Seattle Made Hair Metal Die Overnight

Nirvana's Nevermind dropped on September 24, 1991, and by January it had dethroned Michael Jackson's Dangerous atop the Billboard 200, an act of cultural regicide that nobody — including the band — saw coming. The album was supposed to sell maybe 250,000 copies. It sold 30 million. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" became the anthem for a generation of kids who didn't want anthems, which was exactly the kind of contradiction that made it work. Overnight, the entire apparatus of mainstream rock music — the spandex, the power ballads, the hair spray, the earnestness — looked ridiculous. Grunge replaced it with flannel, distortion, and a performative apathy that was, of course, its own kind of performance. Kurt Cobain became the reluctant voice of Generation X, a title he hated with a sincerity that only made it more accurate. The music industry scrambled to sign anything from the Pacific Northwest with a guitar and an attitude problem. Seattle became the center of the universe for about three years, which was roughly how long it took for corporate rock to figure out how to commodify alienation.