Sells like teen spirit: Nirvana stopping being a band when Kurt Cobain died – now they’re a brand

Thirty years ago this month Nirvana released Unplugged In New York, the live acoustic album recorded as part of MTV’s Unplugged series. It’s a brilliant record, so good in fact, that for many it sits up there with the band’s best – their true fourth album, held as dearly as Bleach, Nevermind and In Utero. 

There could, of course, be no “new” Nirvana records – Kurt Cobain’s life had come to a sudden, jarring and horrible end just six months after that performance. The sometimes-beautiful, sometimes-stark Unplugged seemed more than a suitable coda to the band’s short career. At the time it felt like a glorious epitaph. A celebration of a perfect moment. A poignant final statement. 

In truth, however, Unplugged wasn’t the final anything. It was just the beginning. With it, Nirvana had entered their afterlife – an afterlife that would last far longer than Cobain’s time as an inhabitant of planet Earth. Unplugged was followed every couple of years with compilation albums and box sets until, having more or less emptied the vault of the unreleased stuff, the band’s label and management, surviving members and Cobain’s estate turned their attention to reissues, with bonus-laden, remastered deluxe editions of Bleach, Nevermind, In Utero and Unplugged itself. The 30th anniversary edition of In Utero, released last year, went for £250.

Meanwhile, the band’s logo started cropping up on every imaginable piece of merchandise. T-shirts, of course, now available in Primark; socks, towels, mugs, bags, patches, Funko Pop figurines and expensive watches… because nothing says alternative rock like a designer watch. When Cobain’s life ended so abruptly in April 1994, Nirvana ceased forever to be a band. They would live on as something else: a brand. And brands care very little for art. What they need is content, and Nirvana™ is no exception.

It’s hardly a unique story. All music legends have an afterlife: The Beatles’ brand is practically an industry in itself, one powered by remixed and remastered reissues, documentaries, endless, endless merchandise of every conceivable sort and Paul McCartney turning up to do Hey Jude at the opening of any suburban leisure centre that will have him. 

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Similar industries have been created out of Joy Division, The Doors, Hendrix and Bob Marley. David Bowie’s post-vital business is especially well thought through – not a surprise, since he planned a lot of it out meticulously while he was still alive – while ABBA are so good at branding they’ve been playing a residency in London for three years now without ever having to leave Sweden or speak to each other.

There’s something inevitable about all of this, but there’s also something a little tawdry. In the case of Nirvana we should, of course, have seen it coming, and maybe Kurt would have approved. His favourite band, after all, was The Beatles. He’d be happy to be following in their footsteps. He was also, despite his underground leanings and purist rock image, someone who craved success and especially enjoyed earning pots and pots of money. Still, there’s something about the overbranding of Nirvana that feels uncomfortable. 

Alongside his commercial instincts there was always a purist element to Cobain’s outlook and output. He was from and of the underground. He liked weird, uncomfortable and unpalatable outsider art, and regularly tried to sabotage his success so that no one could prise those elements away from him. Unplugged itself was part of that. Here was an opportunity to be something people didn’t expect of him, stripping his songs down to their bare bones, letting the melodies stand on their own and replacing hits with covers by bands he loved, the more obscure the better (“I smell ratings” a deeply sarcastic MTV producer, Alex Colletti, was heard to remark). It worked commercially, as most of Kurt’s art did, not because it played to the marketplace, but because it played against it. 

Had he abandoned covers by The Vaselines, Meat Puppets and Lead Belly in favour of duetting on Smells Like Teen Spirit with Eddie Vedder (as MTV desperately wanted) the resulting album wouldn’t have felt so perfect and so enduring. It wouldn’t, in other words, have fitted the brand of the living Nirvana. Though it might, with some irony, have fitted its afterlife. 

Kurt has been gone for over 30 years now. We’ve had a Cobain-less Nirvana for far longer than the band lasted as a creative entity, and the landscape looks very different. These days even living musicians need to diversify into content and merchandise in order to hustle for their rent. 

Perhaps the super-commercial Nirvana brand is exactly as it should be? It would just be nice if there was a way to do it that smelled more like teen spirit and less like the inside of a bank. Well. Whatever. Never mind.

Nirvana: A Detailed Guide to the Band that Changed Everything by Marc Burrows is out now (White Owl, £20). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops. 

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