nirvana as a gateway drug

preface:  why am i writing about nirvana? hasn't enough been written? i don't know for certain and probably. if you read my blog a lot, and i'm assuming you don't, i write about nirvana and kurt cobain probably more than anything else. i'm just a really big fan. maybe it's because they're gonna be inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame this year. or maybe it's because i was sitting around the apartment and decided to give nirvana 'unplugged,' a spin. actually, that was probably it. so here it is, 'nirvana as a gateway drug.'

before nirvana, i didn't have excellent musical taste (i guess my current musical taste is still debatable but it's better than it was pre-nirvana by leaps and bounds). before nirvana, i owned cassettes by motley crue, poison, mc hammer, kriss kross, and vanilla ice. i was a musical mess. i don't even know what i was trying to get out of music back then. and then nirvana happened. everyone knows the story, right? video for, 'smells like teen spirit,' hits mtv. music world gets thrown into a frenzy. glam rock dies. michael jackson's career is never the same.

nirvana changed everything. i'm not sure why universally. i can only speak for myself. from my perspective, nirvana was like a first drug experience... not in a negative way. it's just like that first time you get high off of something and it hits your brain and you feel like you've never felt before and you don't know how to exactly describe it but everything's changed. after nirvana, my musical tastes changed drastically. i wanted to know about bands like nirvana. i wanted to know about bands that influenced nirvana. i started looking at my mom's record collection that included a lot of really good classic rock and thinking, 'holy shit, my mom's been cooler than me all along.' and just like that vanilla ice never got another spin on my boombox. that shit was for the squares, man.

like a pothead who's moved on to bigger and better things, i'll always look back on the first bag, the first drag, the first circle of friends where i learned that, 'puff, puff, pass,' was the rule... the first time i combined a case of the munchies with ice cream and my brain almost exploded in euphoria. that was nirvana. i just didn't know anything like that was out there before then. and ever since, i've been chasing the dragon looking for my next fix, eagerly anticipating the next time i'll press play and my soul gets shook down to its core.