Nirvana brought mass appeal back to guitar rock, and the mass appeal made the bands braver—some of them even had something to say about the real world, which is way more than anybody has a right to expect from musicians. A kind of popular song existed that didn’t before and doesn’t any more, as arty guitar bands seized the moment to communicate with huge numbers of fans and go to extremes and indulge their appalling drug-addled muses and say dangerous or dumb things and expand the emotional/musical languages with which people communicated.
