Review of Incesticide by Nirvana *

Popular Only Because It Is Nirvana

I admit no single album in my lifetime has had as big of an album as Nirvana’s album Nevermind.  Well, this album came to prove that just because it was Nirvana it didn’t have to be good.  This album is tasteless.  It is musically weak.  Only someone interested in counter culture could find this Incesticide to be a treasure.   It gets one star because there are a few redeeming tracks, but for the most part, they are the best tracks on this album are just average.  Still, by the time this album was released, the local radio stations wouldn’t play them.  I don’t think these songs ever got much radio play.  What’s more if this was Nirvana’s best work, they would have remained a garage band.  And, though that is, that this got no radio play is no means for a call of judgment, these just simply are not Nirvana’s best songs.  Really, this album like so many of the 90s albums of the, “90s rock revolution,” there is nothing revolutionary about this.  What is revolutionary is the technology used in it.  That technology is called compression.  This album could have been put out in the 60s and sold just as well.  Without technology, it wouldn’t have even been a stand out album in the 60s.  However, defining fact of this album for me is that it is an album that people bought merely because it was a Nirvana album, as they had achieved tremendous popular by then.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Kurt Cobain’s suicide was in part due to the fact that his albums were selling for no other reason other than Nirvana was the new fad, as the whole idea when Nirvana started was to rebel against popular music.