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Sun 28 June 2026 20:30, UK
There was never any accurate way of trying to guess what Kurt Cobain was ever interested in, music-wise.
He was always a snob when it came to his favourite songs, and while he had a few choice words for people that were nothing but manufactured trash, he still had his fair share of guilty pleasures when talking about how much he loved 1970s AM pop music. Calling him an enigma wrapped in a riddle still doesn’t tell the full story in many respects, but he did understand who made good Seattle music and which bands were nothing but trendy bands looking to become famous.
Then again, the grunge wave wasn’t started by people who wanted to play in clubs for the rest of their lives, either. Cobain himself claimed that he wanted to be a mixture of The Beatles and Black Sabbath in many respects, but he didn’t really have the foundation to prepare himself for what would happen next. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was one of the biggest songs of all time once it came out, and in Cobain’s eyes, everything felt like way too much, way too soon when they started playing arenas.
He wanted to have the slow-burning career that REM had during the 1980s, and when he saw everyone else throwing on flannel shirts and singing about their own internal pain, he had practically created a genre that he despised. But it’s not like every single band coming out of Seattle at the time were looking to cash in or anything.
You’d hardly be able to find a more uncommercial band than Mudhoney when they first started performing, and while Soundgarden did have it in them to be the Led Zeppelin of the 1990s, they were still trying to throw a few surprises into the mix whenever they played. But while Cobain had said his piece on Pearl Jam not being truly alternative, he seemed to feel the same way when looking at Alice in Chains.
In his eyes, Alice was the kind of band that sounded like they were chasing trends with their more metallic approach to the genre, saying, “I have strong feelings about Alice in Chains and bands like that. They’re obviously just corporate puppets that are just trying to jump on the alternative bandwagon–and we are being lumped into that category. Those bands have been in the hairspray cock rock scene for years and all of a sudden they stopped washing their hair and started wearing flannel shirts.”
And Cobain does have a small point there as well. Alice was never trying to be a straight-ahead glam rock band by any stretch, but when you look at the early press photos that they took, they did have a lot more in common with Guns N’ Roses than they did with the Seattle scene. But when they found their sound on tunes like ‘Man in the Box’, they were never going to be sharing the same stages as bands like Warrant or Ratt anytime soon.
Further reading: From The Vault
In fact, Jerry Cantrell was the one person who seemed to be the most friendly with every band in Seattle. SAP was already a change of pace for them after their first record, and by having members from Soundgarden and Mudhoney on the song ‘Right Turn’, it’s not like he wasn’t proud to consider himself one of the main members of the scene before it officially blew up in 1991.
His band might have been a bit too heavy and glamorous for what Cobain was looking for, but Alice in Chains weren’t going to be defined by their look. It was about the energy that they created every single time they walked into the studio, and there has hardly been a single record that they have made that hasn’t sounded absolutely gigantic when they were finished.
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