30 years on, Nirvana’s Nevermind continues to touch countless souls around the world - including many Indonesians from all walks of life. 

Halfway across the world from Seattle, the United States, five years after the death of singer-guitarist and songwriter Kurt Cobain in April 1994, a then-junior high school student in Yogyakarta, Stephan Gilang, tried playing guitar for the first time. He had just had his “mind blown” listening to Nirvana’s “Lithium”, the third single off of Nevermind, the band’s second album and major label debut, released in September 1991. 

“One day, I went strolling with my friends around the touristy Malioboro Street when I accidentally heard part of the intro [from ‘Lithium’] on a bootleg Video Compact Disc [VCD] at a street stall. I have not gotten it out of my head since,” he told The Jakarta Post on Sept. 21.

After buying the VCD, which turned out to be a pirated copy of the band’s 1994 rockumentary Nirvana: Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!, the tween Gilang became increasingly charmed by Cobain’s effortless fashion, heavy music and poetic lyrics. He bought the album and diligently taught himself how to play guitar through songs from Nevermind. Like many others, Gilang saw a gateway to playing music through Cobain’s passion-over-skill approach to guitar playing. 

“The first time I trained my fingers to master power chords was to ‘Lithium’,” he said, laughing.

Not long afterwards, he founded a band named ‘Grunge’, a Nirvana cover band who often played Nirvana’s most iconic song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at school events. He went on to play with several short-lived bands of various genres at small to medium size venues in Yogyakarta during the 2000s, but he still credited Nirvana and Nevermind for introducing him to a wider array of music.

Now a 34-year-old elementary school teacher and father of a toddler son, Gilang now only plays occasionally with his childhood buddies at rented studios for nostalgia.

“Although you are now old, you have to keep smiling and having fun like Nirvana’s smile logo!” he said, referring to the band’s iconic happy face logo.

Gilang’s Nevermind purchase in 1999 contributed to the album’s 30 million copies sold worldwide, making it one of the best selling albums of all time.

Priceless advice

More produced than 1989’s indie-label released Bleach, Nirvana’s debut album, Nevermind was received with commercial and critical success. The singles from the album “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, “Come As You Are”, “Lithium” and “In Bloom” topped the Billboard charts for weeks and played in heavy rotation on MTV, introducing many to moshing, and essentially pioneering the trend of grimey-looking music videos for the next few years. Cobain's stance on feminism, LGBTQ rights, racial justice and his outspokenness against mainstream and corporate culture came at a time when few, if any, celebrities conveyed such humanistic leanings. 

The album is often credited as the cornerstone for grunge and the defining sound of the 90s, opening the gates for punk and indie music into the lucrative arms of major labels and the mainstream. The album’s popularity is often considered as having destroyed hair metal, the mainstream rock genre that was popular in the late 1980s. It also inspired fans around the world to build fan communities where they could exist with like-minded souls. 

In Indonesia, Nirvana, and specifically Cobain, continue to endure beyond any limitations. From professionals who still put on the band’s t-shirt and music from time to time, to the truck drivers who paint Cobain’s face on their trucks along with some of his popular quotes; it is clear that the band’s humble beginnings and raw emotion have reached something that not many other world-class bands have been able to. 

Hendra “Adit” Adityawan, the co-founder of Jogja Grunge People, a community of grunge devotees in Yogyakarta, was born in the same year Nevermind was released. The album, which he listened to for the first time as an 8-year-old, led him to the most interesting parts of his life and introduced him to friends that would play an integral role in his growing up.

Lifted: A crowd at a Jogja Grunge People gig in 2009. (Jogja Grunge People Facebook) (Facebook/Courtesy of Jogja Grunge People)

In 2009 Adit and several other Yogyakarta Nirvana fans started hosting underground music gigs for local and touring bands, forcing him to learn event organizing and networking. However, he saw that too many fans in the community put Kurt Cobain on a god-level pedestal and limited themselves from listening to other great bands with similar sounds.

“I once worshipped a local band because the lead singer played guitar left-handed like Cobain,” he said. “In every grunge show, there would be 20 to 25 bands playing at least one Nirvana cover. Whether the same song had been covered by other bands at the show was not a problem, because it would guarantee them a crazy mosh pit.”

We can plant a house, we can build a tree

For many Indonesians, Nevermind’s angst-ridden songs were their gateway to a vast, new repertoire of sounds to explore and experiment with.

Wok the Rock (real name Wito Wibowo) founder of Yes No Wave Music, a netlabel (Internet label) famous for its experimental collection, credited it as one of the albums that widened his musical palate to weird, experimental and eclectic music.

If Gilang and Adit encountered Nirvana after it was established as a modern treasure, the 46-year-old artist and curator discovered Nirvana when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was climbing the radio’s Top 40 chart.

“The first time I heard that song, I was in high school [...] a death metal enthusiast, and a big fan of Sex Pistols and The Ramones,” Wok said on Tuesday. “The song blew my mind. I remember thinking that it was a pop-rock song, but spiced up with wild aggression. Very fresh for me.”

Big fan: Wok The Rock, who runs experimental label Yes No Wave, said that 'Nevermind' was a life-changing album for him. (Wok The Rock) (Personal archives/Wok The Rock)

He was easily hooked, and started to collect all releases from Nirvana’s label - Geffen and Sub Pop - that he could get in his hometown, the small agricultural town of Madiun in East Java.

The comfort in being sad

Not only did the band introduce him to a new kind of alternative rock, Nirvana also introduced young Wok to what it was like to grieve. For many, Cobain's suicide also opened the door to discussions about depression and mental health.

“I was preparing to go to school in the morning when I heard on the radio that Kurt Cobain had killed himself. It was the first time I felt so, so very sad because of [the death of] someone I didn’t personally know,” he said. “After school I went to a shop near my house that owned a satellite dish so I could watch the news from MTV. My grief was confirmed. I was so sad, I cried. On the way home I bought a blank T Shirt, and I drew Kurt Cobain’s face on it with the text ‘I Hate Myself and I Want To Die’.” That line was a title of a Nirvana song, and was also the planned title of their third and final album, 1993’s In Utero, which Cobain claimed had been a sarcastic joke. 

The next morning Wok told his father that he was in mourning and refused to go to school.

Wok grew up to be one of the most prominent experimental music purveyors in Indonesia. In 2007, he launched Yes No Wave Music, one of the first netlabels in the country, releasing albums from nationally acclaimed artists such as piano-songstress Frau and indie pop band Bangkutaman, to internationally recognized musicians such as experimental duo Senyawa and electronic sensation Gabber Modus Operandi, as well as creations of acquired taste such as funkot unit Barakatak and elderly choir group Dialita.

Wok’s openness to new, experimental sonic creations eventually introduced people who trusted Wok’s taste to wider array of sounds. 

In his view, what makes Nirvana’s music evergreen is that it pushed its listeners to larger-than-life exploration and experimentation, instead of just being stagnant in listening to any heavy music under the label “grunge” or “Seattle sound”.

“It’s explorative music - and its world view, and style should always evolve. To simplify the music into a term [grunge] will only kill it,” he said.