---A few days ago, I took the opportunity to listen to Nevermind – the era-defining 1991 Nirvana album had been reissued remastered a few years ago to tie in with its 20th anniversary – because I haven’t listened to it for several years. The opening chords of Smells Like Teen Spirit started up, the drums came crashing through and Kurt’s voice came out, plaintively singing those famous opening lines “Load up on guns/ Bring your friends” and … I didn’t recognise it.
It wasn’t that I didn’t recognise the song. That’d have been crazy. It’s that I didn’t recognise the person singing the song. All I could hear were echoes of the bands and singers who came after Nirvana, the ones who diluted their performance and message and impact by slavishly following a formula that was never intended to be followed. All I could hear was this weird triple-tracked, brightening vocoder-type effect used on Kurt’s voice.
I wondered how much of my inability to recognise the song was to do with the remastering – done, presumably, so the record would sound more "contemporary", with all the spatial FX and volume setting subtly adjusted to "correct" the original version. (That version, let’s not forget, managed to sell several million copies on its own merits, without any "correction" or brightening or volume "enhancement" effects, thank you.)
So I had another listen. Unlistenable.
All I could hear was Nickelback and Puddle of Mudd and Silverchair, and other bands too horrible to even whisper their names. I heard Phil Collins covering You Can’t Hurry Love.
This was odd. Surely, my familiarity with the song – I had the “Hello/ Hello/ Hello/ Hello” refrain on my answerphone six months before Teen Spirit was released, as I thought it sounded funny – would override such niggling concerns? Surely, I could convince myself that the odd digital distortion here, the odd flattened dynamic there, shouldn’t affect my enjoyment of a song I felt such a strong personal connection to.---