In 1992, Nirvana released the album Nevermind. Overnight, the album climbed the charts and ushered in a new era of alternative grunge music.
What most people don’t know is that Nirvana wasn’t original.
They ripped off their style, from The Pixies.
I was only 7 or 8 years old at the time but even I felt the Nirvana’s impact. All the older (read: cool) kids on the schoolbus listened to tracks “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come As You Are” on their walkmans (what we used to call tape cassette players).
The legend of Nirvana grew after lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter Kurt Cobain took his own life after a long bout with depression and drug abuse.
With their sludge guitar riffs and loud-quiet-loud dynamics, the band inspired a decade of alternative and grunge bands and thirty years later, numerous contemporary artists admit they were inspired by Nirvana.
But the Loud-Quiet-Loud style they were known for wasn’t theirs at all. It was The Pixies’.
The Pixies, a Boston punk rock band formed in 1986, are often referred to as “your favorite band’s favorite band”.
David Bowie adored them. Coldplay revered them. They were the music equivalent of the writer’s writer. Never achieving wide commercial success but inspiring legions of artists who would.
In a 1993 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Cobain was upfront about it. When asked how he came up with “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, he said:
“I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.”
Kurt Cobain
David Perell made the claim that imitation is the foundation of improving at any skill. I agree.
Creatives are often puzzled by this. Great artists steal, Picasso told us.
How far do you take stealing though?
“Smells Like Teen Spirit”, and the Loud-Quiet-Loud dynamic, wouldn’t be the only time Nirvana was accused of ripping off another artist.
The band’s other hit single from the same album, “Come As You Are”, had an opening riff that sounded identical to a 1984 song called “Eighties” by band Killing Joke.
Cobain felt uncomfortable releasing “Come As You Are” as a single but acquiesced due to pressure. Killing Joke was pissed when they heard it.
But Killing Joke chose not pursue legal action probably because their song bore some resemblance to another song from two years before their track called “Life Goes On” by The Damned.
Six months after Killing Joke released “Eighties” as a single, another lesser known band, Garden of Delight, released a track called “22 Faces” with a familiar riff.
Listen to the video in this tweet:
In David Perell’s essay, Imitate Then Innovate, he makes the case for imitation as a virtue. But not for blind copying. Copying creates homogeneity while imitation creates something new based on prior work.
We’re all influenced in way or another by what we consume whether we realize it or not.
Which brings me to my larger point — originality is overrated.
James Clear had it right when he said “one form of originality is creation. Another form is synthesis. People often focus so much on creating new ideas that they overlook the value of synthesizing ideas from different sources. Innovation usually mean connecting previously unconnected concepts.”
What seems original to the casual observer is nothing more than an amalgamation of a creator’s prior influences.
Goethe reminds us that “as soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us, and this goes on to the end.”
Instead of shooting to be 100% original, find your influences.
Imitate them.
In doing so, you end up adding your own spin to it because, well, because you’re you.
Tweet: Storytelling Mistakes
Nathan Baugh is an excellent storyteller. I found this list of mistakes compelling and caught myself making some of them. Are you guilty of any of these?
Article: Van Gogh Copied Other Artists
Imitating art is more common than you think.
Podcast: Finding Your Niche
When Billy Oppenheimer, Ryan Holiday’s assistant, was thinking about starting to write on his own he complained to his mentor that he didn’t know what his niche would be. Ryan told him “you’re trying to map out the whole 9 innings but you should just throw out the first pitch”.
Till next week,
-Tom
