Nevermind, an album on major chords
65 comments
·May 4, 2025mingus88
Pretty much every chord he played was a power chord. Thats just a root and a 5th.
It’s neither major or minor, because you need the 3rd to establish that
And nearly every punk and metal band uses predominantly power chords, without any real care in the world as to what the progressions are. It just sounds good to them. There aren’t any rules because punk is a DIY genre. If you told him he was doing a thing, he’d do the opposite just because. And it would still probably slap.
Kurt cobain was a fantastic song writer but you see these types of articles come out now and then propping him up as a genius. His own quote refutes that, and anyone who listens to punk music will agree that trying to analyze it using classical western tonality is silly and pretentious
notahacker
Yeah. And if you did want to analyze it using classical western tonality, then taking into account vocal melodies, quite a lot of it sits better in minor...
Power chords were quite heavily used by some of the bands Kurt liked and were easy to play, hence the stuff that sounded good when he was noodling used a lot of that. Nirvana weren't innovators in tonality, but they had great crunchy guitar tone, catchy hooks and a singer with a raspy voice - exactly what you'd expect a band that didn't care about music theory to potentially excel at, and exactly what was needed to breaking the trend in layered reverbs and guitar hero solos of the 80s ...
thisismytest
That’s just not true. Off the top of my head Lithium, Dumb, About A Girl have critical minor and major chords.
Also part of what made him so good was how he played vocal melody and rhythm off of chords. So in some songs you might have plain power chords but the melody hits important major or minor notes.
I don’t know what your definition for genius is but the guy wrote some of the best songs in human history and did so without a primary collaborator or big production crew of cowriters and collaborators. I think we can call him a genius.
tptacek
I like Nirvana as much as the next 90s kid but there is no way these are the best songs in human history, or even in rock history, or even in "modern rock" history.
wyclif
It's because the fans who like Cobain's songs overpraise him or praise him in the wrong terms: "OMG Kurt Cobain is a genius songwriter."
I think, and as this post suggests, it's much more the case that "Kurt Cobain had very good instincts for someone completely untutored" which is a different thing altogether.
horns4lyfe
I don’t know how you can say with a straight face that smells like teen spirit isn’t one of the greatest modern rock songs. That riff is etched in music history at this point
thisismytest
Some of the best. More than one in the top 10,000.
cue_the_strings
Yeah, that's definitely 'the' Kurt thing, vocal melody completing power chords.
I do hate how he (and the whole generation, and some of the punks before him + no wave crowd as well) pretended that they didn't know any music theory or practice at all. That was quite destructive for so many of us who aspired to play music in our teens, especially if you weren't exposed to music theory and practice in childhood through other means.
bryceneal
Going back all the way to the '60s, if you listen to interviews with Paul McCartney of The Beatles he states very plainly that he knows no music theory, and can't read music.
I suspect this is true of many great songwriters, maybe even most of them. I would even argue that studying music theory may even make you a worse songwriter, because the most innovative songwriters don't seem to follow some clearly established rulebook, but rather they bend/break the "rules" unknowingly because their focus is on what they are feeling/hearing rather than something more analytical.
jfengel
Did he pretend, or did he really not know? The blues was founded by people who rediscovered Western music theory on their own, in part because guitars lend themselves to it. Punks learned that they could play power chords because they work with the messy overdriven sound.
Theory can explain it after the fact, and can extend your options (or at least save you time knowing what you want). I know a lot of "untrained" musicians had a fair bit of theory, but I don't know about Cobain.
mingus88
I mean, you have lost credibility in my eyes by claiming he wrote some of the best songs in human history. Have you any idea the sheer scope of music that has existed?
What a ridiculous statement.
Melodies will be in a key, using a set of notes. That’s kinda unavoidable. By his own statement he wasn’t aware of any tonality and didn’t even care to. That folk come along decades afterward and try to fit it into various boxes is good for them, but shows a complete misunderstanding of what he was doing as an artist. I’d imagine he’d shake his head at this entire thread.
thisismytest
When it comes to cultural significance and catchiness the fact that people have been doing it for a long time doesn’t matter.
In fact, the ability to tap into mass media only makes the impact of a song greater. Access to electric instruments and effects only gave them more ability to create interesting music.
I’m a fan of all kinds of music old and new. But anyone saying German leders or old timey civil war ditties are better than Smells Like Teen spirit are high on their own supply.
Most of history humans expressed an extraordinarily limited range of emotion in song, in rigid form. Kurt Cobain wrote more than one song that you could play for a toddler and they’d love it. He wrote more than one song that hundreds of millions of people are listening to 30 years later. I’m sorry but your favorite Gregorian Chant is just not very good in comparison.
sunrunner
> Melodies will be in a key, using a set of notes. That’s kinda unavoidable.
Schoenberg has entered the chat.
williamdclt
> punk and metal band uses predominantly power chords, without any real care in the world as to what the progressions are
Somewhat true for punk, mostly incorrect for metal. A lot of metal is very analytical, deeper in musical theory than most popular genres (rock, pop, rnb…), they care _a lot_ about it. Metal is often very technical, it bred some of the top musicians in the world, it’s no surprise they give a shit about it: it’s their craft and a hard one.
In fact I remember the singer of Gojira in a French interview, saying (iirc, surely not quite remembering his point) that metal is in many ways closer to classical than rock, as it values composition so much more where rock is all about interpretation (closer to punk)
seanhunter
Yeah. It's really poor musical analysis in general, and my ears just don't agree. For example "Come as you are"- it's really hard not to hear that as functionally in a minor mode.
Also, there's nothing particularly unusual about not having any minor chords. In fact, here's a thing that may surprise some people: most African music for example has no minor chords of any kind, and we're not talking about power chords etc just only major and no minor triads. In African music it's really common to have the first inversion of the 4th degree triad function as the relative minor (so in the key of C that would be A-C-F instead of A-C-E).
tangue
Yep 90% power chords and the sound on Nevermind was in part due to Butch Vig. It’s simple but at the time quite unheard : bit of compression a lot of overdub, maybe a little flange/chorus but it was quite minimal compared to heavy metal, guitar heroes of the time and really different from the punk bands.
anton-c
They probably didn't care what they were but when you pull them apart it's usually some variation of a 1-4-6-5 with occasional chords on the 2nd or 7th scale degree. Generally it was diatonic. I think most musicians listen to enough to know when something doesn't sound "right"(beyond welcome subversions of expectations usually found in more sophisticated genres, musically. I love and played punk for the record)
tptacek
There's a whole thing here where people are trying to axiomatically reconstruct Cobain's guitar playing, but he famously shoplifted riffs from other acts. I don't mean that as a dunk, any more than I would talk down J Dilla. But I feel like the process he used to construct memorable hooks might not be too hard to reverse engineer. The band's most famous hook comes from Boston, for crying out loud.
spacemadness
[dead]
florilegiumson
Really cool project. I love the animations that go with the songs.
I’d go through all of the chord progressions and make sure they actually match what is being played. There are quite a few errors. Happens to everyone.
Also, you and everyone else should remember that while the band is mostly playing power chords and omitting the fifths, what Cobain sings is part of the chord as it’s heard. This means that, for example, a lot of songs do sound major, Smells like teen spirit is probably in F minor.
I find determining key in popular music to be tricky. Most progressions consist of something like 4 chords, and there isn’t the teleology you see in something like Tin Pan Alley or Chopin to give the sense of where one is to arrive. Even the Axis of Awesome progression can be heard a major or minor depending on how you end the song.
SwellJoe
This is a remarkably ignorant take. Literally every detail is wrong.
They aren't major chords, they're mostly power chords, which are neither major nor minor (no third and the third provides the major/minor tonality). They often function as minor chords because of the melody or other parts, or just because of how the progression fits together. They aren't unique or new with Cobain, he was part of a long history of punk and rock and roll.
Cobain was a good songwriter in the rock and roll tradition. He was not particularly innovative or doing something technically unheard of, and he wouldn't have claimed to be. He wanted to be a good songwriter, and he succeeded. That's it, don't make up bullshit about it.
bigstrat2003
> Cobain was a good songwriter in the rock and roll tradition.
He wasn't even that. He was a pretty bad songwriter. His music was by and large mopey, plodding monotonous work that is dreary to listen to. Apart from Smells Like Teen Spirit, I don't think he wrote a single song worth listening to.
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crucialfelix
Just like many punks before him, he did know chords, but he wanted that classic punk naive sound and in interviews he claims he doesn't know anything. It's about moving up and down the neck and finding the sweet, sick and weird sounds.
I don't know why the article claims this was a Nirvana discovery. It started in the 70s. Discharge, Wire then Fugazi, Minor Threat. These people are smart, just raw, and they like blunt aesthetics.
kimi
Don't forget Ramones.
cue_the_strings
A common thing w/ Nirvana songs is that Kurt plays power chords, and then has the thirds (+ other tones) in the vocal melody.
But also, it was just a (counter-) cultural thing to feign lack of music theory knowledge or practice at the time. Quite a destructive one, I might add.
A nice video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWY4YYmSTWg
cue_the_strings
If you want a song with all majors, where the full chords are played on the main instrument, first thing that comes to mind is Eno's Golden Hours (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxyg3sP03Cs). For parts of songs, maybe the intro to Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1pMMIe4hb4)
codazoda
If you like this you might like The Storyteller by Dave Grohl, it’s a great read from the vantage point of Nirvana’s drummer and his adventures and music influences both before and after.
The Kindle version is $3 right now.
hbsbsbsndk
Dave needs all the money he can get, he has two families to feed!
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jsphweid
As other posts point out, leaving out the third takes away the major-ness.
It's also worth mentioning the way Kurt often played power chords, using his index for the bass note and barring the rest with his ring finger. This often leads to major chords when the root is on the A string and non-major ambiguous-sounding chords with the root is on the E string. It's obvious as early as the 3rd chord in the intro to Teen Spirit; it has the notes Ab Eb Ab Db (NOTE: Db, not C). It's inconsistent in Kurt's playing (edit: whether or not his strumming makes that 4th string, 4th interval sound come out), but the subtlety is a signature part of Kurt's guitar sound.
Also some of the chord analysis in the site (ex. In Bloom verse) is just flat out wrong.
Synaesthesia
Kinda like the Beatles there are clasically "wrong" chord progressions that just work. (EG V-IV-1). Just a classic punk album.
seanhunter
V-VI-I is a plagal cadence. It's most definitely not classically wrong. Take any old hymn, Bach corale etc if they do a big "Amen" that will be a plagal cadence.
https://www.musictheoryacademy.com/how-to-read-sheet-music/c...
For some reason, people who don't know music theory say things like this about the Beatles because they think because they haven't heard something before it must be new.
codedokode
I am under impression that almost every progression works as long as you are in the key, am I wrong?
senderista
That’s just the end of a classic 12-bar blues progression.
vunderba
From the article:
> Careful music analysis was left for other bands.
I'm sorry... but lol what.
> And it's fascinating to think that Kurt Cobain was unaware of any musical composition's rule he was following, but just trusting his musical instict (sic).
This doesn't come as much of a surprise. A good deal of my friends who are musicians (particularly those who could sing) found themselves writing music at a pretty young age before they had any real understanding of music theory.
0_____0
It was wild to watch deadmau5 live streams and see him dink around in the piano roll seemingly with no plan or idea what key he was in. This isn't a knock either, clearly he makes some dope 4/4 house bangers, but not because he went to Berklee.
amanaplanacanal
Western music theory is all coming along after the fact to explain why something sounds good.
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