(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Anders Jensen-Urstad)
Sun 7 December 2025 21:15, UK
“I’m not sure why, but I felt an immediate kinship with him,” Kim Gordon writes of her first time meeting Kurt Cobain, in her 2015 memoir, Girl in a Band. “Kurt was funny and fun to be around, and soaked up any kind of personal attention. I felt very big sisterly, almost maternal, when we were together.”
As Sonic Youth’s frontwoman, Gordon’s radicalisation of guitar rock set a precedent for grunge to follow. Where the New York natives were inspired by their city’s predecessors like The Velvet Underground, Patti Smith and The Stooges, Sonic Youth’s emergence from the American noise rock underground of the late 1980s revolutionised guitar performance. They imagined new ways that the instrument could be played and tuned–say, with a drumstick instead of a guitar pick, or altered with the assistance of household tools. When Gordon sang, in her brutally imperfect but all the more stunning rattle, she commanded attention like no other.
When Sonic Youth finally broke through with Goo in 1990, headlined by Gordon’s infectious drone on ‘Kool Thing’, the world finally heard the essential nature of Sonic Youth’s sound, of which they had been honing for the better part of a decade. But for the musicians who sprouted to fame in their aftermath, eagerly following in the late bloom of their wake, Sonic Youth were already gods to revere. Few worshipped them as ardently as Cobain.
Just before Nirvana were to cause their grunge-infused seismic shift with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, they were invited to tour with Sonic Youth for a European festival tour, alongside Dinosaur Jr, Babes in Toyland and Gumball. Gordon and Thurston Moore had first crossed paths with Cobain at an early Nirvana gig, attending with Iggy Pop.
They met backstage, marking the beginning of a kinship that lasted until Cobain’s untimely death in 1994. Nirvana’s inclusion on their tour was one that Cobain never forgot, as he once noted, “To be asked to go on tour with Sonic Youth was a dream come true. I still can’t describe what I felt. What an honour.”
A music fanatic at his core, Cobain’s drive to become a musician in the first place came from his ravenous consumption of any piece of music he could get his hands on. He recorded his favourite music in his journals, with one page reading, ‘Top 50 by Nirvana’, encompassing a list of his top albums. Sonic Youth, of course, is included, specifically their 1988 album, Daydream Nation.
Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth’s fifth studio album, is a definitive work not just for its truly goddamn innovative sound, but in the lyrical commentary weaved into its chords. Across the record, the pieces touched on a really wide variety of topics, ranging from critiques of the music industry to the crack epidemic in America that overtook the decade, matched with wildly inventive instrumental solos heard in lengthy sections between verses.
Science fiction inspired ‘The Sprawl’, with literary sampling in its lyrics from The Stars at Noon, a novel by Denis Johnson. ‘Eric’s Trip’ alludes to Warhol superstar Eric Emerson’s LSD-induced speech in Warhol’s movie Chelsea Girls.
Daydream Nation, as a whole, encompasses the milieu that Sonic Youth found themselves enclosed in, and with its inventive tone and expression, it is easy to see where Cobain found himself enchanted, perhaps even imagining where he could mirror a similar approach.
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