(Credits: Alamy)
Thu 8 January 2026 20:30, UK
As much as he’s still highly regarded by fans of the band, Krist Novoselic is perhaps the forgotten member of Nirvana and is unduly placed behind both Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl in terms of his importance.
Understandably, when you’ve got a frontman as enigmatic and mysterious as Cobain, then large amounts of attention are going to be placed in his direction, and given that Grohl would go on to have a successful career post-Nirvana with his own project, Foo Fighters, as well as appearing in several other places as a multi-instrumentalist, he’s also spoken about much more frequently than Novoselic.
Yes, you could make the argument that the five other drummers who were in the band for brief stints before Grohl made the position his own are more frequently dismissed than Novoselic, and some casual listeners are going to be able to pluck out the names of Chad Channing, who appeared on the debut album Bleach, and Dale Crover, who is better known as the drummer with fellow grunge outfit Melvins, but are you going to be able to name Aaron Burckhard, Dan Peters or Dave Foster?
Others may also recall that Jason Everman enjoyed a brief stint in the band around the time of the debut as a secondary guitarist, but as far as the concrete lineup of the band goes, it’s Cobain, Grohl and Novoselic that people remember. Unfortunately, carrying the curse of the bassist and often being brushed aside in favour of the other members, Novoselic gets hailed far less frequently for his efforts than the other core members.
This is, of course, a great injustice given how stellar his bass playing was across the band’s short discography, and there are plenty of gorgeously crafted, slinking basslines that underpin all of the excellent songwriting of Cobain and that bolster the drumming of Channing and Grohl in their separate eras.
However, picking out one particular bassline from a catalogue of exceptional entries as being his best is an insurmountable task, and one that Novoselic himself has often been reluctant to do. When prodded on the matter during a Reddit AMA on the band’s official subreddit, it proved to be hard to coax a solid answer from the bassist, with him finding excuses not to divulge his true feelings.
“It is like saying what is your favourite kid,” he responded to the first commenter who asked what his favourite Nirvana bassline was, and while this is a humble response that diplomatically chooses not to hail any one contribution more than another, this only stoked the fire for fans to keep asking the same question in the hope that he’d concede.
After being repeatedly asked, Novoselic eventually decided to give the fans what they wanted, and surprisingly named the band’s most famous song, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, as his favourite bassline. While it may not have the complexity of other basslines he played with the band, simply following the chord progression through most of the song, it tracks that the song that brought him the most success and notoriety would also be a favourite.
Facetious or not, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is indeed a timeless classic. However, there are arguably plenty more stellar basslines that Novoselic came out with during his time with Nirvana, and you’ve only got to listen to Nevermind for one more track to stumble upon the brilliance of ‘In Bloom’, or dive into early masterpieces like ‘Sliver’ to notice just how talented Novoselic really was at his instrument.
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