No surprise that The Vaselines and The Pixies were major influences on Nirvana's music. But The Beatles, Kiss and Public Enemy?
In turn, the grunge icons — who will be inducted Thursday into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — were absorbed by a broad spectrum of future artists, from Lil Wayne to 30 Seconds to Mars. "Any kind of rock band that's using slightly akilter rhythms, choruses and verses were influenced by Nirvana," says Charles R. Cross, who wrote the Cobain biographies Heavier Than Heaven and Here We Are Now.
USA TODAY's Korina Lopez and David Oliver connect the dots.
INFLUENCED NIRVANA
The Beatles
"When I was young, that's how I learned how to play music — I had a guitar and a Beatles songbook," drummer Dave Grohl told Access Hollywood in 2012. "It got me to understand song structure and melody and harmony and arrangement. ... Even in Nirvana — The Beatles (were) such a huge influence. Kurt (Cobain) loved The Beatles because it was just so simple. Well, it seemed simple … they sound easy to play, but you know what? They're (expletive) hard."
"Oh, yeah. John Lennon was definitely my favorite Beatle, hands down," Cobain told Rolling Stone in 1994. "Lennon was obviously disturbed. So I could relate to that."
The Pixies
"I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off The Pixies," Cobain told Rolling Stone in 1994. "I should have been in that band — or at least a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard."
Kiss
When Cobain was a roadie for The Melvins, he drew pictures of Kiss on the outside of the group's 1972 Dodge touring van, Rolling Stone reported in 2012. In 1989, Nirvana recorded a cover of Kiss' 1976 tune Do You Love Me.
Public Enemy
The rappers and Cobain shared a mutual admiration. In the book Journals, which compiles Cobain's jottings, he identified It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back as one of his favorite 50 albums; Cross says it was the only hip-hop record Cobain owned. Public Enemy, in turn, wrote a song called Black Cobain.
NIRVANA INFLUENCED
Lil Wayne
A vocal, ardent fan, the rapper has Photoshopped himself on the cover of Nevermind and cited Cobain often in interviews. In 2011, he explained the connection to MTV News: "Because I was young and I actually listened to the lyrics, and I probably felt at that time that I was rebelling, I could relate to the things (Cobain) was talking about," he says. "I probably couldn't, but I thought I could."
Adam Levine
In a 2012 interview with U.K.'s The Sun, the Maroon 5 frontman calls Nirvana the last group to greatly change pop culture. "Nirvana, that was probably the last time it happened," he says. "And then in the 1990s were all the boy bands. I was kind of hoping that somebody would come along and demolish the boy band — Nirvana came along and demolished the bad pop metal."
Lana Del Rey
"When I was 11, I saw Kurt Cobain singing Heart Shaped Box on MTV and it really stopped me dead in my tracks," the singer told Sirius XM in 2011. "I thought he was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. Even at a young age, I really related to his sadness."
Jay Z
The rapper won a Grammy Award in January for Holy Grail, which tweaks lyrics from Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. "And we all just / Entertainers / And we're stupid / And contagious." In 2012, Jay Z told Pharrell Williams (in the book Pharrell: Places and Spaces I've Been), "Hip-hop was becoming this force, then grunge music stopped it for one second ... Those 'hair bands' were too easy for us to take out; when Kurt Cobain came with that statement (Teen Spirit) it was like, 'We got to wait awhile.' "
Demi Lovato
The pop singer tweeted on Aug. 30, 2012, "In Seattle, rocking a flannel and listening to Nirvana ... #90sgrunge."
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