Nirvana: Sub-Pop Music.

Nirvana is in stores now.

Nirvana. Seem so long ago now. It isn't really - just eight-and-a-half years. The world wasn't quite as strange then. Seems we've slipped the knot a little more. The pressure's beginning to tighten around the throat; the smell of reactionary conservatism taints everything.

Kurt Cobain, Chris Novoselic and Dave Grohl had their own stench to deal with. Seattle, romanticised and revered as the home of grunge – indeed of the mighty Sub Pop - is, as one of its citizens so succinctly put it "a dump". A grey, tough, unyielding concrete and brick spray on the edge of nothing much. Fourteen kilometres out is the suburb of Aberdeen – a trailer park, limbo-hell where the embryonic Nirvana first got together in 1986. See Aberdeen, you'll understand why they were.

Grunge is gone. Well gone. Like all musical trends its life drained by its own success. And so are most of its heroes. Yesterday's angry young men, coated in their angst, wearing their rage in the slash'n'burn of punk-smeared chords and feedback, are today's mainstream drug addicts. Fatter, fucked-up and freaked by their own largeness, by the very thing they railed against in the beginning. Success costs the few who have made it this far. Most, simply, did not.

And it shouldn't be that way. Success shouldn't hurt. It isn't a sin but it's become one. Kurt would probably have found that funny. Nirvana never seemed to have too many rules. Good thing. They didn't handle success either. That screwed 'em over. The story that follows comes from a time when the machine had just snared Nirvana. Geffen - now a part of Universal Music - had taken the most extraordinary band of their generation and thrown them to the world.

The world went sick.

We critics sat back and sniffed the wind. Aaah, we chorused, Smells Like Teen Spirit. And we hopped on board. Why not? Here was band that punched holes in brick walls with a sledgehammer of fiery chords and white fists of feedback, yet - without any prompting - understood the very essence of song. There has to be harmony and melody and contrast - enough to pique the imagination, draw the listener. Something to hang off, a hook. And variety. This mob had the lot.

Nevermind was - and is - an album of incalculable genius. Impossibly good; impossible to follow-up. Nevermind was Nirvana's pinnacle and their swansong. They would never recover. It, the hype and suddenness of fame's onslaught would all combine to see to that. Nirvana never had a chance.

Released in September 1991, by the Southern summer and Northern winter of early 92, Nevermind was the word on the cracked lips of every kid - small and big. Teen Spirit was an anthem to a generation who didn't even know what anthems were. That video alone defines a sudden oneness that an ailing and lost youth culture had never imagined. They had heroes, they had a band, they had songs that were theirs and they were too much. Too, too much for three kids in their early 20s from limbo-hell.

Nirvana were tossed casually and with little direction from clubs packed with friends to open-air amphitheatres. From $20 a night, to tens of thousands of dollars in advances, then royalties, tour profits, product percentages... they never had a bloody chance.

Two years later Kurt became the most famous suicide of the 90s. He put a shotgun to his head and blew his brains all over his garage. And, so on April 5, 1994, sadly, so very sadly, the last great American hero died.

But not Nirvana.

They - and especially Kurt - live on in their albums and now, after all the legal squabbling has been resolved, on Nirvana. To those who remember, it is time to look back and smile. To those who missed them the first time around, it's time to be introduced.

The songs, the melodies, the hooks, the precision and the loose-limbed passion, the contrasts, the chancy stuff, the sheer unmitigated rawness of unkempt, uncluttered, unrestricted rock; it's all there. Loud, potent, unstoppable and wonderfully unspoiled and creative.

Nirvana were timeless. With Nevermind (in Australia it has sold an astonishing 552,237 copies to date - nearly eight times platinum) and In Utero (206,142) they set a standard nobody else even touched. On their wonderful MTV Unplugged In New York (449,160) they gave us all a glimpse of what might have been. Listening to Nirvana - their new 15 classic songs compilation with its one new track, the spartan, brooding, You Know You're Right - it all comes back: why this band was the one.

The last band to change youth and popular culture through its music and its very existence. And still do.