Much has been made of the greatness that was the fall of 1991 in the music world. Over the span of a few short months, some of the most seminal albums ever created were shipped to record stores (back when shipping physical copies of things to record stores was a thing that happened). Some of these releases are getting boldfaced reissues, like Nirvana’s Nevermind and U2′s Achtung Baby. But there are plenty of others that simply stand the test of time, like Metallica’s Metallica, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend, and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger. And 1991 wasn’t all rock albums, either, as A Tribe Called Quest dropped The Low End Theory, Tupac made his solo debut with 2Pacalypse Now, Ice Cube wrote Death Certificate, and Michael Jackson became Dangerous.

All of these albums are great accomplishments in their own right, and they all hold up surprisingly well. Having recently sat down with the men responsible for Nevermind and also having written a book that centers around alternative rock’s rise in ’91, it’s not a mystery that Nirvana’s second album stands above and beyond the rest of them as my favorite album from that year.

However, that was not actually true in 1991. The big joke that came up while I was writing my book was that I didn’t know who Kurt Cobain was until the day I heard the news of his suicide. That’s completely true, as I don’t think I heard Nevermind until 1995, which was after I had already heard In Utero first. I was 13 years old then, and just beginning to be able to fully ingest popular music and process what rock really meant (unsurprisingly, that was the same year my friend Zack turned me on to punk rock, mostly via the Ramones).

In ’91, I was only nine years old, and though I was interested in listening to music, my tastes didn’t really have any definition. Like most kids that age, I was really into “Weird Al” Yankovic. I spent most of the early part of ’91 memorizing the lyrics to “Ice Ice Baby” and missing the double-meaning in Warrant’s “Cherry Pie.” I thought “Do the Bartman” rocked, and a friend of mine played me Guns N’ Roses’ “Get in the Ring,” which I thought was amazing because it had so much cursing in it. Basically, I approved of things that floated into my transom, but I never really made the next step into fandom, or even going as far as buying a cassette.

That changed in the summer of that year, when I was at a friend’s house. His older brother was watching MTV, and I became completely transfixed by the video for “Into the Great Wide Open,” which is why Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ Into the Great Wide Open became my favorite album of that year. READ FULL STORY »