[mingus88]

Pretty much every chord he played was a power chord. Thats just a root and a 5th.

It’s neither major or minor, because you need the 3rd to establish that

And nearly every punk and metal band uses predominantly power chords, without any real care in the world as to what the progressions are. It just sounds good to them. There aren’t any rules because punk is a DIY genre. If you told him he was doing a thing, he’d do the opposite just because. And it would still probably slap.

Kurt cobain was a fantastic song writer but you see these types of articles come out now and then propping him up as a genius. His own quote refutes that, and anyone who listens to punk music will agree that trying to analyze it using classical western tonality is silly and pretentious

[thisismytest]

That’s just not true. Off the top of my head Lithium, Dumb, About A Girl have critical minor and major chords.

Also part of what made him so good was how he played vocal melody and rhythm off of chords. So in some songs you might have plain power chords but the melody hits important major or minor notes.

I don’t know what your definition for genius is but the guy wrote some of the best songs in human history and did so without a primary collaborator or big production crew of cowriters and collaborators. I think we can call him a genius.

[cue_the_strings]

Yeah, that's definitely 'the' Kurt thing, vocal melody completing power chords.

I do hate how he (and the whole generation, and some of the punks before him + no wave crowd as well) pretended that they didn't know any music theory or practice at all. That was quite destructive for so many of us who aspired to play music in our teens, especially if you weren't exposed to music theory and practice in childhood through other means.

[bryceneal]

Going back all the way to the '60s, if you listen to interviews with Paul McCartney of The Beatles he states very plainly that he knows no music theory, and can't read music.

I suspect this is true of many great songwriters, maybe even most of them. I would even argue that studying music theory may even make you a worse songwriter, because the most innovative songwriters don't seem to follow some clearly established rulebook, but rather they bend/break the "rules" unknowingly because their focus is on what they are feeling/hearing rather than something more analytical.

[munchler]

Paul McCartney deliberately avoided learning how to read music, but he understands music theory just fine. They are two different skills. It's quite clear from The Beatles' music that they know about keys, chords, etc.

For example, McCartney tells a fun story about The Beatles traveling across Liverpool to learn a single B7 chord in their early days: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_r5B1AhP1Fo

[bryceneal]

I hear your point. I wouldn't personally consider someone who knows what a key or a chord is to be well-studied in music theory. Surely even Kurt Cobain understood which power chords he was playing, for example.

I was referring more to being well read in music theory in the academic sense. I am doubtful McCartney ever picked up a book on the subject. Traveling to meet someone so they can show you how to position your fingers so you can play a B7 chord is a bit different than that in my opinion.

[cue_the_strings]

I hate going into semantics like this, but I guess there's no other way.

Music - rhythm, harmony and melody - has patterns. Those patterns can be described / named. There are systems to also write them down.

When you mention reading / writing music and music theory, western notation and western music theory are what first comes to mind for most of us here. They are obviously not the only ways. Any one of us can trivially make our own systems, or adopt tiny portions of the western system. I have no doubts that people have done that.

From my personal experience, back we were teens, my friend group and I knew a tiny bit of theory (5ths, major, minor, 7th chords + pentatonic / blues scales) so we could use that in communication. The other thing we'd do is refer to motifs by citing them from songs, like "drum beat like When the Levee Breaks" or "strumming pattern like Where is My Mind). Or "for the brigde, turn it around like in Goddamn Lonely Love". Your group knows the same songs, and then you just cite that + show someone something on a guitar.

If you play with a wider group of musicians, a language likely starts to appear, and things get called fixed names more often. No doubt that all the blues people did it, the Beatles and that whole scene did it, ...

Now, if you're into music enough, and want to communicate with other musicians from different backgrounds and genres, it makes sense to just learn the regular western notation (because it's convenient for noticing harmony) and theory (because it has names for all the concepts). It's a bit infuriating that such fancy names ("dominant", "leading tone") are given to such seemingly simple things, but this is true of any jargon.

I've seen the equivalent with self-taught programmers, where they understand some CS concept, but can't name it properly. Maybe in your local demoscene, it got called something else, because nobody has formal CS knowledge. That was quite frequent before the internet, but still is possible when people do something as a hobby.

But for western music theory and notation, you can use it strictly descriptively and not prescriptively. Learn some, then transcribe your favorite songs, write down the progressions in roman-numeral-notation or something, figure out which scales are used, figure out how melodies fit over chord changes, ... Shame music education is closely tied to a classical (and / or jazz) repertoire in most places, it doesn't need to be.

But in any case, both playing well and writing songs obviously takes a lot of practice and effort, and you use whatever you have at your disposal to help. The "we don't practice, we don't care, this just comes out of our soul on its own" is plainly disingenuous, that's the most toxic part of it. But you can't write music without theory, at least your own pidgin theory.

[metalman]

hey now!

there is a wall, on one side is everything that has been done.....and can be learned/replicated. If someone is compeled to see the other side the best way through, ha!, is with very little baggage/knowledge or theory

some few talk about the experience of crossing that divide, but in no way are they responsible for anyone else considering there museing, instructional

if you want a gentler discorse on the process, then there is no one better than keef, and his various atempts to explain why 5 strings are all he can handle, does alright with them as well

[jfengel]

Did he pretend, or did he really not know? The blues was founded by people who rediscovered Western music theory on their own, in part because guitars lend themselves to it. Punks learned that they could play power chords because they work with the messy overdriven sound.

Theory can explain it after the fact, and can extend your options (or at least save you time knowing what you want). I know a lot of "untrained" musicians had a fair bit of theory, but I don't know about Cobain.

[senderista]

The blues isn’t really compatible with conventional tonality: it’s basically major chords with added minor seventh (I won’t call them dominant sevenths because they don’t function as dominant chords), with minor pentatonic (plus added flat fifth) melody. There’s no way that combination can possibly work—but it does!

[hn_throw2025]

IMHO that’s a narrow definition of the Blues, and the genre is much wider. From the top of my head, I’m thinking of BB King playing “The Thrill is Gone”. Still blues, but in a minor key. Definitely not major chords with an added minor seventh.

For the minor blues scale working over a major blues progression - I think the dissonance is okay because the flat third and fifth are often passing tones. If you loiter on them, they are more jarring.

[senderista]

I wouldn't say the minor third is a "passing tone" at all, it's the defining note of the minor scale. Listen to e.g. "Mannish Boy"--the minor third is absolutely essential to that riff.

Agree that of course there are blues songs with definitely minor harmony, but I still think the really distinctive and innovative characteristic of blues is "minor melody over major harmony"--the minor pentatonic scale was already ubiquitous in African-American music in e.g. spirituals. That's just incredibly weird and I can't imagine how it must have sounded to white audiences hearing it for the first time.

[cue_the_strings]

Yeah, the added flat fifth really isn't a Western European thing, that's what made it different, cool and appealing. Also the shuffle rhythm.

But if you listen to a lot of blues, play a lot of it, play with other blues players, etc. You will notice there's a vocabulary, idioms, etc. You can learn them by ear. You can call them by names of songs or players (Bo Diddley beat), or by the number of bars, ... Well, all of that is kind of - theory. Also, knowing which things you wouldn't play because they don't fit the style, that's also theory.

[tptacek]

I like Nirvana as much as the next 90s kid but there is no way these are the best songs in human history, or even in rock history, or even in "modern rock" history.

[wyclif]

It's because the fans who like Cobain's songs overpraise him or praise him in the wrong terms: "OMG Kurt Cobain is a genius songwriter."

I think, and as this post suggests, it's much more the case that "Kurt Cobain had very good instincts for someone completely untutored" which is a different thing altogether.

[mtalantikite]

But I think most of us would take a musician with great instincts and not much theoretical understanding over one with extraordinary theory and poor instinct. How many thousands of boring jazz players have been pumped out by university programs over the past 50 years? Meanwhile John Lee Hooker could just vamp over a single chord and I could listen to it for hours.

I'm remembering a scene in Hampton Hawes's autobiography where a well known piano teacher was telling him his students were starting to ask how to play like Hampton. He tells him he wants to give him lessons to help his technique, which he thinks will help his natural talent even more, but Hampton finds it boring and never goes back. The teacher framed Hampton's check he used to pay for the lesson and put it on his wall. All that's to say having great ears can bring you a long way.

[BabylonSysErr]

"How many thousands of boring jazz players have been pumped out by university programs over the past 50 years?" - Almost all of them.

[wyclif]

I did have a hard time thinking of any. The only one that I'm a big fan of is Julian Lage.

[wyclif]

FWIW, I'm a huge fan of both John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed, who had similar vamp-based playing styles and were untutored, couldn't read music, &c. One of my guitar teachers knew Hooker and he even imparted "the secret of the guitar" to him, which he then passed down to me.

But yeah, feel, instinct, and having good ears can carry you a long way especially for solo artists. I'm still glad I can read music and wouldn't trade that for (almost) anything, though.

[mtalantikite]

Yeah absolutely, I'm not arguing against theory by any means. I'm happy I know it, but often times I wish my early music teachers spent more time with me on following my ears than whatever it was they were trying to do. It wasn't until I was an adult that I found someone that really cared about that.

But also... what's John Lee Hooker's secret of the guitar??? Don't hold out on us!

[quesera]

I'm not sure how to differentiate "very good instincts in an untutored person" from "genius".

I am very clear though, that "genius" and "intelligence" are unrelated but sometimes coincident.

[horns4lyfe]

I don’t know how you can say with a straight face that smells like teen spirit isn’t one of the greatest modern rock songs. That riff is etched in music history at this point

[tptacek]

It's not even in my top 5 Nirvana songs. The riff you're talking about is Boston's "More Than A Feeling" --- so much so that they used to play a fake-out of "More Than A Feeeling" in concert. I like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" more than "More Than A Feeling", but not like, much more.

1. Where Did You Sleep Last Night Unplugged

2. Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle (or, interchangeably, "Rape Me", though the "blanket of ash" line gets me every time with Frances Farmer).

3. Lithium

4. Heart Shaped Box

5. Dumb (unplugged).

It's not fair to make the #1 song a cover, but that performance merits it.

[dehrmann]

It was culturally influential, signaled the end of glam rock, and was even dubbed the anthem of a generation, but it didn't showcase great songwriting. It's not fair because he had time to grow as an artist, but "Everlong" is a better song.

[onlypassingthru]

It's really twofold. You could also identify the song just from Dave's riffs.

[dadrian]

Dave’s riffs are also stolen from disco. Which again, is fine! I love them!

Source: https://youtu.be/dZCrdSC2-1I

[thisismytest]

Some of the best. More than one in the top 10,000.

[jeswin]

> some of the best songs in human history

I think this was the statement he/she was disagreeing with. No doubt a genius, but when you phrase it like that it's more than genius.

[tptacek]

I don't know that I think he was a genius? If I don't think Husker Du, the Pixies, and Sonic Youth were genius-led bands, I'm not sure how a band that basically synthesized those bands and then lensed them through Guns n Roses could be genius. Is David Bowie a genius? Maybe, if we're generous?

When I hear people call Cobain a genius I feel the way I do when I'm hear someone say they've never seen The Wire. Listen to Surfer Rosa and Rid of Me!

None of this is to say Nevermind and In Utero aren't good; they're very, very good, I listen to them all the time 30 years later. But like, I still listen to Soundgarden every once in awhile too. They're not geniuses!

[quesera]

I mostly agree with you, but I suspect there's an element of just being the right age.

I think of Kurt Cobain like an accidental Elvis Presley. Perfect for the moment, and (unlike Elvis) mostly organically grown, but with very clear antecedents.

I cannot point to strong antecedents of Pixies, Sonic Youth, Throwing Muses, PJ Harvey, Cocteau Twins, Bauhaus, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Slits, Bongwater, Kate Bush, The Cure, etc. In a couple of these cases, I suspect my own ignorance. In others, I could (and might) argue all night! :)

But I cannot assemble a case for not recognizing David Bowie as a (musical|performance) genius. I don't even enjoy his recordings very much, but he was artistically sui generis and enormously influential.

Influence might not be a requirement of genius (I'm not sure), but surely a novel creativity is at the root of it?

[jamesblonde]

Loud-quiet-loud was the signature sounds of Nirvana - borrowed from Frank Black who pioneered it with the Pixies. Kurt was a way better singer and better looking than Frank Black. Along with good songs, that was a recipe for success. I am a big Nirvana fan. But a bigger Pixies fan. A chunk of Pixies sound/energy was inspired from the guitar middle/outro in B52's "Rock Lobster".

[-__---____-ZXyw]

Surely if genius is to maintain any usefulness as a word at all, it has to mean more than that the person didn't work with a big production crew or have a "primary collaborator", whatever that means. How irrelevant!

I'm not sure if this notion of "genius" helps people appreciate music or if it just worsens the idolising/othering aspect of it. If we are going to use the word, though, can we not attempt to reserve it for the uncontroversial candidates, like Art Tatum, for example.

[mingus88]

[flagged]

[dang]

> you have lost credibility in my eyes

> Have you any idea

> What a ridiculous statement

Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully and edit out swipes, as the site guidelines ask?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[thisismytest]

When it comes to cultural significance and catchiness the fact that people have been doing it for a long time doesn’t matter.

In fact, the ability to tap into mass media only makes the impact of a song greater. Access to electric instruments and effects only gave them more ability to create interesting music.

I’m a fan of all kinds of music old and new. But anyone saying German leders or old timey civil war ditties are better than Smells Like Teen spirit are high on their own supply.

Most of history humans expressed an extraordinarily limited range of emotion in song, in rigid form. Kurt Cobain wrote more than one song that you could play for a toddler and they’d love it. He wrote more than one song that hundreds of millions of people are listening to 30 years later. I’m sorry but your favorite Gregorian Chant is just not very good in comparison.

[globnomulous]

This comment is such a weird way to defend the patently absurd claim that he wrote some of the best songs in human history.

Even the first sentence makes no cogent sense, especially when read alongside your original comment:

> When it comes to cultural significance and catchiness the fact that people have been doing it for a long time doesn’t matter.

You've apparently changed your argument. "Best in human history" does not mean "most culturally significant and catchiest."

If "the fact that people have been doing it for a long time doesn't matter," then why did you mention all of human history?

If what you mean instead is that you care only about contemporary, present-day cultural impact, then, again, why did you mention all of human history? You've already decided that no time period other than the present matters.

[quesera]

> You've apparently changed your argument. "Best in human history" does not mean "most culturally significant and catchiest."

To be fair, "best" has no correct definition.

What's yours?

[globnomulous]

> What's yours?

Just not whatever that guy's is.

Less cheekily, I agree with you that, in the case of something like music, the concept of "best" has no correct meaning. It's literal nonsense.

[jrowen]

This whole subthread - arguing about "the best songs in human history" without even the slightest attempt to define one of the most subjective things ever - is patently absurd.

[amiga386]

It's an odd thing to even compare. Musical styles and genres come in and out of fashion. Instruments and timbres likewise. People clamour both for novelty and also familiarity. There's no "best" music, just music that has more or fewer fans.

Ideally, the measure of timelessness of a tune is how many people will still go to the effort to play it or reference it once all people who were alive at its release (the people who "liked it before it was cool") are dead. By that measure, the one-hit-wonder of Pachelbel's Canon in D is probably top of the list.

[sunrunner]

> Melodies will be in a key, using a set of notes. That’s kinda unavoidable.

Schoenberg has entered the chat.

[andybak]

Arguably we tend to attempt to hear atonal music in a key (or temporal sequence of keys) despite it's attempt to avoid that.

I suspect something similar about bitonality. We hear one of the keys and then try and interpret the other notes in relation to that.

(warning. I am neither a music theorist or an expert in the psychology of music perception. But this is HN so yolo...)

[sunrunner]

> we tend to attempt to hear atonal music in a key

Is it the case that much of this is influenced by individuals having grown up listening in an environment with music already structured around a central key and modulation around that? With the same idea also applying to an understanding (or feeling) of rhythm?

[Biganon]

Atonal music / serialism is insufferable pretentious bs that no one has ever listened to with pleasure, ever. It's a purely mathematical study, orthogonal to art.

[sunrunner]

I don't disagree regarding "listened to with pleasure" and I only remember actively listening to atonal music as part of a required syllabus. I do think it's perhaps a useful lens to use to look at 'traditional' tonal music through however, even if just to re-affirm that _some_ kind of order and structure is an important part in making something palatable to the ears (or the brain).

[epcoa]

I will continue to abstain from eating dog shit to convince myself that a ribeye tastes good.

[williamdclt]

> punk and metal band uses predominantly power chords, without any real care in the world as to what the progressions are

Somewhat true for punk, mostly incorrect for metal. A lot of metal is very analytical, deeper in musical theory than most popular genres (rock, pop, rnb…), they care _a lot_ about it. Metal is often very technical, it bred some of the top musicians in the world, it’s no surprise they give a shit about it: it’s their craft and a hard one.

In fact I remember the singer of Gojira in a French interview, saying (iirc, surely not quite remembering his point) that metal is in many ways closer to classical than rock, as it values composition so much more where rock is all about interpretation (closer to punk)

[dehrmann]

And only somewhat true for punk. Once you're a mediocre guitarist, you finger the whole chord in case you strum too far.

[tekla]

Metal is probably one of the most technically and music theory driven genres. It attracts people who really want to get GOOD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9xvi0uXzaY&t=464s

[scns]

Dream Theater would be the prime Example. The three founding members studied at Berklee.

[killerstorm]

That's actually not true. Cobain used a rather "weird" technique where he would "accidentally" hit 4th in addition to 5th. That actually has characteristic Nirvana sound and is sometimes called "Cobain chords". Assuming Cobain doesn't hit any other strings these are sus4 chords.

Here's a video with some analysis of "Smells like teen spirit": https://youtu.be/Xambk1JkWrE?si=aV-kCj1JsbMdM_AV&t=137

I find it really weird that people claim these are power chord even though they sound really different. In my view they are important to the vibe of "Smells like teens spirit" as they bring some dreamy characteristic as they make it a lot brighter compared to what it would be if it was played with only two lowest notes.

[notahacker]

Yeah. And if you did want to analyze it using classical western tonality, then taking into account vocal melodies, quite a lot of it sits better in minor...

Power chords were quite heavily used by some of the bands Kurt liked and were easy to play, hence the stuff that sounded good when he was noodling used a lot of that. Nirvana weren't innovators in tonality, but they had great crunchy guitar tone, catchy hooks and a singer with a raspy voice - exactly what you'd expect a band that didn't care about music theory to potentially excel at, and exactly what was needed to breaking the trend in layered reverbs and guitar hero solos of the 80s ...

[seanhunter]

Yeah. It's really poor musical analysis in general, and my ears just don't agree. For example "Come as you are"- it's really hard not to hear that as functionally in a minor mode.

Also, there's nothing particularly unusual about not having any minor chords. In fact, here's a thing that may surprise some people: most African music for example has no minor chords of any kind, and we're not talking about power chords etc just only major and no minor triads. In African music it's really common to have the first inversion of the 4th degree triad function as the relative minor (so in the key of C that would be A-C-F instead of A-C-E).

[hn_throw2025]

Power chords are also common when guitars are played with distortion, like most of this Nirvana album.

R 5 R - the intervals are far enough apart that in this powerchord that they don’t clash harmonically.

R 3 5 R - the third is too close to the root and fifth, so the sound would be indistinct.

If you play the usual cowboy chords with a high gain tone, it turns to mush.

Of course, you can get around this with inversions to produce different voicings. I like R 5 3 with distortion to push the third up an octave, and keep it clear of it’s neighbours.

[tptacek]

There's a whole thing here where people are trying to axiomatically reconstruct Cobain's guitar playing, but he famously shoplifted riffs from other acts. I don't mean that as a dunk, any more than I would talk down J Dilla. But I feel like the process he used to construct memorable hooks might not be too hard to reverse engineer. The band's most famous hook comes from Boston, for crying out loud.

[tangue]

Yep 90% power chords and the sound on Nevermind was in part due to Butch Vig. It’s simple but at the time quite unheard : bit of compression a lot of overdub, maybe a little flange/chorus but it was quite minimal compared to heavy metal, guitar heroes of the time and really different from the punk bands.

[wvh]

He was not a great guitar player, but he had an ear for tonality and combining melodies on top of those ambiguous chords. I read somewhere he was a Beatles fan, and I can see how their pop vocal layering and more complex instrumentation via George Martin and Co might have had an influence above and beyond the basic blues pentatonic scale and chord progression that inspired a lot of rock and hard rock. Dude did not accidentally "make it", which is the other, often-heard opposite opinion than that of him being a genius.

[anton-c]

They probably didn't care what they were but when you pull them apart it's usually some variation of a 1-4-6-5 with occasional chords on the 2nd or 7th scale degree. Generally it was diatonic. I think most musicians listen to enough to know when something doesn't sound "right"(beyond welcome subversions of expectations usually found in more sophisticated genres, musically. I love and played punk for the record)

[otabdeveloper4]

Here in 2025 a "chord" is the new name for "pitch", and "chord progression" is the new name for "melody".

¯\_(ツ)_/¯