Last night at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Nirvana were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25 years after their debut album Bleach was released (on cassette) via Sub Pop Records. In the months leading up the performance, many people speculated which Rock Hall luminary would be chosen to replace Kurt Cobain during Nirvana’s induction performance. But then last night, at an awards ceremony that is historically male-dominated, something unexpected happened: A team of women took turns standing in for Cobain.
Joan Jett, Kim Gordon, St. Vincent, and Lorde joined members of Nirvana for raucous and stripped-down versions of classics, beginning with Joan Jett’s take on “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Kim Gordon later took on “Aneurysm”, St. Vincent stepped up for “Lithium”, and Lorde finished out the evening with “All Apologies”.
Earlier in the evening, Chris Martin inducted Peter Gabriel. Tom Morello inducted Kiss. ?uestlove inducted Hall and Oates. Like the Grammys, the Rock Hall show was playing out like most major music award shows: Men were dominating the airtime. Pitchfork editor Lindsay Zoladz has written about the fact that every award show “superjam” seems to conclude with an ensemble of male rockers jamming out together. Last night’s induction proved how interesting the alternative to the “No Girls Allowed Club” can be.
There was poetic generational arc to the order in which the women performed: Joan Jett, an early badass of late-70s rock segued into a performance from Kim Gordon, whose work—not to mention her iconic “Girls Invented Punk Rock Not England”—defined much of the 80s. St. Vincent, who personifies a particular sect of 00's indie rock, came out next.
The fact that each woman stayed on stage as the successive performers came out made it feel like there was a mini torch being passed as the leading ladies shared the space with Nirvana. By the time they arrived at Lorde’s closeout performance, all the other women remained on stage, implying some sort of lead up to the newest face of young "alternative" music. (Lorde recently become the first women in 17 years to top Billboard's Alternative charts.)
That Jett, Gordon, Clark, and Lorde each offered slightly different takes on the Nirvana songs that they performed—Kim remained coolly dissonant on “Aneurysm”, while Lorde took her signature minimalist route for “All Apologies”—also shows how calculated their selections were, which ultimately reflects back on the dynamism of Nirvana's catalog.
It’s true, of course, that this one performance doesn’t mean alt-rock has righted itself of the implicit gender iniquity that pervades all of the arts, but for once broadcast television seems to have landed on a tasteful gesture without exploiting its subjects. The Rock Hall performance captured what we all were thinking: 25 years later, Nirvana are still a platform for something greater than themselves.