Yesterday, Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan said that Nirvana’s success was “just timing” and it seems that former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic agrees.
Novoselic didn’t take offence at the comments at all instead saying, “Maynard James Keenan is right”.
“Music was set to change in the early ’90s and part of Nirvana’s success was due to timing,” he said (via Alt Nation).
“I have always said that bands like Faith No More and Jane’s Addiction broke ground for us with the mainstream.”
To be fair, you could almost say that about any band. A large part of any artists success is timing and their positioning in the market at any certain time.
Even Tool’s success had a lot to do with the climate they were entering at the time and Keenan admitted that following his comments about Nirvana saying, “With hindsight, when you’re looking at it, it looks like it was calculated.”
Novoselic continues that much of Nirvana’s success had to do with the public’s exhaustion with “the Hair Band movement.”
He also commented broadly on the larger state of rock saying, “Nirvana was the last of the pre-internet bands.”
“I think we are in a post-Rock era rooted in the information age,” he said.
“The old paradigm was the “push” media where if you got on rotation with MTV, you could seep in the minds of the public. Today, the game is “pull” media and this, by nature, is decentralized.”
So, there you go. As much as you’d probably like to see a beef between Nirvana and Tool it’s not going to happen because Novoselic is so damn logical.
Watch: Nirvana – ‘Come As You Are’
