Love this album from start to finish.

I agree, there will NEVER be another “broadly accessible yet artistically credible” band like Nirvana, but not because music in general has gotten worse, rather because the ideas of broad popularity and artistic credibility are mutually exclusive in today’s record industry. Major labels have seen their bottom line get chewed to pieces by piracy, so they can no longer afford to take chances on creative, artistically credible bands, and must stick to generic sure-bets. However, widespread popularity on the scale of Nirvana or Radiohead still depends on major label support. Because there is dissonance between creativity and major label support, there are very few credible artists with widespread popularity, and instead the bands that saturate our culture all sound like a copy of a copy. Still, make no mistake about it, this is a golden age of music. Bands that would never have had a shot 15 years ago can rise to some level of popularity, if not Nirvana level popularity, based not on whether they get signed to a major label, but based solely on whether or not their music *sounds good*. That is an amazing innovation in modern music, and it is something to celebrate, though, as this debate points out, it has its own consequences.