Probably an upopular opinion, but… a LOT of Nirvana deserves a nod here. 
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I always associate chromatic mediant chords with Bond theme songs.
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Most of the grunge repertoire doesn’t make sense. It’s all about random major chords all over the place.
Also, the king of chromatic mediant in pop culture:
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Power chords for one, but I disagree. Cobain downplayed it and certainly loved his punk, but he was a HUGE Beatles fan.
This is worth a watch:
Beyond that, something like “Lithium” - that brief dip into minor with the C in place of the C#, the timing there isn’t at all coincidental, it adds a LOT of tension as you move towards and then out of the end of that riff.
This is pretty cool, too, I actually didn’t know Beato had done a second breakdown of Nirvana’s music, but, well, Cobain has a surprisingly nuanced harmonic sense, and there’s a LOT more to their music than basing at power chords with maybe some odd chormaticism thrown in, and on/off dynamics.
Honestly, as crazy as this sounds coming from a guy who likes playing a million notes a second, I’ve been thinking a LOT about Nirvana these days while writing, arranging, and mixing this album I’m chipping away at. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on in their music.
EDIT - it’s funny, too, because I completely disagree with him on those 4ths in the riff, I definitely don’t hear them. They may accidentally come out here and there from power chords, but not nearly to the extent he tries to show them.
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I don’t know how well known this song is in the US, but this was a major hit in the UK and Ireland. Some pretty cool borrowed chords in the progression.
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I’ve never heard this before… but what a wonderfully bizarre video.
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I never heard it, and it didn’t seem to chart in the USA. Coffee & TV - Wikipedia
Yeah, it didn’t chart in the USA, I was also unfamiliar with it.
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OMG how could I forget fourth best trilogy ever. 
I wasn’t expecting my comment to be taken literally. But just to entertain the conversation, you’d be surprised by how important those thirds are for the grunge sound and its pseudo-randomness.
Also, about Cobain, yeah, his biggest talent probably was that prodigious ear to find banger after banger in stuff that only made sense after he played it with the right attitude, which also makes the “formal” study of grunge music very tricky because, well, it only needed to sound cool regardless of how much “sense” it made, musically speaking.
RIP KC
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I probably wouldn’t be surprised at all. They’re not always in the chords (sometimes, sure) but they’re often in his melodies, and he had a hell of an ear for melody. Big Beatles fan, making him a little bit of an anomaly in the punk/metal grey area where Nirvana sort of came together.
If you haven’t seen that Beato video on Smells Like Teen Spirit, i’d strongly recommend it for two reasons - one, an awesome deep dive on how Grohl pushes the beat, and two, he runs through the harmonizations implied by the vocal melody over the chords, and it’s cool as hell.
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Love that deep dive! It’s an interesting look into the rabbit hole of Nirvana’s music and grunge in general.
I’ve always been curious about how Cobain arguably killed the whole shred scene because the kids of the time just wanted to be loud and angry, whereas being a virtuoso didn’t seem as cool as 5 years before the grunge boom. The thing is that many people reduce the discussion to EVH being replaced by a guy who “couldn’t play” but there’s a lot more than meets the eye/ear.
One need only hear Taxman and Opinion back-to-back to hearing his Beatles love
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I have VERY strong feelings on this.
First, you’re right.
Second, you could argue about the type of solo, sure… but saying Cobain killed the guitar solo doesn’t really add up, considering how many Nirvana songs DO have guitar solos. He was alternately either very melodic (Teen Spirit, Heart-Shaped Box) or atonal (Breed, Serve The Servants, though that one at times is kind of both), but they were often there.
Third… The downside of the shred movement is while it sounded awesome and made being a lead guitarist cool as hell… it wasn’t accessible. If you were just picking the guitar up, Steve Vai might as well have been on a different planet. I mean, bad example, actually, since he probably is… but then you pop Nevermind into your record player, and as someone who’d never tyouched a guitar before, that sounded like something YOU could do. That was certainly the case for me, growing up on a diet of Jimi and the Stones, where I always loved the sound of a guitar but it wasn’t until someone played me Unplugged in New York that suddenly I felt like maybe this was something I could do.
And, of course, some of those kids fumbling through “Plateau” in their bedrooms then grew up and heard a Satriani record and thought, "hey, that sounds awesome, it might be fun to be able to do that.
Countless kids all over the world picked up a guitar because of Kurt Cobain. Even if only 0.5% of those millions of new guitarists decided they liked guitar solos… that’s a lot of would-be shredders.
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Me, I am one of those kids that got a guitar for Nirvana songs…
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Same here. Unplugged. That “Plateau” example was not exactly made up. 
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I did the opposite. As a forever rebel, I rejected anything that didn’t have a crazy solo after grunge and Nu Metal producers decided solos were not so cool, just to go against the trend. LOL
Important disclaimer: some grunge songs have some of the coolest rock solos ever recorded, imho.
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For me, Cobain was why I picked up the guitar in the first place, but when I heard Jimi’s “Voodoo Child (slight return)” for the first time it blew my mind and that was my gateway into blues, lead guitar in general, and eventually to Joe Satriani. But those early grunge albums, the love never went away.
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My Dad had a few CDs and records by Eric Clapton and Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Thin Lizzy, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd, etc. I used to listen to them a lot, and that’s what made me pick up the guitar in the first place.
Actually, the chord progressions in Layla are pretty cool.
I bought Nevermind when I was about 12 or 13, which wasn’t long after I started playing guitar. It’s not the reason I started playing, but I learned a lot of Nirvana songs when I was starting out.
Now that I think of it, this was probably the earliest thing I heard where I thought that guitars were fucking awesome (written and performed by Joe Perry)
Though it may have been this…
B.B. King playing Albert King. Gotta love it.
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I’m gonna throw a curveball and go old school to hype my people’s music.
When you grow up in a salsa town, modal/jazzy harmonies are the norm, they coexist on the radio along with Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift etc. and both listeners and performers (especially dancers) just get it. It is not considered “music for musicians” in any way, and many people are not even aware of how complex the music they dance to every weekend really is.
Of course, I was a stupid kid and rejected all that because it didn’t fit my metalhead persona. In contrast, all musicians I know from back home can play all those complex changes over different clave rhythms like it’s nothing.
This is a more modern version of a classic.
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J Mascis, Billy Corgan, Mike McCreedy and Jerry Cantrell absolutely kept guitar solos alive but it returned to a 70s rock type vibe. Nu Metal/Pop Punk was the death of soloing in the late 90s mostly from adopting a more streamlined pop type song structure which is why those bands did so well on the charts. Catchy hooks and a song structure more akin to earlier 1950s and 60s rock.
J Mascis doesn’t get enough credit tbh post-reunion Dino Jr is great stuff.
“I Don’t Wanna Go There” should have the recognition Alter Bridge’s “Blackbird” or Wilco’s “Impossible Germany” get for solid post 2000s rock solos.
