I'll say it: Nevermind is the weakest of the Nirvana discography. That's not to call it bad; "Drain You" has got to be one of the band's tightest songs, and I still crank the radio whenever "Lithium" or "In Bloom" comes on the car radio. But looking back at Kurt Cobain's history as a songwriter, his influences and legacy, it becomes clear that Nevermind is not the best example of what made Nirvana great.

It is what made them famous; I'll give it that. Without Nevermind, there may have been no injection of fringe music into the mainstream. That's because it's the closest Cobain got to a pop record in the traditional sense. As a songwriter, he constantly oscillated between churning out sludge and penning straight pop. "I'm such a nihilistic jerk half the time and other times I'm so vulnerable and sincere [. . . The songs are] like a mixture of both of them," he's quoted as saying in Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana (Azerrad, 1994. p. 210–11). It was a good way of putting it; you can hear the influence of The Vaselines as much as that of Scratch Acid in his work. The way these two extremes worked together is part of what made Nirvana's appeal so widespread. The innocence beneath the rough edges drew in fans who would have never touched pure noise rock.

But Nevermind slants too far to the pop side. It throws off the Nirvana equillibrium, cleans up the production, loses some of the heft. Cobain's artistic duality can be seen most clearly on the transition between "About a Girl" and "School" on Bleach. The former, track three on the record, is as close to The Beatles Nirvana ever got. Track four brings us into the outskirts of stoner metal territory. Nirvana was spanning the boundaries of rock music at the time with just two songs. And on their debut, no less; even before they'd been established as "important".

Maybe I've just worn out Nevermind. "Lithium" was my anthem in middle school, and somewhere there's a four-track recording of my very amateur cover of "Come As You Are" (I had just started playing the guitar and I got excited). But the only Nirvana I listen to these days—besides the occasional radio jam—is on Incesticide, Bleach, or With the Lights Out. I don't find much on Nirvana's most praised album that comes close to the rawness of "Aneurysm" or the melancholy on "Sappy". The whole of In Utero is infused with its own kind of sick derangement. When I listen to Nevermind now, twenty years past its release, I find it awfully light and clean in contrast to the hot, heavy filth of the bulk of Nirvana's catalog.

Maybe I've been desensitized, or maybe I'm just old. Maybe all the vomit-inducing post-grunge clones ruined it for me. I don't know. How has Nevermind aged for you? Is it still worthy of all the adoration, or has it lost its punch with time?