Nirvana: intertextuality and musical discourse

Abstract

From Nirvana, the highest representative of the grunge movement in the 1990’s, there has not been a rock band with the same musical, social and cultural impact until our days. This analysis seeks to explain the discursive keys of this impact. To do so, it suggests that Nirvana represents the largest pastiche of Anglo-Saxon popular music, due to honored permanently to the vast majority of the movements and musical scenes that emerged in the United States and the UK in the second half of the twentieth century. It thus proposes that the discursive impact of Nirvana is due to its high degree of intertextuality, which mixed global and local musical discourses but also to a consistent semantics that came with the Kurt Cobain’s death, the band leader.