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Pretty much every chord he played was a power chord. Thats just a root and a 5th. It’s neither major or minor, because you need the 3rd to establish that And

Pretty much every chord he played was a power chord. Thats just a root and a 5th. It’s neither major or minor, because you need the 3rd to establish that And nearly every punk and metal band uses predominantly power chords, without any real care in the world as to what the progressions are. It just sounds good to them. There aren’t any rules because punk is a DIY genre. If you told him he was doing a thing, he’d do the opposite just because. And it would still probably slap. Kurt cobain was a fantastic song writer but you see these types of articles come out now and then propping him up as a genius. His own quote refutes that, and anyone who listens to punk music will agree that trying to analyze it using classical western tonality is silly and pretentious

thisismytest 1y ago
That’s just not true. Off the top of my head Lithium, Dumb, About A Girl have critical minor and major chords. Also part of what made him so good was how he played vocal melody and rhythm off of chords. So in some songs you might have plain power chords but the melody hits important major or minor notes. I don’t know what your definition for genius is but the guy wrote some of the best songs in human history and did so without a primary collaborator or big production crew of cowriters and collaborators. I think we can call him a genius.
- tptacek 1y ago
  I like Nirvana as much as the next 90s kid but there is no way these are the best songs in human history, or even in rock history, or even in "modern rock" history.
  - thisismytest 1y ago
    Some of the best. More than one in the top 10,000.
    - jeswin 1y ago
      > some of the best songs in human history I think this was the statement he/she was disagreeing with. No doubt a genius, but when you phrase it like that it's more than genius.
      - tptacek 1y ago
        I don't know that I think he was a genius? If I don't think Husker Du, the Pixies, and Sonic Youth were genius-led bands, I'm not sure how a band that basically synthesized those bands and then lensed them through Guns n Roses could be genius. Is David Bowie a genius? Maybe, if we're generous? When I hear people call Cobain a genius I feel the way I do when I'm hear someone say they've never seen The Wire. Listen to Surfer Rosa and Rid of Me! None of this is to say Nevermind and In Utero aren't good; they're very, very good, I listen to them all the time 30 years later. But like, I still listen to Soundgarden every once in awhile too. They're not geniuses!
        quesera 1y ago
        I mostly agree with you, but I suspect there's an element of just being the right age. I think of Kurt Cobain like an accidental Elvis Presley. Perfect for the moment, and (unlike Elvis) mostly organically grown, but with very clear antecedents. I cannot point to strong antecedents of Pixies, Sonic Youth, Throwing Muses, PJ Harvey, Cocteau Twins, Bauhaus, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Slits, Bongwater, Kate Bush, The Cure, etc. In a couple of these cases, I suspect my own ignorance. In others, I could (and might) argue all night! :) But I cannot assemble a case for not recognizing David Bowie as a (musical|performance) genius. I don't even enjoy his recordings very much, but he was artistically sui generis and enormously influential. Influence might not be a requirement of genius (I'm not sure), but surely a novel creativity is at the root of it?
        tptacek 1y ago
        Pixies antecedents are Husker Du and Sonic Youth. Sonic Youth was the Velvets and The Fall; I found a list of setlists from '70s CBGB and made a playlist, and you can hear Sonic Youth all over it. Throwing Muses (a favorite of mine) a little harder to pinpoint, feels to me like the product of a scene more than a direct evolution of clear antecedents, rather than an act like Dinosaur Jr. was a perversion of Neil Young. A good contrast to Nirvana. PJ Harvey is the Pixies antecedents plus Patti Smith. People say Beefheart; I don't know Beefheart well enough to say and have a deep suspicion of people who bring up Beefheart. Kate Bush is prog rock. Einsturzende is Can (or like a violent response to Can). The Cure is radio-friendly post-punk; their early stuff, which is the only stuff that comes close to holding up, is basically Wire.
  - wyclif 1y ago
    It's because the fans who like Cobain's songs overpraise him or praise him in the wrong terms: "OMG Kurt Cobain is a genius songwriter." I think, and as this post suggests, it's much more the case that "Kurt Cobain had very good instincts for someone completely untutored" which is a different thing altogether.
    - quesera 1y ago
      I'm not sure how to differentiate "very good instincts in an untutored person" from "genius". I am very clear though, that "genius" and "intelligence" are unrelated but sometimes coincident.
    - mtalantikite 1y ago
      But I think most of us would take a musician with great instincts and not much theoretical understanding over one with extraordinary theory and poor instinct. How many thousands of boring jazz players have been pumped out by university programs over the past 50 years? Meanwhile John Lee Hooker could just vamp over a single chord and I could listen to it for hours. I'm remembering a scene in Hampton Hawes's autobiography where a well known piano teacher was telling him his students were starting to ask how to play like Hampton. He tells him he wants to give him lessons to help his technique, which he thinks will help his natural talent even more, but Hampton finds it boring and never goes back. The teacher framed Hampton's check he used to pay for the lesson and put it on his wall. All that's to say having great ears can bring you a long way.
      - wyclif 1y ago
        FWIW, I'm a huge fan of both John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed, who had similar vamp-based playing styles and were untutored, couldn't read music, &c. One of my guitar teachers knew Hooker and he even imparted "the secret of the guitar" to him, which he then passed down to me. But yeah, feel, instinct, and having good ears can carry you a long way especially for solo artists. I'm still glad I can read music and wouldn't trade that for (almost) anything, though.
        1y ago
  - horns4lyfe 1y ago
    I don’t know how you can say with a straight face that smells like teen spirit isn’t one of the greatest modern rock songs. That riff is etched in music history at this point
    - tptacek 1y ago
      It's not even in my top 5 Nirvana songs. The riff you're talking about is Boston's "More Than A Feeling" --- so much so that they used to play a fake-out of "More Than A Feeeling" in concert. I like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" more than "More Than A Feeling", but not like, much more. 1. Where Did You Sleep Last Night Unplugged 2. Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle (or, interchangeably, "Rape Me", though the "blanket of ash" line gets me every time with Frances Farmer). 3. Lithium 4. Heart Shaped Box 5. Dumb (unplugged). It's not fair to make the #1 song a cover, but that performance merits it.
    - onlypassingthru 1y ago
      It's really twofold. You could also identify the song just from Dave's riffs.
      - dadrian 1y ago
        Dave’s riffs are also stolen from disco. Which again, is fine! I love them! Source: https://youtu.be/dZCrdSC2-1I https://youtu.be/dZCrdSC2-1I
    - dehrmann 1y ago
      It was culturally influential, signaled the end of glam rock, and was even dubbed the anthem of a generation, but it didn't showcase great songwriting. It's not fair because he had time to grow as an artist, but "Everlong" is a better song.
- cue_the_strings 1y ago
  Yeah, that's definitely 'the' Kurt thing, vocal melody completing power chords. I do hate how he (and the whole generation, and some of the punks before him + no wave crowd as well) pretended that they didn't know any music theory or practice at all. That was quite destructive for so many of us who aspired to play music in our teens, especially if you weren't exposed to music theory and practice in childhood through other means.
  - jfengel 1y ago
    Did he pretend, or did he really not know? The blues was founded by people who rediscovered Western music theory on their own, in part because guitars lend themselves to it. Punks learned that they could play power chords because they work with the messy overdriven sound. Theory can explain it after the fact, and can extend your options (or at least save you time knowing what you want). I know a lot of "untrained" musicians had a fair bit of theory, but I don't know about Cobain.
    - senderista 1y ago
      The blues isn’t really compatible with conventional tonality: it’s basically major chords with added minor seventh (I won’t call them dominant sevenths because they don’t function as dominant chords), with minor pentatonic (plus added flat fifth) melody. There’s no way that combination can possibly work—but it does!
      - cue_the_strings 1y ago
        Yeah, the added flat fifth really isn't a Western European thing, that's what made it different, cool and appealing. Also the shuffle rhythm. But if you listen to a lot of blues, play a lot of it, play with other blues players, etc. You will notice there's a vocabulary, idioms, etc. You can learn them by ear. You can call them by names of songs or players (Bo Diddley beat), or by the number of bars, ... Well, all of that is kind of - theory. Also, knowing which things you wouldn't play because they don't fit the style, that's also theory.
      - 1y ago
- mingus88 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - sunrunner 1y ago
    > Melodies will be in a key, using a set of notes. That’s kinda unavoidable. Schoenberg has entered the chat.
    - andybak 1y ago
      Arguably we tend to attempt to hear atonal music in a key (or temporal sequence of keys) despite it's attempt to avoid that. I suspect something similar about bitonality. We hear one of the keys and then try and interpret the other notes in relation to that. (warning. I am neither a music theorist or an expert in the psychology of music perception. But this is HN so yolo...)
      - sunrunner 1y ago
        > we tend to attempt to hear atonal music in a key Is it the case that much of this is influenced by individuals having grown up listening in an environment with music already structured around a central key and modulation around that? With the same idea also applying to an understanding (or feeling) of rhythm?
    - Biganon 1y ago
      Atonal music / serialism is insufferable pretentious bs that no one has ever listened to with pleasure, ever. It's a purely mathematical study, orthogonal to art.
      - sunrunner 1y ago
        I don't disagree regarding "listened to with pleasure" and I only remember actively listening to atonal music as part of a required syllabus. I do think it's perhaps a useful lens to use to look at 'traditional' tonal music through however, even if just to re-affirm that _some_ kind of order and structure is an important part in making something palatable to the ears (or the brain).
- -__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
  Surely if genius is to maintain any usefulness as a word at all, it has to mean more than that the person didn't work with a big production crew or have a "primary collaborator", whatever that means. How irrelevant! I'm not sure if this notion of "genius" helps people appreciate music or if it just worsens the idolising/othering aspect of it. If we are going to use the word, though, can we not attempt to reserve it for the uncontroversial candidates, like Art Tatum, for example.
notahacker 1y ago
Yeah. And if you did want to analyze it using classical western tonality, then taking into account vocal melodies, quite a lot of it sits better in minor... Power chords were quite heavily used by some of the bands Kurt liked and were easy to play, hence the stuff that sounded good when he was noodling used a lot of that. Nirvana weren't innovators in tonality, but they had great crunchy guitar tone, catchy hooks and a singer with a raspy voice - exactly what you'd expect a band that didn't care about music theory to potentially excel at, and exactly what was needed to breaking the trend in layered reverbs and guitar hero solos of the 80s ...
tangue 1y ago
Yep 90% power chords and the sound on Nevermind was in part due to Butch Vig. It’s simple but at the time quite unheard : bit of compression a lot of overdub, maybe a little flange/chorus but it was quite minimal compared to heavy metal, guitar heroes of the time and really different from the punk bands.
seanhunter 1y ago
Yeah. It's really poor musical analysis in general, and my ears just don't agree. For example "Come as you are"- it's really hard not to hear that as functionally in a minor mode. Also, there's nothing particularly unusual about not having any minor chords. In fact, here's a thing that may surprise some people: most African music for example has no minor chords of any kind, and we're not talking about power chords etc just only major and no minor triads. In African music it's really common to have the first inversion of the 4th degree triad function as the relative minor (so in the key of C that would be A-C-F instead of A-C-E).
spacemadness 1y ago
[dead]
williamdclt 1y ago
> punk and metal band uses predominantly power chords, without any real care in the world as to what the progressions are Somewhat true for punk, mostly incorrect for metal. A lot of metal is very analytical, deeper in musical theory than most popular genres (rock, pop, rnb…), they care _a lot_ about it. Metal is often very technical, it bred some of the top musicians in the world, it’s no surprise they give a shit about it: it’s their craft and a hard one. In fact I remember the singer of Gojira in a French interview, saying (iirc, surely not quite remembering his point) that metal is in many ways closer to classical than rock, as it values composition so much more where rock is all about interpretation (closer to punk)
- dehrmann 1y ago
  And only somewhat true for punk. Once you're a mediocre guitarist, you finger the whole chord in case you strum too far.
- scns 1y ago
  Dream Theater would be the prime Example. The three founding members studied at Berklee.
- tekla 1y ago
  Metal is probably one of the most technically and music theory driven genres. It attracts people who really want to get GOOD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9xvi0uXzaY&t=464s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9xvi0uXzaY&t=464s
anton-c 1y ago
They probably didn't care what they were but when you pull them apart it's usually some variation of a 1-4-6-5 with occasional chords on the 2nd or 7th scale degree. Generally it was diatonic. I think most musicians listen to enough to know when something doesn't sound "right"(beyond welcome subversions of expectations usually found in more sophisticated genres, musically. I love and played punk for the record)
tptacek 1y ago
There's a whole thing here where people are trying to axiomatically reconstruct Cobain's guitar playing, but he famously shoplifted riffs from other acts. I don't mean that as a dunk, any more than I would talk down J Dilla. But I feel like the process he used to construct memorable hooks might not be too hard to reverse engineer. The band's most famous hook comes from Boston, for crying out loud.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
wvh 1y ago
He was not a great guitar player, but he had an ear for tonality and combining melodies on top of those ambiguous chords. I read somewhere he was a Beatles fan, and I can see how their pop vocal layering and more complex instrumentation via George Martin and Co might have had an influence above and beyond the basic blues pentatonic scale and chord progression that inspired a lot of rock and hard rock. Dude did not accidentally "make it", which is the other, often-heard opposite opinion than that of him being a genius.
hn_throw2025 1y ago
Power chords are also common when guitars are played with distortion, like most of this Nirvana album. R 5 R - the intervals are far enough apart that in this powerchord that they don’t clash harmonically. R 3 5 R - the third is too close to the root and fifth, so the sound would be indistinct. If you play the usual cowboy chords with a high gain tone, it turns to mush. Of course, you can get around this with inversions to produce different voicings. I like R 5 3 with distortion to push the third up an octave, and keep it clear of it’s neighbours.
otabdeveloper4 1y ago
Here in 2025 a "chord" is the new name for "pitch", and "chord progression" is the new name for "melody". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
killerstorm 1y ago
That's actually not true. Cobain used a rather "weird" technique where he would "accidentally" hit 4th in addition to 5th. That actually has characteristic Nirvana sound and is sometimes called "Cobain chords". Assuming Cobain doesn't hit any other strings these are sus4 chords. Here's a video with some analysis of "Smells like teen spirit": https://youtu.be/Xambk1JkWrE?si=aV-kCj1JsbMdM_AV&t=137 https://youtu.be/Xambk1JkWrE?si=aV-kCj1JsbMdM_AV&t=137 I find it really weird that people claim these are power chord even though they sound really different. In my view they are important to the vibe of "Smells like teens spirit" as they bring some dreamy characteristic as they make it a lot brighter compared to what it would be if it was played with only two lowest notes.

thisismytest 1y ago

That’s just not true. Off the top of my head Lithium, Dumb, About A Girl have critical minor and major chords. Also part of what made him so good was how he played vocal melody and rhythm off of chords. So in some songs you might have plain power chords but the melody hits important major or minor notes. I don’t know what your definition for genius is but the guy wrote some of the best songs in human history and did so without a primary collaborator or big production crew of cowriters and collaborators. I think we can call him a genius.

tptacek 1y ago
I like Nirvana as much as the next 90s kid but there is no way these are the best songs in human history, or even in rock history, or even in "modern rock" history.
- thisismytest 1y ago
  Some of the best. More than one in the top 10,000.
  - jeswin 1y ago
    > some of the best songs in human history I think this was the statement he/she was disagreeing with. No doubt a genius, but when you phrase it like that it's more than genius.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      I don't know that I think he was a genius? If I don't think Husker Du, the Pixies, and Sonic Youth were genius-led bands, I'm not sure how a band that basically synthesized those bands and then lensed them through Guns n Roses could be genius. Is David Bowie a genius? Maybe, if we're generous? When I hear people call Cobain a genius I feel the way I do when I'm hear someone say they've never seen The Wire. Listen to Surfer Rosa and Rid of Me! None of this is to say Nevermind and In Utero aren't good; they're very, very good, I listen to them all the time 30 years later. But like, I still listen to Soundgarden every once in awhile too. They're not geniuses!
      - quesera 1y ago
        I mostly agree with you, but I suspect there's an element of just being the right age. I think of Kurt Cobain like an accidental Elvis Presley. Perfect for the moment, and (unlike Elvis) mostly organically grown, but with very clear antecedents. I cannot point to strong antecedents of Pixies, Sonic Youth, Throwing Muses, PJ Harvey, Cocteau Twins, Bauhaus, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Slits, Bongwater, Kate Bush, The Cure, etc. In a couple of these cases, I suspect my own ignorance. In others, I could (and might) argue all night! :) But I cannot assemble a case for not recognizing David Bowie as a (musical|performance) genius. I don't even enjoy his recordings very much, but he was artistically sui generis and enormously influential. Influence might not be a requirement of genius (I'm not sure), but surely a novel creativity is at the root of it?
        tptacek 1y ago
        Pixies antecedents are Husker Du and Sonic Youth. Sonic Youth was the Velvets and The Fall; I found a list of setlists from '70s CBGB and made a playlist, and you can hear Sonic Youth all over it. Throwing Muses (a favorite of mine) a little harder to pinpoint, feels to me like the product of a scene more than a direct evolution of clear antecedents, rather than an act like Dinosaur Jr. was a perversion of Neil Young. A good contrast to Nirvana. PJ Harvey is the Pixies antecedents plus Patti Smith. People say Beefheart; I don't know Beefheart well enough to say and have a deep suspicion of people who bring up Beefheart. Kate Bush is prog rock. Einsturzende is Can (or like a violent response to Can). The Cure is radio-friendly post-punk; their early stuff, which is the only stuff that comes close to holding up, is basically Wire.
- wyclif 1y ago
  It's because the fans who like Cobain's songs overpraise him or praise him in the wrong terms: "OMG Kurt Cobain is a genius songwriter." I think, and as this post suggests, it's much more the case that "Kurt Cobain had very good instincts for someone completely untutored" which is a different thing altogether.
  - quesera 1y ago
    I'm not sure how to differentiate "very good instincts in an untutored person" from "genius". I am very clear though, that "genius" and "intelligence" are unrelated but sometimes coincident.
  - mtalantikite 1y ago
    But I think most of us would take a musician with great instincts and not much theoretical understanding over one with extraordinary theory and poor instinct. How many thousands of boring jazz players have been pumped out by university programs over the past 50 years? Meanwhile John Lee Hooker could just vamp over a single chord and I could listen to it for hours. I'm remembering a scene in Hampton Hawes's autobiography where a well known piano teacher was telling him his students were starting to ask how to play like Hampton. He tells him he wants to give him lessons to help his technique, which he thinks will help his natural talent even more, but Hampton finds it boring and never goes back. The teacher framed Hampton's check he used to pay for the lesson and put it on his wall. All that's to say having great ears can bring you a long way.
    - wyclif 1y ago
      FWIW, I'm a huge fan of both John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed, who had similar vamp-based playing styles and were untutored, couldn't read music, &c. One of my guitar teachers knew Hooker and he even imparted "the secret of the guitar" to him, which he then passed down to me. But yeah, feel, instinct, and having good ears can carry you a long way especially for solo artists. I'm still glad I can read music and wouldn't trade that for (almost) anything, though.
      - 1y ago
- horns4lyfe 1y ago
  I don’t know how you can say with a straight face that smells like teen spirit isn’t one of the greatest modern rock songs. That riff is etched in music history at this point
  - tptacek 1y ago
    It's not even in my top 5 Nirvana songs. The riff you're talking about is Boston's "More Than A Feeling" --- so much so that they used to play a fake-out of "More Than A Feeeling" in concert. I like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" more than "More Than A Feeling", but not like, much more. 1. Where Did You Sleep Last Night Unplugged 2. Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle (or, interchangeably, "Rape Me", though the "blanket of ash" line gets me every time with Frances Farmer). 3. Lithium 4. Heart Shaped Box 5. Dumb (unplugged). It's not fair to make the #1 song a cover, but that performance merits it.
  - onlypassingthru 1y ago
    It's really twofold. You could also identify the song just from Dave's riffs.
    - dadrian 1y ago
      Dave’s riffs are also stolen from disco. Which again, is fine! I love them! Source: https://youtu.be/dZCrdSC2-1I https://youtu.be/dZCrdSC2-1I
  - dehrmann 1y ago
    It was culturally influential, signaled the end of glam rock, and was even dubbed the anthem of a generation, but it didn't showcase great songwriting. It's not fair because he had time to grow as an artist, but "Everlong" is a better song.
cue_the_strings 1y ago
Yeah, that's definitely 'the' Kurt thing, vocal melody completing power chords. I do hate how he (and the whole generation, and some of the punks before him + no wave crowd as well) pretended that they didn't know any music theory or practice at all. That was quite destructive for so many of us who aspired to play music in our teens, especially if you weren't exposed to music theory and practice in childhood through other means.
- jfengel 1y ago
  Did he pretend, or did he really not know? The blues was founded by people who rediscovered Western music theory on their own, in part because guitars lend themselves to it. Punks learned that they could play power chords because they work with the messy overdriven sound. Theory can explain it after the fact, and can extend your options (or at least save you time knowing what you want). I know a lot of "untrained" musicians had a fair bit of theory, but I don't know about Cobain.
  - senderista 1y ago
    The blues isn’t really compatible with conventional tonality: it’s basically major chords with added minor seventh (I won’t call them dominant sevenths because they don’t function as dominant chords), with minor pentatonic (plus added flat fifth) melody. There’s no way that combination can possibly work—but it does!
    - cue_the_strings 1y ago
      Yeah, the added flat fifth really isn't a Western European thing, that's what made it different, cool and appealing. Also the shuffle rhythm. But if you listen to a lot of blues, play a lot of it, play with other blues players, etc. You will notice there's a vocabulary, idioms, etc. You can learn them by ear. You can call them by names of songs or players (Bo Diddley beat), or by the number of bars, ... Well, all of that is kind of - theory. Also, knowing which things you wouldn't play because they don't fit the style, that's also theory.
    - 1y ago
mingus88 1y ago
[flagged]
- sunrunner 1y ago
  > Melodies will be in a key, using a set of notes. That’s kinda unavoidable. Schoenberg has entered the chat.
  - andybak 1y ago
    Arguably we tend to attempt to hear atonal music in a key (or temporal sequence of keys) despite it's attempt to avoid that. I suspect something similar about bitonality. We hear one of the keys and then try and interpret the other notes in relation to that. (warning. I am neither a music theorist or an expert in the psychology of music perception. But this is HN so yolo...)
    - sunrunner 1y ago
      > we tend to attempt to hear atonal music in a key Is it the case that much of this is influenced by individuals having grown up listening in an environment with music already structured around a central key and modulation around that? With the same idea also applying to an understanding (or feeling) of rhythm?
  - Biganon 1y ago
    Atonal music / serialism is insufferable pretentious bs that no one has ever listened to with pleasure, ever. It's a purely mathematical study, orthogonal to art.
    - sunrunner 1y ago
      I don't disagree regarding "listened to with pleasure" and I only remember actively listening to atonal music as part of a required syllabus. I do think it's perhaps a useful lens to use to look at 'traditional' tonal music through however, even if just to re-affirm that _some_ kind of order and structure is an important part in making something palatable to the ears (or the brain).
-__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
Surely if genius is to maintain any usefulness as a word at all, it has to mean more than that the person didn't work with a big production crew or have a "primary collaborator", whatever that means. How irrelevant! I'm not sure if this notion of "genius" helps people appreciate music or if it just worsens the idolising/othering aspect of it. If we are going to use the word, though, can we not attempt to reserve it for the uncontroversial candidates, like Art Tatum, for example.

notahacker 1y ago

Yeah. And if you did want to analyze it using classical western tonality, then taking into account vocal melodies, quite a lot of it sits better in minor... Power chords were quite heavily used by some of the bands Kurt liked and were easy to play, hence the stuff that sounded good when he was noodling used a lot of that. Nirvana weren't innovators in tonality, but they had great crunchy guitar tone, catchy hooks and a singer with a raspy voice - exactly what you'd expect a band that didn't care about music theory to potentially excel at, and exactly what was needed to breaking the trend in layered reverbs and guitar hero solos of the 80s ...

tangue 1y ago

Yep 90% power chords and the sound on Nevermind was in part due to Butch Vig. It’s simple but at the time quite unheard : bit of compression a lot of overdub, maybe a little flange/chorus but it was quite minimal compared to heavy metal, guitar heroes of the time and really different from the punk bands.

seanhunter 1y ago

Yeah. It's really poor musical analysis in general, and my ears just don't agree. For example "Come as you are"- it's really hard not to hear that as functionally in a minor mode. Also, there's nothing particularly unusual about not having any minor chords. In fact, here's a thing that may surprise some people: most African music for example has no minor chords of any kind, and we're not talking about power chords etc just only major and no minor triads. In African music it's really common to have the first inversion of the 4th degree triad function as the relative minor (so in the key of C that would be A-C-F instead of A-C-E).

spacemadness 1y ago

[dead]

williamdclt 1y ago

> punk and metal band uses predominantly power chords, without any real care in the world as to what the progressions are Somewhat true for punk, mostly incorrect for metal. A lot of metal is very analytical, deeper in musical theory than most popular genres (rock, pop, rnb…), they care _a lot_ about it. Metal is often very technical, it bred some of the top musicians in the world, it’s no surprise they give a shit about it: it’s their craft and a hard one. In fact I remember the singer of Gojira in a French interview, saying (iirc, surely not quite remembering his point) that metal is in many ways closer to classical than rock, as it values composition so much more where rock is all about interpretation (closer to punk)

dehrmann 1y ago
And only somewhat true for punk. Once you're a mediocre guitarist, you finger the whole chord in case you strum too far.
scns 1y ago
Dream Theater would be the prime Example. The three founding members studied at Berklee.
tekla 1y ago
Metal is probably one of the most technically and music theory driven genres. It attracts people who really want to get GOOD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9xvi0uXzaY&t=464s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9xvi0uXzaY&t=464s

anton-c 1y ago

They probably didn't care what they were but when you pull them apart it's usually some variation of a 1-4-6-5 with occasional chords on the 2nd or 7th scale degree. Generally it was diatonic. I think most musicians listen to enough to know when something doesn't sound "right"(beyond welcome subversions of expectations usually found in more sophisticated genres, musically. I love and played punk for the record)

tptacek 1y ago

There's a whole thing here where people are trying to axiomatically reconstruct Cobain's guitar playing, but he famously shoplifted riffs from other acts. I don't mean that as a dunk, any more than I would talk down J Dilla. But I feel like the process he used to construct memorable hooks might not be too hard to reverse engineer. The band's most famous hook comes from Boston, for crying out loud.

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wvh 1y ago

He was not a great guitar player, but he had an ear for tonality and combining melodies on top of those ambiguous chords. I read somewhere he was a Beatles fan, and I can see how their pop vocal layering and more complex instrumentation via George Martin and Co might have had an influence above and beyond the basic blues pentatonic scale and chord progression that inspired a lot of rock and hard rock. Dude did not accidentally "make it", which is the other, often-heard opposite opinion than that of him being a genius.

hn_throw2025 1y ago

Power chords are also common when guitars are played with distortion, like most of this Nirvana album. R 5 R - the intervals are far enough apart that in this powerchord that they don’t clash harmonically. R 3 5 R - the third is too close to the root and fifth, so the sound would be indistinct. If you play the usual cowboy chords with a high gain tone, it turns to mush. Of course, you can get around this with inversions to produce different voicings. I like R 5 3 with distortion to push the third up an octave, and keep it clear of it’s neighbours.

otabdeveloper4 1y ago

Here in 2025 a "chord" is the new name for "pitch", and "chord progression" is the new name for "melody". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

killerstorm 1y ago

That's actually not true. Cobain used a rather "weird" technique where he would "accidentally" hit 4th in addition to 5th. That actually has characteristic Nirvana sound and is sometimes called "Cobain chords". Assuming Cobain doesn't hit any other strings these are sus4 chords. Here's a video with some analysis of "Smells like teen spirit": https://youtu.be/Xambk1JkWrE?si=aV-kCj1JsbMdM_AV&t=137 https://youtu.be/Xambk1JkWrE?si=aV-kCj1JsbMdM_AV&t=137 I find it really weird that people claim these are power chord even though they sound really different. In my view they are important to the vibe of "Smells like teens spirit" as they bring some dreamy characteristic as they make it a lot brighter compared to what it would be if it was played with only two lowest notes.