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Guest
I think I hear Come As You Are at least a dozen times a day where I live. Or at least I would if I could bear listening to the radio anymore. I never said Nirvana wasn’t talented. But most of the music that is attributed to their influence really should go to other bands. And yes, the Pixies did have more effect on the music scene than Nirvana did. The whole industry changed after Doolittle. During the 80s, overproduction was the name of the game in the industry. The notions of simple recording sessions, underproduced stage performances and rejecting the hair band excesses of the horrifying hard rock era were basically spearheaded by the post-punk college rock movement and it was the Pixies who forced it into the mainstream with the (albeit short-lived) success of Surfer Rosa and Doolittle.
Even if you could attribute the mainstream acceptance of alternative to Nirvana (and really, the credit for that belongs to a lot of bands), the deeper and ultimately larger changes in production style, performance style and songwriting style were all due to the influence of the Pixies just before grunge came to the fore and eventually overshadowed the post-punk indie pop scene (temporarily – grunge really didn’t last long before it was completely commodified and ruined by all the Pearl Jam/Temple of the Dog imitators and then eventually morphed into abhorrid new metal).