Who's paying attention?

Nevermind turns 20 this September. In 1991 I started my second year of my first teaching job at a private Christian high school. My classroom was in the basement and my first class of the day, all year long, was grade 11 English Lit starting at 8 am. At some point during that year I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit in that basement hallway - dank, gray tile floor, cinder-block walls painted a faint green. I have this memory. I want to believe that one of my kids, Nick maybe, was playing it on the ghetto blaster on my desk. Oh I wanted to turn that thing as loud as I could. I wanted to be one of the kids. I wanted to celebrate hating all the crap that was school, especially when all that was loaded together like a bad seven layer salad in a religious school. 


To this day, at least once a semester I play Nevermind in my classes and every time the kids (most of them) recognize it and nod their heads, track after track. It may not be their style, but they understand and appreciate what's being said and done.


Whether you liked Nirvana then, or now, is not so much the point as that at that point in time a lot of us, young and not as young as we wish we were, felt like somebody got it, and we sang along (even if Kurt was daring us not to). The album was an observation, a complaint, a confession, and a dare. Does this sort of naked, open, and powerful art (yes, I'm calling it art) happen today? I know this kind of question is asked often, but I do wonder whether the media landscape is fertile to grow a singular piece of critical, artistic communication with nearly worldwide impact. When Nevermind was released they initially shipped 46,251 copies to American record stores, and 35,000 to the UK. Within a week they sold out and it took a while for the industry to create more copies for people to buy. This would not (could not?) happen today. In the face of that sort of delay, we'd all lose attention and click off to find something else. 


Yes, in many ways the artistic soil is so fertile now that many (any) things can and do grow. If you've tried to garden you know that fertile soil for your vegetables is also fertile soil for the weeds. Is anyone out there taking the time to weed the garden? What would it be like if albums like Nevermind, or The Joshua Tree, or Dark Side of the Moon, or Pet Sounds, or Revolver were released today? Who would notice? For how long? Radiohead seems like a reasonable contender, but even their albums don't create the sort of sustaining reverberations that big albums, albums we now think of as "important," used to, and continue to, make.


So can you name one album in the last ten years that has had the sort of widespread impact, for listeners and for fellow artists - that albums like these have had? PB can you make one? Please? In the meantime, help me understand what we're losing. Or maybe ... well ... nevermind.