“Music fans will tell you that there are objective, historical reasons for favoring one record over another. ‘Nevermind’ ushered alternative into the mainstream and influenced the sound of every rock record that followed. ‘Some Gave All,’ on the other hand, yielded a much-parodied novelty hit, ‘Achy Breaky Heart,’ the video for which spawned a deeply regrettable line-dancing craze. And though Cyrus outsold Nirvana in 1992, the numbers have since come to vindicate the latter: ‘Nevermind’ has sold 30 million copies to date, 10 million more than ‘Some Gave All.’

There are also other, less obvious reasons for the favored place of ‘Nevermind’ in music history. As the critic Joshua Clover argued recently, Nirvana was ‘the last great invention of rock and roll’ — the last rock band to really rock, the last consensus-eliciting gasp of a moribund medium. The author Simon Reynolds wrote something similar, suggesting that ‘an undercurrent to grunge retrospection is the music media’s and record industry’s own nostalgia for the heyday of the rock monoculture.’ We revere ‘Nevermind’ because it allows us to remember the days when rock was rock, and everyone agreed about what rock was — unlike, say, ‘Some Gave All,’ a record that conjures mostly memories of bad jeans and poor life choices.”