After Nirvana broke, there was a sense to me of excitement, something new in the air. Perhaps now there was a possibility that great format-busting music could emerge from the underground en masse to be heard by anyone on their radios. This didn't happen, the ??alternative? stations behaved like all other stations, demanding that everything fit within their narrow format definition, and playing the same songs from bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam over and over again, 12 times a day. (I mean, didn??t we already own these albums?) Not to blame station programmers, they are just responding to advertisers and teenagers demands.
So really, Nirvana didn??t change anything, and that??s why I tend to evaluate them like any other band, based on the merits of their music alone. Which is to say, they weren't bad, for music on the radio.