A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

THE KING OF ILLITERATURE: Klosterman, on Kurt Cobain's efforts to sound less commercial for In Utero:

He wanted to make Nirvana culture a hermetic culture; he wanted it to be insular and manageable and uncompromised.... And this was never going to work. It was never going to work because the sector of the audience Cobain hoped to alienate did not really care what In Utero sounded like. What Cobain failed to accept is that there is nothing that "sounds mainstream" to mainstream listeners. Music critics have an inflexible description of what mainstream music sounds like, but music consumers do not; to the consumer, the definition of mainstream is whatever everyone else is listening to. In 1993, "mainstream rock" was Nirvana, regardless of their style or intention. The sonic dimensions were a minor detail.

Hmm. Short of The Boredoms, say, is there a band you can think of that couldn't eventually be deemed to sound "mainstream" to consumers?