I became invested in the band’s identity as underdogs. As Nirvana became more popular, I remember how strange it was to hear it on drive-time radio, or see the band on MTV during the daytime. I even heard it on the local hip-hop station. Unlike the bands topping the mainstream rock charts, an assembly line of men with enormous, wavy hair and tight leather pants, Nirvana seemed young and spontaneous. Its members looked different from those other rock stars, too. It was much easier to dress like them.

Nobody—not Nirvana’s label, its management, or the band itself—was prepared for the velocity of its ascent. In January of 1992, “Nevermind,” which had débuted modestly, at No. 144 on the Billboard album chart, took over the No. 1 spot (displacing Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous”). The album would eventually go diamond, selling more than ten million copies in the U.S. alone.

It was exciting to see something so unexpected take off like that. For my friends and me, Nirvana’s unglamorous, D.I.Y. style was a welcome reaction against the groupie-chasing, hard-partying posing that had dominated MTV for so long. Nirvana was like an intruder in the temple, making those bands seem barbaric, and instantly irrelevant. But Nirvana was also tapping into something bigger: an emergent, far-flung world of youth culture that was proudly, at times self-consciously, “alternative.” A new spectrum of identities and creative forms seemed to infiltrate the mainstream, and the possibilities felt thrilling.