The folks at Idolator have stumbled upon an argument that is both very interesting and totally random. Matthew Yglesias, a political blogger for the highbrow Atlantic Monthly posted a Nirvana video and made the following controversial statement: "In general, for a much-praised and undoubtedly influential band, Nirvana strikes me as shockingly little listened-to in practice." And then, if it wasn't strange enough that the Atlantic was posting Yglesias' musings on Nirvana, Zubin Jelveh of the high-end business magazine Condé Nast Portfolio had to step in and try to prove him wrong. Jelveh ran through a whole hell of a lot of numbers trying to prove his point, and he's probably right, but there are some more subtle questions in here that no one's actually tackling.

What, for example, do you mean when you ask, "Does anyone listen to Nirvana?" Do they play the CD in the car or queue it up on iTunes or hum along casually when it comes on the radio? How about really listening to Nirvana, as in seriously considering the music and lyrics. We already know that many of the band's post-Nevermind fans were homophobic, misogynist frat-guy types who didn't realize that the band was very feminist and pro-gay rights. It was a fact that haunted Cobain, and he complained about it a lot. So maybe a better question is, "Did anyone ever really listen to Nirvana?" But do the great masses of mainstream music listeners actually process anything they're hearing? Would it bother a lot of guys that when they're singing along to The Killers' "Somebody Told Me" (a song that I despise, by the way, for reasons that have nothing to do with sexual ambiguity), they're actually uttering the homoerotic words, "Somebody told me that you had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend that I had in February of last year"?

So while Yglesias and Jelveh's little spat is amusing, I'd urge them to stick with politics and economics (respectively). Did a lot of people buy and listen to Nirvana's albums? Yes. Did most of those people ever make the mental effort to fully comprehend what they were headbanding to? Probably not. A completely separate question: Has Nirvana lost listeners in the past 14 years, since they've ceased to exist? As a lot of music fans are quick to discard what they see as passé in favor of the next big thing, it's likely.

I'm willing to bet that most people are doing what I tend to do--while Nirvana is no longer in heavy rotation on my iPod, I'll put them on once every few months and be blown away by how powerful their music still is. But should we expect an extinct band to remain as popular it was when it was still producing albums? Of course not.