Meghan O'Rourke, author, The Long Goodbye: The first time I saw the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video, its sepia tones made it seem already a memory of my own youth — the way I would one day remember what it was like to be 15 in 1991, suffused in a rage and knowingness about sex, hypocrisy, entertainment, cruelty. Even on that first listen, the song carried with it a strange nostalgia.

And the strange thing about the 20th anniversary of Nevermind is realizing that the album did capture what it was like to be floating through adolescence in the fading sun of the early '90s. When I think about those years, I often think about the way Cobain embodied damage and longing in "Polly" or "Rape Me," songs I'd never heard the likes of before. The sound was disenchanted yet not exactly ironic; weary yet oddly celebratory. The album aspired almost to the operatic, but in a modern way. During that year, I first listened to Nevermind feeling it was ours, feeling it had captured a moment. I self-consciously wondered if part of me just wanted to have that feeling about a band — the way my parents had had about the Stones or Dylan. We were the belated generation; rock'n'roll wasn't just music, it was the music that was supposed to signify a riotous charge (yet rarely did). Today, I realize that my questioning was shaped by the music itself: What made Nevermind iconic had a lot to do with Cobain's own self-consciousness.

By the time I was in college, listening to indie rock, having put away my flannel shirts, it seemed the world had gotten a little more fey and a lot more ironic. But when Cobain killed himself in the spring of 1994, we all left our dorm rooms and went out to the lawn and someone played Nevermind from the window loud enough that it reverberated among the gothic stones as we sang along.

Ray Davies: When it came out, I thought it was the most significant American rock'n'roll album since the Doors. Twenty years on and it is still fresh.

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