10 Best Rhythm Guitarists You Need To Know
9. Kurt Cobain
Ok, now it's just getting ridiculous! From Green Day to Kurt Cobain, the musically illiterate 90's guitar philistine!!! While I see your point, just roll with me here for a quick second.
It has been widely known that Kurt Cobain was pretty self-deprecating when it came to his musical background. He even went on record saying he could never play like a virtuoso even if he had wanted to. However, by taking the basic elements of rock guitar, Cobain constructed glorious grunge slams that ignited the alternative movement.
Cobain didn't have the incessant knowledge of guitar scales and typically shied away from flashy solos, but his guitar parts created tons of atmosphere in Nirvana's recordings. Take "Smells Like Teen Spirit," for example. The song would be nothing without Cobain's opening riff, but he only plays two notes in the verse. Not necessarily too difficult, but the off-kilter gloominess behind those two notes are more important than anything else going on in the verse.
Cobain's power-chord approach also made it much easier for him to experiment with melodic structure when writing vocal lines for Nirvana songs. When hair metal was still king, Cobain made authenticity and playing from the heart important for a whole generation of guitarists.