From the August SPIN cover story:

Dave Jerden, Producer, "Nothing's Shocking" and "Ritual de lo Habitual":"'Nothing's Shocking'" eventually found an audience all right [more than a million copies sold]. There's not one person I talk to today who's in their thirties who didn't listen to that record in college. "'Nevermind'" was a fucking classic record, and the press has marked that as the beginning of this big change in alternative becoming mainstream. But it wasn't. "'Nothing's Shocking'" was. It didn't have the same sales, but it made the same cultural landmark - and made it first." Charley Brown, manager, Jane's Addiction:"The whole [Seattle] thing came out of Jane's. There wasn't anything like us at the time. If Jane's hadn't happened, Seattle wouldn't have happened. The scene was bubbling up, and Soundgarden and Mudhoney were the first ones out there, but they were too paranoid of L.A. [music-business people], and they hesitated and missed the window. Nirvana ended up getting the credit. Jane's got mired down because we were the first ones cutting through. Even though the sheep in the music industry hated us, the realized that this was happening, so once they didn't get Jane's, the started going for all the bands that opened for us, like Soundgarden.

I've always subscribed to the "Nirvana-changed-everything" theory; Jane's Addiction paving the way for them totally makes sense. Chris Cornell (Soundgarden), in the same article, even says: "I think a lot of people out there [in Seattle] think that rock 'n roll changed in the early 90's when Nirvana showed up, and everyone had a big hit. But it didn't really work that way. There were bands like Jane's Addiction that laid the groundwork." Interesting...

I don't even remember the last time I bought a copy of SPIN, besides in high school. Man, what a shitty rag it's become. It's a total mishmash, like there's no heart in it; really superficial. It just felt like it was hard to actually read anything in it. It was more like flipping channels on TV. On the other hand, I snaked a copy of Rolling Stone out of the recycling closet in our building, another magazine I haven't bothered to read in ages, and was actually a bit surprised to discover I wasn't totally repulsed and that I enjoyed reading it. I wonder if it has to do with their use of the same font throughout the magazine, whereas SPIN switches fonts halfway through. I found that totally annoying and it added to it's fluffiness.