So here we sit, a week more than 20 years removed from the publication of what’s considered one of the most important albums in the history of popular music. What do we have to show for it?

Nirvana’s Nevermind was released on September 24, 1991, in many ways the culmination of a four-year stretch in rock and roll history that entirely redefined the genre in a popular sense. Even though Guns & Roses’ Appetite For Destruction, the album that most effectively placed the first nail into the coffin of the 1980s, was released in July of 1987 – and oddly enough, Guns & Roses was a band that Nirvana publicly hated and, in a lame sense, feuded with – it was 1988 that first reinvigorated rock music as a potent and subversive entity after a two-decade stretch of sheen, superficiality and banality (with, of course, a few exceptions). Jane’s Addiction, the Pixies and Sonic Youth all released their most important works that year, with the added benefit of Screeching Weasel’s first great album, Boogadaboogadaboogada!, which would, more than anything, define punk style and substance throughout the next decade.

But Nevermind was released almost ten months into 1991, and its immediate influence seems more apocryphal than earth shattering. Bands like Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam had all released their respectively important major-label debuts earlier in the year – and Alice in Chains had released theirs a full year before.

Yet it was Nevermind, specifically the famed video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” that gave so-called grunge music, a mishmash of similar rock styles that mostly hailed from the same Seattle scene, both a hook and an image. Nirvana popularized something that was already well-defined, the peak of a mountain that had its grounding a few years in the past. But why is that important?

Truth be told, Nevermind is not particularly innovative, a label that seems to have been mercilessly applied to it over the course of time. But that’s okay. The first fat-bellied power chords that kick “Smells Like Teen Spirit” into gear may have been a revelation for the general consumer of music. (There’s a reason the song remains in regular airplay on contemporary rock radio even today.) But for young, subcultural audiophiles throughout the ‘80s, it sounded wholly familiar, which is perfectly fine. We’re not here to debate whether the album is good or bad.

Nirvana attempted to be the blank canvas on which the spirit of the Pixies, Sonic Youth and others could present itself, in which attempt they were wholly – perhaps a bit too much – successful. Nevermind alternates between honest Replacements balladry, raw three-chord punk mayhem and stop/start Pixies irony at the drop of a hat, but there’s very little ultimately about the album that is solely Nirvana’s beyond Kurt Cobain’s shriek and Dave Grohl’s distinctive drumming.

And maybe that’s what made it sell so well. It gave kids the ability to embrace a movement and all its disparate parts as much as they were embracing a band. Culturally speaking, the members of Nirvana were as much their flannel shirts as they were their music. They were alternative rock.

“Something in the Way” seems to be the best example of Nirvana speaking clear. In the context of the album, it (and “Polly”) seems woefully out-of-place amid the noise and Pixies impressionism. There’s an almost uncomfortable level of clarity here (as with “All Apologies” on In Utero), as the wall of static between the listener and Kurt Cobain’s psyche is completely struck down.

It’s this idea that the band would eventually latch onto (and would make the white noise that much more significant) and would pervade Unplugged in New York, but it’s not what Nirvana was most inclined to do on Nevermind itself. It’s telling that even Bleach, the band’s underappreciated 1989 debut, sounds almost nothing like its successor, preferring instead an effectively unfocused brand of sludgy punk, out of which “About a Girl” sticks like a compound fracture.

Nevermind, at the time, was a catalyst above all else. But 20 years later, it’s difficult to see what exactly it was a catalyst for, in the long term, aside from the band’s own substantial legacy. Grunge music has certainly stuck with us for quite some time, which is why the idea that we’re suddenly nostalgic for it (with new albums and tours from the likes of Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden) is so absurd.

However, it was eventually bands like Nickelback, Three Doors Down and Creed who became the standard-bearers for the movement that Nirvana effectively began, a group of bands that, while they have commercial draw, have streamlined a fundamentally chaotic style – if not, genre – of music to such an extent that they’ve ripped its heart out and done a funny little dance on it.

Nickelback, during an incredibly lucrative career in which they’ve sold 21 million albums in the United States alone (in the age of the digital download no less), have unflinchingly maintained their reputation as one of the most critically reviled bands on the face of the Earth. And what Nickelback is essentially playing is the music of Nirvana, replacing bare heart and intelligence with leering sexism and chest-thumping hyper-masculinity, which is difficult to comprehend.

Perhaps the canvas that Nirvana presented with Nevermind was so blank that it allowed all the wrong interpretations, all the wrong projections, all the wrong paintings. Perhaps that’s why Pearl Jam, whose Vs. more than easily outsold Nirvana’s own In Utero in 1993, have maintained a level of critical respectability to which the bands who have followed in their compatriots’ footsteps have seemed medically allergic.

In the ‘80s, it was easy to see the imprint that the Beatles and Rolling Stones had left upon popular music with synth pop and new wave songwriting. In the ‘70s, especially in the eyes of the Clash and the Sex Pistols, the influence of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry was firmly cemented both on the charts and in the soul of rock.

But 20 years after Nevermind, what can it say for itself? A quick perusal of the pop charts doesn’t paint a very positive picture. Of the current top 50 albums, only three are from rock bands, and one of those (the number-one selling Moves Like Jagger by Maroon 5) features pop singer Christina Aguilera prominently. If rock isn’t dead, it’s certainly hibernating.

Ultimately, Nevermind’s once-certain long-term impact on rock and roll does not seem, two decades later, to have been all that profound. And while there’s some poetry in the idea that Nevermind’s only ultimate legacy might be itself, it doesn’t make it seem any less that writing this piece is like writing a second obituary for Kurt Cobain.