I don’t really care for Nirvana. There — I’ve said it. I have to confess that, for a moment, I half expected the sky to fall on my head in an explosion of dirty feedback. Taking in my surroundings, however, I see that the sun is still shining, and that, as the song on my stereo says — a song that no Nirvana purist should own — I’m still alive.

It is 15 years to the day since Nirvana’s grunge-defining second album, Nevermind, was released. In terms of musical blasphemy, the nearest equivalent of someone of my early-thirties age group admitting to an indifference to the music of Kurt Cobain is probably a member of the generation above confessing to a rampant dislike of the Beatles. But even the most ardent moptop obsessive is going to find it hard to argue that the Beatles didn’t make some mawkish pap in their time.

Cobain, however, remained a figure of aching integrity right up to his suicide, in April 1994. Sure, he might have sold millions of albums, and had his likeness plastered onto a million bootleg T-shirts, but he never left you in any doubt that he was thoroughly unhappy about it. How many people have you met who have said, “That bloody Smells Like Teen Spirit annoys the hell out of me”? Whingeing of that type is not considered good form.

At the same time, it’s probable that there aren’t that many people whose favourite band of all time is Nirvana. They have always seemed a safe sixth- or seventh- favourite group to keep in your musical locker, within credibility’s reach. A vote for Nirvana was never just a vote for Cobain’s disaffected anthems: it was also a vote against selling out.

Or, at least, it used to be. These days, the ground rules seem a little muddier, with songs from Nevermind covered on talent shows such as Tommy Lee’s Rock Star: Supernova alongside tracks by Stone Temple Pilots and Live — bands who, a decade ago, were clearly marked as the diluted, corporate answer to Nirvana but now seem to be viewed by a new generation of rock fans as grunge legends of equal standing. A quick scan of the hallowed top eight friends on the Nirvana MySpace page provides something of a surprise, with pride of place going to the wholly catchy, not remotely tortured Weezer and Blink-182.

Is this what Cobain would have wanted, 15 years after his masterpiece? Probably not. Is it a bad thing? Not necessarily. The wisdom that said Nirvana were good and the likes of Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots were evil now seems as peculiar to the early 1990s as the idea of the floppy, unconditioned middle parting as a male pin-up’s hairstyle. In fact, 15 years on, what is most noticeable about Nevermind is perhaps not so much how shabbily it has aged, but how handsomely its less integrity-tortured peers have.

Take the Seattle-based self-styled metal drag queens Alice in Chains: certainly, they’re not quite the 1990s equivalent of Black Sabbath, but they really don’t sound bad now (certainly not bad enough for a 1995 NME review to rename their third album, Jar of Flies, Bag of Shite). Then there’s Blind Melon’s single No Rain: in 1993, sappy MTV grunge-lite ballad; with the hindsight of 2006: bona fide, perfectly constructed, bittersweet pop-rock classic.

Who would have thought that, a decade and a half on, it would be Nevermind that prompted the description “of its time”, and critically sniffed-at late-grunge works such as Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream and Soundgarden’s Superunknown that would sound like classics? I certainly couldn’t have dreamt that, 14 years after Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam undermined his tortured grunge integrity by appearing as a member of Matt Dillon’s fake band, Citizen Dick, in Cameron Crowe’s grunge comedy Singles, Pearl Jam would be the critical toast of the Reading festival, with blanket five-out-of-five reviews; or that their 1991 anthem Alive would sound better with each passing year.

Is it just the passage of time that has transformed the supposed Nirvana lites into rock gods, or were earnest grunge fans missing something? Probably a bit of both. The odd thing about the grunge era (1989-94, roughly) was that it was probably the only time in musical history when the prevailing aesthetic was one of wilful, slack amateurism. Twelve years on, in an era when MySpace self-promotion is mandatory, there is little place for the slacker. Back when it was mandatory for self-loathing rockers to moan about “punching the clock”, the careerism and musicality of Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden may have seemed strange. These days, it just seems logical. Nevermind, meanwhile, continues to reach new generations of listeners, many of whom are not old enough to realise that Lithium is one of the most irritating songs ever written, and who are almost certainly not simultaneously discovering the Cobain-endorsed, indie-spirited (ie, unlistenable) likes of Tad and Babes in Toyland.

Although Nevermind has failed to make the top 10 in a couple of notable recent “best albums ever” polls and lags behind Pearl Jam’s Ten in the bestselling-albums-of-all-time chart, and although you see fewer of those horrible “Kurt Cobain 1967-2004” T-shirts than you used to, you couldn’t quite say its star has dimmed. What is certain, however, is that it is not the album it used to be.

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