People still actually believed the cliches. A few boomers had not fully sold out yet, and there was a renaissance of actual punk-rock as reaction to the glossy yuppie '80s pop sound.
I'm not criticizing the values, which I think we definitely could learn from - imagine an artist today putting art and integrity over money! - but the way they are expressed.
Cliches signal to me that the speaker doesn't mean seriously what they are saying - they haven't thought enough to construct their own language (and at more than a superficial level, it's unlikely the cliche represents anyone's serious, nuanced point-of-view); they only have a vague notion and copy and paste a phrase that matches somewhat.
When Nirvana was at the height of their popularity, imagine all the people approaching them, saying what they thought Nirvana wanted to hear. That is how Albini's letter reads to me: A lot of cliche demonstrating that Albini didn't really think these things. But obviously Nirvana knew their values, their business, and the situation far better than I do now, and they hired Albini. Also, someone else in this thread was a record producer at the time and sees the letter as significant, and we should probably listen to them too.
I agree and would go further to say the correlation with outright falsehood is probably higher, i.e. a cliché might represent someone's effort to contradict the truth about themselves.
