The story of Nirvana‘s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is one full of contradictions. Indeed, its very inception attested to the fervent dualities that tormented its author. In early 1991, as Nirvana prepared to work on their second album, Nevermind, guitarist and singer Kurt Cobain composed the song’s recurring riff, recognizing instantly its infectious qualities as befitting his intentions for this new batch of fabric.
Displeased with the oppressive, sludgy sound that had dominated their 1989 debut, Bleach, Kurt needed to make sure that its follow-up would additional expose the expressive moments that their debut harbored, permitting for songs with a stronger, extra unabashed sense of melody than earlier than. In addition to being a champion of the uncompromising punk rock of Wipers and the primal energy of Swans, Kurt was additionally a Beatles obsessive, and all the time sought to distinction his work’s prevailing darkness with an considerable edge.
“[Kurt] had that dichotomy of punk rage and alienation, but also this vulnerable pop sensibility,” stated producer Butch Vig, who’d be drafted in for this album’s classes.
“All in all,” Kurt himself would later confess, “I think we sound like The Knack and The Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath.”
Writing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
His design for this explicit tune was way more bold than any nihilistic punk diatribe: he needed to put in writing “the ultimate pop song.” As he composed it, his thoughts was on the usage of dynamics as employed by one other affect, the Pixies, particularly their tendency of “being soft and quiet [in the verse] and then loud and hard [in the chorus],” Kurt would concede. “I connected with that band so heavily.”
Introducing it to his bandmates at rehearsal, it was deemed “ridiculous” by bassist Krist Novoselic, who despaired at being made to constantly play this “Louie Louie” rip-off for over an hour. Ultimately, at Novoselic’s suggestion, the tune’s tempo was lowered, which allowed new drummer Dave Grohl (not too long ago employed to switch Chad Channing) to throw in some “disco flams” impressed by funk drummer Tony Thompson. (This course of is why it’s the one tune on Nevermind by which all three band members are credited as writers.)
It was then crudely recorded onto cassette, which was despatched to Butch Vig to inform him of this newest addition to the album’s pool. “It was so fucking distorted, I could barely hear anything,” Vig later recalled. “But underneath the fuzz, I could hear ‘Hello, Hello,’ melodies and chord structures. And even though the recording was terrible, I was super excited.”
The tune’s lyrics
The lyrics on that recording had been largely unfinished, and would solely be accomplished as soon as the band had been in Vig’s studio. They’d received to Sound Metropolis Studios in Van Nuys, California, in Might 1991, having caught to their weapons with the selection of producer, regardless of the objections of Geffen Data, the foremost label they’d simply signed to after leaving the Seattle-based indie Sub Pop – a transfer spearheaded by Cobain that once more pitched his ambitions towards his punk rock ideologies.
As soon as full, the lyrics appeared to corroborate the turmoil Kurt felt in coping with his conflicting ideas (“I’m worst at what I do best,” he sings), and whereas it infuriates him (“I feel stupid and contagious”), he resigns himself to his shortcomings (“Oh well, whatever, never mind”). He additionally famously included a comparatively inscrutable line that has been misheard since its launch. (“A mulatto, an albino / A mosquito, my libido.”)
Kurt’s phrases had been seething with anger – geared toward himself and the world round him, which he seen as banal and synthetic. “I just didn’t get them the first time I read them,” Novoselic later stated of the lyrics. “And then I started listening to it in the song format, and then I had an idea of what he was talking about. He was talking about kids, commercials, Generation X, the youth bandwagon, and how he’s really disappointed in it, and how he doesn’t want anything to do with it.”
After recording simply three takes of the tune, the second was chosen because the grasp, then, emboldened by double-tracked guitars and multilayered vocals (which Kurt needed to be satisfied to do by Butch Vig, who cited John Lennon’s tendency to do the identical), turned indomitably forceful.
The tune’s title
The tune title, in the meantime, retains its personal paradoxical context. Not talked about throughout the lyrics, the phrase dates again to the earlier 12 months, when throughout an evening of consuming at Kurt’s residence in Olympia, Washington, his pal Kathleen Hanna penned the immortal line ‘Kurt smells like Teen Spirit’ on his wall. It was a tongue-in-cheek reference to a can of deodorant noticed within the grocery retailer earlier by Hanna and her Bikini Kill bandmate Tobi Vail, an ex-girlfriend of Kurt’s. “I mean, who names a deodorant Teen Spirit?” Hanna stated. “What does teen spirit smell like? Like a locker room? Like pot mixed with sweat? Like the smell when you throw up in your hair at a party?”
Regardless of its playful teasing, Kurt, who was unaware of the identify’s origins, interpreted the graffiti one other approach. “I took that as a compliment,” he stated, selecting it a 12 months later to evoke the rebellious vitality that fuelled his ode to the alienated.
“It has revolutionary themes, but I don’t really mean it in a militant [light],” Kurt would later say of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” “The generation’s apathy is getting out of hand. [I’m] pleading to the kids, ‘Wake up!’”
Nirvana’s administration didn’t determine with the tune’s rallying cries, and due to this fact weren’t invested absolutely in its launch as a single till it was delivered to varsity radio in August of 1991. Their expectations had been quickly to be confounded; “Smells Like Teen Spirit” went into heavy rotation, after which issues received even greater.
“‘Teen Spirit’ definitely established that quiet/loud dynamic thing that we fell back on a lot of the time. It did become that one song that personifies the band,” Dave Grohl stated. “But the video was probably the key element in that song becoming a hit.”
The video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
After inserting an advert for 18-25-year-old extras to seem of their music video (requesting that they “adopt a high school persona, i.e. preppy, punk, nerd, jock”), Nirvana filmed the video at GMT Studios in Culver Metropolis, Los Angeles, in a set resembling a highschool gymnasium. Directed by Samuel Bayer, because the band performs to a spirited janitor and anarchy-loving cheerleaders, bored college students are at first sitting subdued on bleachers. They then begin to develop into extra animated, rising to their ft, dancing and moshing earlier than speeding the stage and trashing the band’s gear whereas Kurt smashes his personal guitar.
“People heard the song on the radio and they thought, ‘This is great’,” Grohl continued, “but when kids saw the video on MTV they thought, ‘This is cool. These guys are kinda ugly and they’re tearing up their fucking high school.’ So I think that had a lot to do with what happened with the song.”
The response to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
What occurred was it went stratospheric. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit the Prime 10 within the UK and US, whereas the album Nevermind reached Quantity One within the US and all over the world. The video, in the meantime, gained two MTV Video Music Awards and the vital acclaim was practically unanimous. Grunge had arrived. Although these feats had been unthinkable on the daybreak of 1991, the chart stats turned considerably irrelevant because the tune permeated and penetrated the mainstream till its stature attained nearly legendary ranges, eclipsing mere gross sales figures in its ascent to iconic greatness.
Kurt had succeeded in realizing his imaginative and prescient for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; he got down to write a revolutionary anthem for the disenfranchised youth, and now he had a military of them seeking to him for solutions that he didn’t have.
At odds with its recognition, Cobain’s relationship with the tune soured, and it will frequently be omitted from the group’s reside performances. “It’s almost an embarrassment to play it,” Kurt stated in 1994. “Everyone has focused on that song so much. The reason it gets a big reaction is people have seen it on MTV a million times. It’s been pounded into their brains. But I think there are so many other songs that I’ve written that are as good, if not better… But I can barely, especially on a bad night like tonight, get through ‘Teen Spirit.’ I literally want to throw my guitar down and walk away. I can’t pretend to have a good time playing it. Once it got into the mainstream, it was over.”
The tune’s legacy
A long time after its launch, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” stays as potent and exhilarating as ever. A daily contender in “Greatest Songs Of All Time” lists. In summer time 2021 it surpassed a billion streams on Spotify. It’s additionally spawned numerous covers by people as diverse as Malia J and Put up Malone, and garnered a parody by Bizarre Al Yankovic. It was, finally, the blessing and curse that propelled Nirvana to a level of fame that Kurt Cobain was fully uncomfortable with. “I have my theories on why so many people connected to it and why Nirvana became a popular band,” Dave Grohl mirrored in 2021, “but mine is just a little more distorted than an actual music critic.”
“It was a zeitgeist moment, you know?” provided Butch Vig. “It turned people’s heads. Those records don’t come along very often.”
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