FEATURE:
Groovelines
have included quite a few male artists in this feature. I want to investigate a song by female artist next week. The reason I have selected Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit is two-fold. For one, it is a song I remember hearing for the first time as a child and being moved instantly. Another reason for spotlighting this song is because it turns thirty on 10th September - it was the lead single (and opening track) from Nirvana’s masterpiece album, Nevermind. I am going to bring in some articles that tell the story of the song and the influence it has had since its release. In terms of its popularity and its iconic music video, here are some more details:
“Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a song by American rock band Nirvana. It is the opening track and lead single from the band's second album, Nevermind (1991), released on DGC Records. The unexpected success of the song propelled Nevermind to the top of several albums charts at the start of 1992, an event often marked as the point where grunge entered the mainstream.
"Smells Like Teen Spirit" was Nirvana's biggest hit in most countries, charting high on music industry charts around the world in 1991 and 1992, including topping the charts of Belgium, France, New Zealand and Spain. The song garnered widespread critical acclaim, including topping the Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics' poll. The song was dubbed an "anthem for apathetic kids" of Generation X, but Nirvana grew uncomfortable with the attention it brought them. In the years since Kurt Cobain's death, listeners and critics have continued to praise "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as one of the greatest songs of all time.
The music video for the song is based on the concept of a school concert which ends in chaos and riot, inspired by Jonathan Kaplan's 1979 film Over the Edge and the Ramones' film Rock 'n' Roll High School. It won two MTV Video Music Awards, which was in heavy rotation on music television. In subsequent years Amy Finnerty, formerly of MTV's programming department, claimed the video "changed the entire look of MTV" by giving the channel "a whole new generation to sell to". In 2000 the Guinness World Records named "Smells Like Teen Spirit" the "Most Played Video" on MTV Europe”.
I am going to end with an article that suggests that, perhaps, the slight polish of Smells Like Teen Spirit and the fact it has been played and heard so many times might have taken away some of edge and legacy. I think that it is a remarkable song and a moment that not only elevated Nirvana but helped put to push Grunge into the mainstream – which has its positives and negatives. In this Kerrang! article, we learn more about Smells Like Teen Spirit’s beginnings:
“Kurt Cobain said that when he sat down to pen Smells Like Teen Spirit, the track that secured Nirvana their unexpected crossover into the mainstream, he was trying to write “the ultimate pop song”.
Kurt’s main influence had been The Pixies, telling Rolling Stone, “I connected with that band so heavily… We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.” Indeed, Krist Novoselic worried that the song was too Pixies-ish, telling Kurt, “People are really going to nail us for it.”
Lyrically, Teen Spirit painted an ambivalent portrait of the indie-rock revolutionaries he’d lived alongside in Olympia, its title drawing upon memories of a night of uncivil disobedience with his friend Kathleen Hanna, who fronted Bikini Kill, her insurrectionary and brilliant riot grrl band with Tobi Vail.
Kathleen later recalled that, in August of 1990, fuelled by a bottle of Canadian Club whisky, the “angry young feminists… decided we’d do a little public service” and graffitied the exterior of a ‘Teen Pregnancy Centre’ which had just opened in town, and was, in fact, “a front for a right-wing operation telling teenage girls they’d go to hell if they had abortions”.
She wrote ‘Fake abortion clinic, everyone’ on the walls, while Kurt added, in six-foot-high red letters, ‘God is gay.’ Mission accomplished, they continued drinking, and ended up at Kurt’s apartment, where Kathleen scrawled lots of graffiti on his walls, including the words, ‘Kurt smells like teen spirit [a deodorant brand].’
“Kurt called me up six months later,” she added, “and he said, ‘Hey, do you remember that night? There’s a thing you wrote on my wall… it’s actually quite cool, and I want to use it.’”
Just before the recording session, Nirvana played through their songs at a nearby rehearsal space. “It blew me away,” Butch remembers. “It was the first time I heard Dave Grohl play live, and it sounded so amazing. I was floored when I heard it. I remember pacing around thinking, ‘Oh my God, this sounds crazy intense.’”
To give Teen Spirit proper emphasis, Butch wanted to use some studio trickery, though Kurt was typically reluctant. “I said, ‘Kurt, I want you to double-track the guitars and vocals, to really make this jump out of the speakers.’ He thought it was ‘cheating’, especially with his vocals. So I had him do multiple vocal takes, and he sang them so consistently I could run them at the same time as a double track, and it really made the song sound powerful”.
On its thirtieth anniversary, Smells Like Teen Spirit will get a lot of new love and attention. I think it is still an immensely powerful song that can ignite and inspire new generations. Maybe it is over-familiar to those of us who were around then the song came out, though it is such an anthem and work of genius that means, years from now, it will be picked over and admired. Recently, Far Out Magazine published an article that explained why Kurt Cobain was never overly-keen on one of his greatest songs:
“It’s safe to say that unless you have had your head firmly placed underneath a rather large rock, then you will have some knowledge of Nirvana and their teen-angst anthem ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. It’s a song that has transcended the ideals of normal music to became, and remained, a bastion of anti-authoritarian feeling and generational discontent.
While the track remains a favourite with all who hear it, in truth, the band’s uncompromising and highly-valued lead singer Kurt Cobain never took it seriously from the start. It has since become a symbol of all the things that Cobain hated about Nirvana’s rise to prominence and unwanted fame.
For all the iconoclastic musings which surround Nirvana’s frontman Cobain and his voice, it’s strange to think that Cobain never actually wanted to step up to the mic at all. Instead, he was more than happy to blend into the background and play his guitar. In a 1994 interview with Rolling Stone, he confessed: “I never wanted to sing, I just wanted to play rhythm guitar—hide in the back and just play. But during those high-school years when I was playing guitar in my bedroom, I at least had the intuition that I had to write my own songs.
PHOTO CREDIT: Tony Mottram
A few years down the road from Nirvana’s humble beginnings in the late 1980s, and into the brand new decade, one of Cobain’s songs would go on to define an entire generation and now forever live in the pantheon of great rock songs. The emergence of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came alongside the band’s breakthrough album Nevermind and set hearts and minds ablaze.
The album and the grunge movement—largely coming out of Seattle—arrived like a slap to the face, a big wake-up call, a gut-punch, and other violent similies, to irreversibly shake the music industry up and never really let it settle back in the same way.
In truth, it picked up rock and roll and deliberately turned it on its head and shrugged as it walked away, unphased by the inconvenience. Grunge was the beginning of ‘Generation X’ and all the scenes that went with it. It was the call to arms, the plodding feet of a new youth platoon and, invariably, that platoon was accompanied by a marching band playing Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ as loudly as they possibly could.
The song was a track that broke down the barriers of rock and showed that, if done correctly, any band could traverse the snooty pop charts and achieve success without compromising their values or give away their morals for a buck or two. This was a concept Cobain struggled to handle.
Eventually though, Cobain stuttered to an understanding on Nirvana’s breadth of new followers, telling RS: “I don’t have as many judgments about them as I used to, I’ve come to terms about why they’re there and why we’re here.” However, in that same interview, he would highlight just why he held so much disdain for the song and those fans who came with it, often refusing to play it at live shows.
“Everyone has focused on that song so much,” Cobain continued. “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, than that song, like ‘Drain You.’ That’s definitely as good as ‘Teen Spirit’. I love the lyrics, and I never get tired of playing it. Maybe if it was as big as ‘Teen Spirit’, I wouldn’t like it as much”.
I am going to leave it there, but I wanted to include Smells Like Teen Spirit in this feature as it is coming up to its thirtieth anniversary. It is played quite a lot. I don’t think that dents the song’s impact. To me, it hasn’t really lost any of its importance and passion because of that exposure. A respectful salute to Smells Like Teen Spirit: a timeless and phenomenal anthem that is…
ALL grown up.