Everything about Smells Like Teen Spirit was perfect
In the introductory monologue of the Coen brothers’ iconic 1998 slacker comedy The Big Lebowski, Sam Elliott describes the Dude the following way: “Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there.”
Twenty-five years and over a hundred viewings later, I’m starting to understand what he meant by that. Timing is a crucial element of any form of success and it’s one that no one has control over. I was interviewing the CEO of a billion dollars startup for work a couple years ago and he told me something that goes along the same trail of thought: “The idea I had, anyone could’ve had it. When I had it was the important part.” He got rich because he was the first. He offered something new. He changed the paradigm for something that affects us all.
Kurt Cobain and his band Nirvana could’ve only become successful in 1991. The world was ready for them. No one could name it, but we were collectively ready for a youth culture act that exposed the fatigue and brooding anger at desperate leftover fakeness from the Ronald Reagan years. I was eight years old when I heard the lead single from their era-defining album Nevermind, so I was blissfully unaware of all that. I was even unaware they had a previous album. But Smells Like Teen Spirit happened and everything changed.
For the world and for me.
I don’t think it could’ve happened with any other song. I believe Smells Like Teen Spirit was the song for its time and place. It fit right there. Everything about it was perfect. I’ve written about it before, but I’m writing about it again in greater detail. Anatomy of a perfect song that arrived in a perfect way and at the perfect moment in popular culture.
The part about the song
Kurt Cobain claimed to whoever wanted to hear it in interviews that he was trying his hardest to rip off The Pixies when he wrote Smells Like Teen Spirit. He also claimed the words didn’t mean anything. That it was an abstract collage of bits of poetry he’d written over the years. All of this is true. He said to band biographer Michael Azerrad in Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana: “The entire song is made up of contradictory ideas ... It's just making fun of the thought of having a revolution. But it's a nice thought."
I couldn’t put it better myself, really.
Smells Like Teen Spirit is a rebellion against the idea of purposeful rebellion. It’s self-destructive. It’s counterintuitive. It’s rock n’ roll in the purest way possible : it is meant to forget your problems to. Whether you decide to dance or destroy someone else’s property to it is up to you, but Smells Like Teen Spirit is a visceral, brooding attack on the idea of meaning itself. It is a song meant to be felt, experienced and most important, lived in the now.
What makes Smells Like Teen Spirit such a convincing generational anthem is not what it says, but rather how it says it. Kurt Cobain is savantly building up to the emotional explosions of the chorus. He’s ominous and yet precise. I believe the key to the ruthless mechanic of the song is the bridge where Cobain repeats : “hello, hello, hello, how low” four times. It represents pure emptiness. Not only no meaning, but there are no words to analyze. Cobain uses the bridge as a launching ramp to coil into the emotional assault of the chorus.
The meaninglessness of the song is another variable that makes its appeal. What is more anxiety-inducing than something that eludes rationalization? Especially with alarming lines like “I feel stupid and contagious” that hit dead ends without any resolution. I believe it’s why the song is so powerful. It cannot be stored away under a neat, explicable label. It just is. Although Smells Like Teen Spirit would probably be successful today, it would be less so because the gap between adults and teenagers was a lot greater then. Self-destructive feelings are much better understood and accepted today than they were then.
Not only it freaked out parents then, but it shattered the idea of what a parent should be. Kids raised on Nirvana became adults and parents of their own. It made it OK to bring a little bit of the disenfranchised kid you were into adulthood. Smells Like Teen Spirit changed the world.
The part about the video
The video for Smells Like Teen Spirit was an underrated element of the song’s cultural impact. The way it presented the band and the underlying ideas of the song was huge.
First of all, it reappropriates an all-american symbol: the pep rally. If you’re not familiar with them, a pep rally is a very American idea that consists in organizing an event to rile up students ahead of a big football game. There’s nothing really happening in them except a lot of cheering and smack talking and color wearing. Pep rallies exist to foster school spirit and ensure the bleachers are gonna be full come game time.
In Smells Like Teen Spirit, the pep rally has been corrupted, sullied. The gymnasium it’s being held in is covered in brown and yellow smoke. Dirty colors. The pom pom girls have tattoos and skinny dresses, which was even more frowned upon in 1991 than it is today. They also look like older girls. Underworld vixens who mirror a life of sex and debauchery. The bleachers are full with burnout, flannel-wearing kids with a taste for destruction. The only adult presence is a hapless janitor who seems to have as much fun in the ongoing chaos as anyone else.
But that pep rally hasn’t gone wrong. It’s going exactly the way it’s supposed to. It’s a well-coordinated dance of destruction.
Smells Like Teen Spirit was the first professional video credited to Samuel Bayer, who’s now a legendary music video director and it contextualized what an otherwise uncontextualizable song was about: deconstructing meaning itself. By taking a meaningful all-American image and turning it into the scene of a chaotic punk show, Bayer and Nirvana stripped it of its symbolic power. The high school gym wasn’t a sanctified haven anymore. High energy rallies could be used by youth culture to create chaos and disorder instead of whatever they were supposed to do in there. It radiated a love for youth and a hatred for systems that trapped it in roles and hierarchies unsuited to the majority.
That video was really important in my life. Smells Like Teen Spirit served as an omen for what I was about to live. It freaked me out the first time I’ve seen it, but with every passing year I came to understand a bit better. Everyone is promised a place in the system. A life-affirming good time in high school and a lifetime of cheerful memories to treasure. But it’s not what happens. You won’t get a place in the system if you don’t execute a function that helps that system perpetuate, but it doesn’t mean there’s no place for you. There’s power in marginals coming together to fuck shit up.
Everything about Smells Like Teen Spirit was perfect. There was never anything like it before and there hasn’t been anything like it since. It was not outwardly Satanic, but it went to war with Judeo-Christian values. It was meant to change the world. It was meant to change me.
I hope it changed you too.
