Legendary Rock Songs: SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT: NIRVANA.
Theme:SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT.
Disc:Nevermind.
Year:1991.
“What are we up to, entertain us”. That was the phrase that marked a whole generation, the simple and concise expression of the teenage feeling of the 90's, of what was called generation X, of “grunge”. Young people from the upper middle class who did not find any interest and lived in a continuous apathy, a monotony only broken by a kind of entertainment that was socially and morally frowned upon but that in the end was nothing but a way out: rock music, sex, drugs, alcohol... Kurt Cobain ended up becoming the very thing he sang about, a guy who had everything, who was at the peak of success, but who was disillusioned with the role he had to live.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” encompassed a feeling of youthful congregation, that pessimism and slovenliness that wanted to sell itself as the trademark of the Seattle sound. Many say that it was nothing but an invention of the industry to manufacture all those bands equally, but the truth is that in a certain way that conception was far from the fun without barriers that until then had meant and carried implicit in some way the rock n' roll.
However, the process of creation of the song was far from all that, from that transcendent and deliberately pessimistic air that he wanted to give it. Before his fatal romance with Courtney Love, Cobain flirted with the girls of the female group Bikini Hill, especially with the drummer Tobi Vail, who used a deodorant called “Teen Spirit”. On a drunken night at the home of another member of the group, singer Kathleen Hanna, while with Cobain, she spray-painted the phrase “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” on her bedroom wall, in reference to the mark or stigma that her friend Vail had left on him.
Cobain didn't even know that it was a reference to a deodorant, but he decided to use the phrase for what would become his most famous song. There are also those who say that the famous refrain, “here we are now, entertain us” was the resource used by Cobain on his arrival to the parties, but this is more legend than anything else. The certain thing is that finally of all that a song was born in an improvisation of Nirvana in their rehearsal room, to which Kurt gave the sense of “adolescent spirit” that has extended and that somehow stigmatized the whole scene that came to be called “alternative”. Also the emblematic riff has its history, four simple chords that some point out as a clear reinterpretation of Boston's “More Than A Feeling” to which the dissonant mark of the Pixies would have been added, whom Cobain cited as inspiration when he said he had composed the song trying to create “the definitive pop song”.
The truth is that he succeeded, because that guitar and the shocking chorus sung with his typical rabid throat became a tremendous success, in the song that would turn “Nevermind” into a best-seller and consequently would elevate Nirvana to the rock altars and to the massive popularity that would end up destroying them. Forced to play his big hit night after night, Cobain ended up loathing his own composition and people's eagerness to hear him sing it. The “teen spirit” had become a consumer product for girls whose only problems were the pimples of puberty. Disgusted, as you all know, Cobain opted for the extreme solution, and this year we celebrate the tenth anniversary of his suicide.
The music video was also to blame for the success of the song (which reached the sixth position in the Billboard singles chart), because although MTV initially refused to broadcast it, soon after it was the most broadcasted video in its programming. The band hated the video, which showed them playing on some high school basketball court, although this one also had some hidden double entendre in its background, as strippers were used to play the cheerleaders. But no matter how much Cobain tried to give ironic sense to his songs or to demystify his conflicting personality, the industry always ended up misrepresenting him to keep selling him as a tortured icon. A pity, at least maybe he never knew that thanks to his song, deodorant sales skyrocketed...
Friends I hope you like this report of this great band and especially of this classic of rock music that has survived the passage of time and still remains an ito of pop culture and classic rock.
See you in a new post and thanks for reading. A thousand blessings.
