Kurt Cobain, the year before Smells Like Teen Spirit was released. Credit: Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage
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Kurt Cobain was dissatisfied, dissatisfaction being his default state. It was 17 August 1991 and Nirvana were in a studio in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, shooting the video for their new single “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. The singer’s notion of a high-school pep rally exploding into arson and anarchy was not going to plan. He thought the gymnasium set was too clean, the cheerleaders too buff and glossy, and the director too uptight. He was only happy at the end of the day when the hot, hungry extras — recruited at a Nirvana show two days earlier — were allowed to run wild and wreck the set. His own performance was fuelled by Jim Beam and irritation.
Oh well, whatever, never mind. The video did the job. Nirvana’s record label DGC chose “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as an introduction to their Nevermind album, believing that the more straightforwardly catchy “Lithium” and “In Bloom” had bigger hit potential, but they miscalculated. When the band were on tour that autumn, they would return to their hotel rooms after a show, turn on MTV and invariably find their own faces staring back at them. Radio stations that deemed it too harsh for daytime airplay were bombarded by requests and ended up rotating it so heavily that it was six months before DGC could release a follow-up single. Nirvana’s talking-point performances on Top of the Pops (passive-aggressive) and The Word (aggressive-aggressive) helped make the song a UK sensation, too.
For all Nevermind’s front-to-back brilliance, it wouldn’t have been a multi-platinum, industry-changing phenomenon if not for that one song. Soon, it was being covered by Tori Amos, parodied by Weird Al Yankovic and sampled by rappers and dance producers. Cobain said two years later that “it’s almost an embarrassment to play it… Everyone has focussed on that song so much.”
Smart observers intuited that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was more than just a popular song. Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times called Nevermind “the awakening voice of a new generation”. Cobain himself suggest in the album’s press release: “Maybe what we need is a new generation gap.” Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X preceded Nevermind by six months but the most popular term at the time was “baby busters”: bust follows boom. A year later, The Atlantic dedicated 11,000 words to selling the doomed concept of “Thirteeners,” i.e. the thirteenth generation of Americans since 1776. The writers dismissed this generation’s music as “a rock-and-roll endgame of harsh sounds, goin’-nowhere melodies, and clumsy poetry”.
Whatever they were called, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” spoke to them loud and clear, specifically the countercultural wing that could be seen in films like Slacker and Singles. “These three individuals represent their generation,” said Jonathan Poneman from Nirvana’s first label Sub Pop. “This band not only delivers the goods, they manage to capture the time.” In the video’s surly, murky rebuke to the mega-budget gloss of early 90s MTV, the fans aren’t just an audience; they’re a tribe. Dressed much the same as the three performers, they eliminate the gap, physically and metaphorically, with the climactic stage invasion. Kim Thayil of Nirvana’s Seattle contemporaries Soundgarden identified the video’s implicit message: “There you guys are, here we are, and we’re you.”
But what was the song actually saying to them? Cobain liked explaining his lyrics even less than he enjoyed writing them. He would scrawl multiple drafts in notebooks and piece them together at the last minute. “A lot of the time I write a song and when someone asks me about it I’ll make up an explanation on the spot because… I have no idea what I’m talking about half the time,” he told the NME. In the case of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, only a few lines of chorus from the demo and live debut in April 1991 remained in the studio version a few weeks later.
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SubscribeEvery generation thinks they invented this sh** and you don’t see it until you are the older generation. I was listening to ‘Land of Confusion’ by Genesis the other day and it’s the same thing. The funniest bit is Phil Collins proclaiming ‘my generation will put it right, we’re not just making promises that we know we’ll never keep’. Aaah the follies of (prematurely balding) semi-youth. I bet if Kurt Cobain were alive today he would be like Dave Grohl. A millionaire middle-aged rocker.
So, same old same old then?
NO, different each time. Some generations are positive, constructive, build – some negative, destructive, tear down. Then the range between.
The modern generations are useless wan*er s, entitled, lazy, degenerate, self loathing, outwardly hating, and useless for the most part. Unfortunately I do not know their music as it S*cks so much – but if someone could link to their generational song I would be curious enough to stream it.