FEATURE:
And for This Gift, I Feel Blessed
Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit at Thirty-Five
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THIS is arguably…
IN THIS PHOTO: Nirvana (L-R: Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl) photographed in May 1991/PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Lavine
one of the greatest songs in music history. Also, one of those tracks that made a huge impact. The lead single from their second studio album, Nevermind, Smells Like Teen Spirit came out on 10th September, 1991. Few bands who had followed the U.S. trio reached this peak. 1989’s Bleach is a good album, but the leap from that to Nevermind was one of the biggest seen by any act. Smells Like Teen Spirit is an anthem that remains hugely played, loved and dissected. As it turns thirty-five soon, I wanted to spend time with it. There is so much written around the single, and I cannot realistically include everything. There are some select features that I do want to bring in, though. I will come to a feature that discusses the iconic video. Almost as beloved and discussed as the song. I do love the story behind Smells Like Teen Spirit. In their 2025 feature, uDiscover Music give us background regarding the title and the lyrics. A timeless anthem. If it was about the banality and artificial nature of the world around Kurt Cobain in 1991, these words are relevant now. Perhaps with a different meaning, one can still connect with the anger that is delivered. It relates to the modern age:
“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 immediately its infectious qualities as befitting his intentions for this new batch of material.
Displeased with the oppressive, sludgy sound that had dominated their 1989 debut, Bleach, Kurt wanted to ensure that its follow-up would further expose the expressive moments that their debut harbored, allowing for songs with a stronger, more unabashed sense of melody than before. As well as being a champion of the uncompromising punk rock of Wipers and the primal power of Swans, Kurt was also a Beatles obsessive, and always sought to contrast his work’s prevailing darkness with an appreciable edge.
“[Kurt] had that dichotomy of punk rage and alienation, but also this vulnerable pop sensibility,” said producer Butch Vig, who’d be drafted in for this album’s sessions.
“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.”
His design for this particular song was far more ambitious than any nihilistic punk diatribe: he wanted to write “the ultimate pop song.” As he composed it, his mind was on the use of dynamics as employed by another influence, the Pixies, in particular 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 continuously play this “Louie Louie” rip-off for over an hour. Eventually, at Novoselic’s suggestion, the song’s pace was reduced, which allowed new drummer Dave Grohl (recently hired to replace Chad Channing) to throw in some “disco flams” inspired by funk drummer Tony Thompson. (This process is why it’s the only song on Nevermind in which all three band members are credited as writers.)
It was then crudely recorded onto cassette, which was sent to Butch Vig to notify him of this latest 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 song’s lyrics
The lyrics on that recording were largely unfinished, and would only be completed once the band were in Vig’s studio. They’d got to Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, in May 1991, having stuck to their guns with the choice of producer, despite the objections of Geffen Records, the major label they’d just signed to after leaving the Seattle-based indie Sub Pop – a move spearheaded by Cobain that again pitched his ambitions against his punk rock ideologies.
Once complete, the lyrics seemed to corroborate the turmoil Kurt felt in dealing with his conflicting thoughts (“I’m worst at what I do best,” he sings), and while it infuriates him (“I feel stupid and contagious”), he resigns himself to his shortcomings (“Oh well, whatever, never mind”). He also famously included a relatively inscrutable line that has been misheard since its release. (“A mulatto, an albino / A mosquito, my libido.”)
Kurt’s words were seething with anger – aimed at himself and the world around him, which he viewed as banal and artificial. “I just didn’t get them the first time I read them,” Novoselic later said 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 just three takes of the song, the second was chosen as the master, then, emboldened by double-tracked guitars and multilayered vocals (which Kurt had to be convinced to do by Butch Vig, who cited John Lennon’s tendency to do the same), became indomitably forceful.
The song’s title
The song title, meanwhile, retains its own paradoxical context. Not mentioned within the lyrics, the phrase dates back to the previous year, when during a night of drinking at Kurt’s apartment in Olympia, Washington, his friend 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 spotted in the grocery store 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 said. “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?”
Despite its playful teasing, Kurt, who was unaware of the name’s origins, interpreted the graffiti another way. “I took that as a compliment,” he said, choosing it a year later to evoke the rebellious energy 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 management didn’t identify with the song’s rallying cries, and therefore weren’t invested fully in its release as a single until it was delivered to college radio in August of 1991. Their expectations were soon to be confounded; “Smells Like Teen Spirit” went into heavy rotation, and then things got even bigger.
‘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 said. “But the video was probably the key element in that song becoming a hit”.
I am not sure if Nirvana knew what impact Smells Like Teen Spirit would have upon its release. In 2014, NME wrote an article that argued Smells Like Teen Spirit began a youth revolution. I was perhaps a little young to feel that in 1991. And I was living in the U.K., so perhaps there was not quite the same explosion here as the U.S. Even so, this incredibly powerful and perfect song holds immense weight with so many generations today. A new generation of young listeners hearing this track and connecting with it:
“Its release in September 1991 sparked a revolution. After all the ugly optimism of President Ronald Reagan’s 1980s America, with the era’s booming free markets and “greed is good” mantra, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ gave a voice to a new class of young people overcome by apathy. Generation X, the newspapers called them, as if apathy was something new. The truth was, that feeling had simply never been given a voice, never made socially acceptable, never been made tangible. Nirvana, with this snarling anthem, their messy misfit thrift store clothes and smirking sense of abandon, wisecracking through interviews and shrugging off the media outlets fawning over them, made it real. If the murky brown colours of the ‘Teen Spirit’ music video, set in a high school auditorium complete with slow motion ironic cheerleaders, reminds you of the filthy brine at the bottom of a blocked drain, that’s because that’s how Cobain saw himself and his generation.
One of the last tracks written for ‘Nevermind’, the trio’s second album, ‘Teen Spirit’ began as a taunt scrawled on Cobain’s bedroom wall apartment by Bikini Kill riot grrl Kathleen Hanna in August 1990. The pair had spent an afternoon drinking, leaving his rented apartment to drunkenly picket a right-wing pregnancy centre, on which Kurt sprayed “GOD IS GAY” in six-feet letters. Returning to Cobain’s apartment, they “got a little more drunk, and I threw up on someone’s leg,” recalls Hanna. “I passed out with a marker pen in my hand and I woke up with one of those hangovers where you think if you go into the next room there could be a dead body in there… Six months later, Kurt called me to say, ‘there’s this thing you wrote on my wall and it’s kind of cool. I want to use it as a lyric in one of my songs.’”
Taking a combustive four-chord riff to rehearsal in early 1991, drummer Dave Grohl instantly loved its energy but had “no idea” it would spawn the monstrous hit it did. A pop song wrapped in punk aggression (“Boston’s ’More Than A Feeling’ with the lyrics changed,” as former NME journalist and close friend to Cobain Everett True called it in 2008), it had a simple verse-chorus structure inspired by the Pixies and was the only cut on ‘Nevermind’ on which all three band members received a songwriting credit. And rightly so – what would ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ be without that drum fill that jolts the song into action like a chainsaw revving into life, or Krist Novoselic’s bass slurs, slinking seductively around Kurt’s verse vocals?
The song’s impact was swift and violent, crashing a demolition ball through pop culture. Danny Goldberg of management firm Gold Mountain admitted that no one at Sub Pop or in Nirvana’s management heard it as having the potential to be a mainstream smash – the hope was to “sell roughly half what Sonic Youth sold on their last album, if we’re lucky “ with ‘Come As You Are’ seen in the Sub Pop camp as the best chance of a crossover hit. However, US college radio latched onto the song and crowds of hundreds were soon gathering outside sold-out Nirvana shows without tickets, in the vain hope of crashing the party”.
Everything about Smells Like Teen Spirit is perfect. Its video is one of the most memorable and enduring of all time. This giant leap Nirvana took and how this was like lightning in a bottle. In 2021, for its thirtieth anniversary, Produce Like a Pro wrote how Smells Like Teen Spirit revolutionised Rock & Roll for a new generation. It was a seismic moment in music history. I still feel it is one of the greatest songs ever. In the sense that nobody else has come up with anything that sounds as important or anthemic. The sheer size and impact of Smells Like Teen Spirit:
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” is an interesting song in many ways. Cobain credits the song’s dynamic changes and sound to an attempt to imitate the Pixies. He was attempting to write the “ultimate pop song.” With the newly recruited Grohl on drums, the band quickly found their groove writing and rehearsing the song together. They made a rough recording which they sent to Vig, who was continuing as their producer even through the label change. Vig recalls hearing that first recording of the song, which also was the first time he heard Grohl play with the band on drums
“Kurt introduced it by saying, ‘Hey Butch, we got some new songs for you, and we also got Dave Grohl – he’s the best drummer in the world!’ “Then they clicked into `Teen Spirit,’ with the scratchy guitar at the start. It was so fucking distorted, I could barely hear anything. …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 guitar sound is definitely striking in its distortion and edginess. From the minute the guitar introduces the song, audiences realized this was a band that sounded completely different from the world around them. The way Cobain slides from chord to chord sounds raw and unrehearsed and yet it’s so perfectly executed.Novoselic’s bass provides the song’s underlying pulse – but there’s actually more to it than you might think when you hear it underneath the rest of the mix. Isolated, you can hear his slides across the bass which definitely create that longing and pull that gives that song that contradictory sense of being pulled back simultaneously as it pushes forward. And of course when Grohl’s drums come in, it’s clear that Nirvana had found that harder sound they were looking for all along.
Perhaps the most striking part of the song, however, is Cobain’s haunting vocals which carry such amazing melodic content amid such a hard, aggressive sound. This is a huge element of what makes this song – and Nirvana – so amazing. The band takes the hard-rocking grunge sound, coming out of the Washington scene, and use it in conjunction with phenomenally captivating melodies. Cobain’s vocal melodies throughout the song are so different and creative against the straightforward chord progression.
The double tracking of the vocals creates both power and mystery in the track. Despite it being a common practice in recording by this time, Cobain was actually hesitant to double track his vocals. Vig recalled: “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.” It took Vig reminding Kurt that John Lennon had done it in his recordings to truly convince him to try the practice. But when we hear Cobain’s thick vocal sound on the chorus, it’s clear that Vig was making the right choice.
The song’s music video also captures the angst and teen-inspired focus of the song. The video – directed by Samuel Bayer – features the band performing in a high school gym to anarchy-touting cheerleaders and apathetic teenage listeners. As the performance continues, the teens erupt into a scene of chaos. The music video was the perfect complement to Nirvana’s take-over of the popular music landscape. It visually declared grunge’s dominance and highlighted the changing aesthetic of the new generation.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the rest of the Nevermind album was recorded at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, CA. Vig, who had produced their first intended tracks for the second album in their Sub Pop days, continued with them after their contract was bought out by DGC Records.
Despite the raw, unpolished sound that was championed by Grunge bands like Nirvana in the early 90s, the group was actually very well rehearsed and prepared before they even entered the studio. “They were psyched…As I started talking to them, they told me they were ready. They had been rehearsing every day for three months. There was definitely not a slacker ethic in that band. I mean, they wanted to make a great record. And Kurt [Cobain] was very ambitious, you know. When they walked into the studio, they were ready to go.”
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” has remained an iconic track in the history of rock, even inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of “Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll” in 1997 – only 6 years after its release! MTV and Rolling Stone listed it number 3 on their list of the 100 Greatest Pop Songs, and NME named in number 2 on their 100 Greatest Singles of All Time. Rolling Stone’s 2004 list of the 500 Greatest Rock Songs of All Time named “Smells Like Teen Spirit” number 9.
It has been credited with transforming the 90s rock landscape, which had previously been dominated by hair bands and polished pop. It ushered in a new sound for rock and roll. A sound which was both revolutionary, and yet somehow still apathetic – paralleling the band’s signature contradictory sensibilities in their sound and songwriting”.
Perhaps a feeling that the 1980s was defined by excess and music was bland and lacked rawness and authenticity. Smells Like Teen Spirit and bands like Nirvana very much shaking things up. I am ending with a MOJO interview from last year. Even though it was a breakthrough hit for Nirvana, nobody thought it would be a success and do what it did. Thirty-five years later and this colossus of a track gathers pace. It has been streamed on Spotify over three billion times. Its video has surpassed two billion views. It is one of these tracks that will never die or fade in terms of its importance and how meaningful it is. Generations from now, people will be talking about Smells Like Teen Spirit:
“Speaking to MOJO, Dave Grohl recalls the group writing the song in a friend’s shed and their surprise when the track – in part propelled by its video featuring Kurt Cobain performing in a high school gymnasium – catapulted Kurt and Nirvana into rock’s big leagues, bringing them in front of a whole new audience. “We started to notice there were normal people at the gigs,” Grohl tells Paul Brannigan. “That guy looks like a jock, what the fuck is he doing here? And it was like, Oh, maybe that video is attracting some riff-raff…”
Dave Grohl: “We wrote Smells Like Teen Spirit in January or February of 1991. We’d been rehearsing in this shed behind someone’s house in Tacoma, Washington. The guy who owned it played in a covers band, a bar band, and he rented out this rehearsal space with a home-made 8-track studio and we rehearsed there for three or four months and that’s where a lot of Nevermind was written.
We’d always start rehearsals with a jam, an open, free-form jam, and a lot of the songs came from that: songs like Drain You and Teen Spirit. At the time we were experimenting with dynamics, with the quiet verse/loud chorus thing: a lot of it was derivative of Pixies and Sonic Youth, but you just knew when the chorus was supposed to get bigger, and you just knew the point of the song where, just when you think you can’t take it any higher, you do take it one step higher.
I didn’t really think much of Teen Spirit at first. I thought it was just another one of the jams that we were doing: we had so many jams like that, that we’d record onto a boombox tape and then lose the cassette and lose the song forever. But Teen Spirit was one we kept coming back to because the simple guitar lines were so memorable.
We played a show in Seattle [at the OK Hotel, on April 17, 1991] to get gas money to go down to Los Angeles to record the record. We set it up at the last minute, it was an afternoon gig and we played that song for the first time and the audience went nuts. I don’t know if it was the rhythm or the melody but people got caught on it pretty quick.
With Nevermind, I thought In Bloom was going to be the ‘smash hit’ off the record, or Lithium. I thought Smells Like Teen Spirit was just another album cut. We recorded it pretty quickly, and I think it was one of [producer] Butch Vig’s favourites, and it soon became pretty clear that it would be the special song on the record. But, of course, at that point we didn’t think anything was going to happen with the record.
I thought Teen Spirit might get on [MTV’s] 120 Minutes and allow us to tour with Sonic Youth, but no one thought it was a hit single because [that] was just unimaginable. I mean the funniest part was seeing the video on MTV. We were touring America just as the album came out in September of ’91, playing places that held maybe 200-300 people, and we’d go back to the hotel and turn on the TV and see our video and go, That’s so funny, we’re on TV, and we’ve just played [legendary ’DC hardcore venue] the 9:30 Club, or whatever! Then with the video came more people and the clubs got bigger and bigger.
The [proper] tour started in Toronto at the Opera House and it seemed like a fairly typical Nirvana gig: there were maybe 500 or 600 people there. To me, you have to remember that was like making it, going from the 32 people who would usually come to see [Grohl’s pre-Nirvana band] Scream in every city to, like, 500 people, I considered that to be the greatest success of my entire life! But the capacity of a lot of the gigs that we were playing on that tour were low – we played a place in Portland, Maine or maybe Vermont where the legal capacity was 67, a tiny little living room of a place, it was chaotic.
When the video hit MTV it made a big difference. That’s when you’d show up to a 500-capacity gig and there were 500 extra people there. We were still in our little bubble – we were in our van, the three of us, Krist’s wife Shelli, our monitor guy Miles, and Monty Lee Wilkes, our tour manager – and it didn’t seem like anything unusual was happening until we’d get to the gig and it was fucking chaos. And we started to notice there were normal people here, what are they doing here? That guy looks like a jock, what the fuck is he doing here? And it was like, Oh, maybe that video thing is attracting some… riff-raff! The only indication that our world was turning upside down would be when you’d get to the venue. Then it would be, Holy shit, these people are nuts!
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. But the video was probably the key element in that song becoming a hit. People heard the song on the radio and they thought, ‘This is great,’ 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. But do I think it’s the greatest single of all time? Of course not! I don’t even think it’s the greatest Nirvana single. And compared to Revolution by The Beatles or God Only Knows by The Beach Boys?! Give me a break! Smells Like Teen Spirit was a great moment in time… but there’s better”.
On 10th September, we mark thirty-five years of Smells Like Teen Spirit. Whereas so many songs from 1991 and that time have dated and are forgotten, this Nirvana track definitely has not! I first heard it in the 1990s but, every time I play it now, it still does something to me. One of those inspired works of genius. Kurt Cobain gifting the world with this timeless anthem. If Nirvana were seen as underground or a rising trio prior to 10th September, 1991, the almighty Smells Like Teen Spirit…
CHANGED everything.