We will never see the likes of Nirvana again. Sure, we’ll see more rock bands hailed as the “voice of a generation”, ascend to the level of superstardom and beyond. In fact, we’ll see all those surface comparisons met given time, but Kurt Cobain and his band were something very different and very special. And, what we’ll never see is a jobbing garage rock band suddenly becoming the biggest pop act in the world off the back of one single, not only be able to keep that momentum going, but also utterly deserve it.
Let me perfectly clear: Nirvana were absolutely that good. It gets swept under the rug for the narrative, but people were fairly certain that they’d hit the big time. Their debut album, Bleach, was a fairly big seller for a Sub-Pop album in the late 1980s; they were a celebrated live band, and, most of all, anyone with a brainstem could see that Kurt Cobain was a star.
Before everything went mental, he was still a ridiculously talented singer, songwriter and frontman with the kind of tortured good looks made to be pasted on the bedroom walls of outcast teenagers. A lot of people were sure his band would make a buck. However, people were thinking the sound would be more Sonic Youth rather than, y’know, Nirvana.
Then Cobain wrote a song. The savvy bastard wanted to combine the grit and quiet/loud dynamics of the Pixies with the power chord riffage of ‘More Than a Feeling‘. So he did, by combining a ludicrously catchy pop hook with a message a drunk Kathleen Hanna wrote on his bedroom wall: “Kurt smells like teen spirit”.
How did ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ crush Kurt Cobain?
Cobain was inspired by Hanna’s message. He saw it as someone he deeply respected acknowledging him as the voice of his generation. Although Hanna was actually saying that Cobain was so broke he was using his girlfriend’s deodorant, two things can be true at once. This became Nirvana’s signature song and one of the biggest hits of the 1990s.
Here’s where things get complicated. Kurt Cobain wanted Nirvana to be a big deal. Probably not to the level that they became, but everyone involved in making their breakthrough album Nevermind recalls him doing cartwheels when hearing the album’s radio-friendly mix for the first time—a mix he would later trash in the press. All this to say that it’s worth taking things he’s said in the press with a pinch of salt.
However, when he discussed how much he grew to hate ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, one can’t help but feel he’s being honest. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Kurt told David Fricke that in he “was trying to write the ultimate pop song”. His disappointment was that people seemed to just enjoy it because it was a radio hit, rather than it actually resonating with them.
Later in the interview, Cobain said, “Once it got into the mainstream, it was over… 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.”
Again, Cobain was a contrarian at best and an outright contentious prick at worst, but one can see what he’s saying here. The tragedy is that I think he’s not giving his audience enough credit. Things don’t resonate just because they’re played on the radio. There were more than enough kids out there who felt seen and understood by Cobain’s work, but, as time would show, that wasn’t enough for him.