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More Than Words: Kurt Smells Too Much Success
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Kurt Cobain
Have you ever loved a song to the point of ridiculousness but no matter how hard you try, you just can’t understand the lyrics? What was the artist thinking when writing your favorite tune? More Than Words, a weekly column, will help to delve a little deeper…
Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana (Nevermind – 1991)
Legend has it that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, the grunge-anthem that launched Nirvana’s tumultuous career, was named after….deodorant.
Before skyrocketing to the fame and superstardom that Kurt Cobain tried hard to avoid, he dated Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail. It was after she dumped him, that Bikini band mate Kathleen Hanna told Cobain he ‘smelled like Teen Spirit’, the deodorant that Vail wore at the time. Cobain claimed that having been interested in the idea of anarchy and punk rock, he took the phrase to have some kind of revolutionary meaning. He did not know ‘Teen Spirit’ was a brand of deodorant until much later.
Cobain was writing a song about teen apathy, which he then decided to name ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ (representing the more political connotation). The title was never mentioned as a lyric in the song.
Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic said in an interview, “Kurt really despised the mainstream. That's what ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was all about: The mass mentality of conformity.”
When chatting to Rolling Stone in 1994 less than three months before he died, Cobain said of the song, “I don’t even remember the guitar solo on ‘Teen Spirit’. I don’t know if that’s lazy or I don’t care anymore. Everyone focused on that song so much. The reason it gets such a big reaction is people have seen in on MTV a million times. It’s been poured into their brains. I can barely get through ‘Teen Spirit’ (on stage). I literally want to throw my guitar down and walk away.”
The lyrics ‘Here we are now, entertain us’ came from something Cobain used to say to break the ice every time he walked into a party.
“A lot of times, when you’re standing around with people in a room, it’s really boring and uncomfortable. So it was, ‘Well, here we are, entertain us. You invited us here’.”
When discussing the song in Michael Azerrad's biography Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, Cobain revealed that he felt a duty “to describe what I felt about my surroundings and my generation and people my age.”
However, the lyrics to the song are open to interpretation mainly due to the murky way in which Cobain vocalizes on the record. It has been said that the incomprehensive nature of Cobain’s slurring actually prevented some radio stations from initially playing the song on air.
Cobain has said, “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.” Drummer Dave Grohl stated he does not believe the song has any message:
“Just seeing Kurt write the lyrics to a song five minutes before he first sings them, you just kind of find it a little bit hard to believe that the song has a lot to say about something. You need syllables to fill up this space or you need something that rhymes.”
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