Here we are now: it’s time to talk about “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” got its name because Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill wrote “KURT SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT” on the wall of Kurt’s apartment. She wrote it because his girlfriend at the time, Tobi Vail, wore Teen Spirit deodorant. Kurt didn’t know that Teen Spirit was a deodorant; he thought it meant something revolutionary. In retrospect, he wasn’t wrong.
I don’t know if I can tell you definitively when I first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It’s one of those songs that I’ve just sort of always known, one of those songs that feels like they’ve always existed. I never paid much attention to it, though, at least not until sophomore year when I started reading Rookie and realized how many references and pieces of pop culture I was missing out on. I went to the library a lot more than usual that year to bring myself up to speed, spending hours in the CD section to pick up any albums that seemed important to know about and form an opinion on. I could have used the internet to do that, I guess, but the browsing was important to me because I didn’t even know what I wanted to listen to. Nevermind was in a stack of about 20 CDs I picked out one week.
It’s difficult to explain the way “Smells Like Teen Spirit” made me feel, listening to it then. I remember starting the album in my CD player then laying back on my bed to finish whatever paranormal YA romance I was probably reading at the time. Except I didn’t get much reading done that day, because the song stopped me in my tracks. I remember putting the book down and sitting up very straight when I heard those opening chords. I knew those chords; I had heard the song before. But never like this.
For the first two-ish years of high school, I was very quiet. Some of my silence came from genuine shyness but I also think it was deliberate. I didn’t want to say anything uninteresting, ever, so I’d wait until I had something good in mind before speaking. But when I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that afternoon, it stirred up an anger in me I didn’t even know I had. It’s fun to lose and to pretend sounded like it was a direct taunt against me, except it also felt like a call for me to join Nirvana in their righteous anger. Here we are now, entertain us. There was no question that I became a part of that we the second I heard those words.
There are few songs that changed pop culture as immediately and completely as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” did. The rest of Nirvana’s output to follow would always run in the shadow of that song. The reason why is no mystery to me. It’s familiar and relatable, but it still shocks the senses to their very core. You listen to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and you’re immediately inducted into the unwavering, indistinguishable we, but it feels more comforting than it does conformist because there’s an unspoken Other you’re rebelling against. It’s never spelled out specifically what you should be so angry about, but you know without a doubt that you should be angry about something. It would feel stupid not to be, like missing out on something important happening in the other room.
The song is big, there’s no denying that, but there’s still an intimacy in the way it seems to tap directly into every stupidly dramatic anti-anything thought you’ve ever had. And of course it’s the teenagers who feel it the strongest–we’re the most stupidly dramatic group of people around.
It’s easy to make fun of it all–the melodrama, the “I’m a special snowflake and no one else is as misunderstood as me,” the teenagers sitting around the fire pit talking naively and pretentiously about how they (we) want to change the world. It’s a perfectly valid thing to make fun of. The song is ridiculous in a lot of ways, and teenagers are ridiculous in even more ways than that. But I choose to see it as more earnest and sincere than anything else. Earnest because with one song, Nirvana managed to tap into the feelings of millions of people, feelings that had previously been the source of loneliness and isolation. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” made me feel angry, yes, but in the long term it was more of a source of comfort than anything else. What better way is there to have an emotion validated than to be shaken by the shoulders and told you’re not the only one?
I didn’t know what kind of music I wanted to listen to or what kind of person I wanted to be when I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that afternoon. But when the song was over, I knew one thing: I was done being quiet.
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