The Nirvana song Kurt Cobain thought was bad for music

(Credits: Far Out / Subpop)

Sun 13 October 2024 18:00, UK

Artists shouldn’t just be looking at their songs as vehicles for becoming hits. Even if it doesn’t reach the top of the charts, whatever you end up writing is going to be set in stone forever from the minute that you lay it down, so it’s probably more important to have something to say rather than just trying your best to sound semi-coherent. Although most people had a hard time deciphering what Kurt Cobain was saying through the lyrics in Nirvana’s songs, the frontman thought that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ did much more harm to the future of music than good.

At the time, though, the song was the answer to everyone’s prayers, coming after years of people trying their hand at making new hair metal tracks. Nobody wanted to talk about partying and getting laid anymore, so someone screaming at the top of their lungs, begging to be entertained by something different, was a lot more relatable for people.

Then again, this also started the ongoing pattern of people carefully trying to figure out just what Cobain was going on about. The title itself is very provocative, but the minute that people start looking from one line to the next, it does not make sense when every other lyric has almost nothing to do with the one that precedes it.

But what if that is all by design? The song is about people getting bored and trying their best to articulate their feelings, so seeing these single lines almost read like individual poetic phrases stitched together to create something that rolls off the tongue could well be the motif the lyricist was after. Given that this was the dawn of the information age, every line is almost like watching Cobain channel-surfing and picking out whatever lyrics come into his head.

Once the chorus hits, those roaring guitars are the perfect bed for Cobain’s voice as he talks about the entire generation being stupid and contagious. That may be a good look at what the age of irony was about to become, but Cobain did think that he wanted with too broad a brush.

In the book Come As You Are, Cobain felt that he came off way too flippant with those lines, saying, “I got caught up pointing the finger at this generation. The results of that aren’t very positive at all. All it does is alienate people and make them feel the same feeling you get from an evil stepdad. It’s like, ‘You’d better do it right.’ I don’t mean to do that because I know throughout the 1980s, my generation was fucking helpless.”

Admittedly, the chorus does come off as a bit abrasive when taken out of context, but the wave of grunge actually helped shape the meaning of the tune as well. Many people felt helpless about themselves, but looking at where acts like Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains ended up, they still managed to push themselves forward and become musical legends despite going through the darkest days anyone can go through.

For all of the cynical angles that you can take out of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, no one should look at the odds stacked against them and then immediately think about giving up. It’s about doing everything you can to prove those detractors wrong and coming out on the other side as a much stronger person.

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