By the end of Nirvana's time together, Nevermind had sold millions of copies - but the band had dropped "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from its live shows.Ĭobain openly worried that the band was attracting the kind of fans he would have hated in high school. "That was the genius of the song: It combined a fierce commentary on shallowness while still having a mass-appeal musicality."Ĭobain's struggle with his own demons - including heroin addiction - ended in April 1994, 25 years ago this month, when he took his own life at age 27. " 'With the lights out, it's less dangerous / Here we are now, entertain us.' It was rock and roll, and kind of an ironic commentary on rock and roll, at the same time," Goldberg says. And then I find myself having to come up with explanations for it."Īmerican Anthem The Legacy Of 'Adam's Song,' An Anthem To Darkness, Loss - And Recovery "A lot of times when I write lyrics, it's just at the last second because I'm really lazy. "I was just using pieces of poetry and just garbage - you know, just stuff that just would spew out of me at the time," he told the Canadian TV channel MuchMusic in 1993. "But what are you supposed to say? 'A mosquito, my libido.' That's the spokesperson."Ĭobain often warned interviewers against reading too much into his lyrics. "People often will say, 'Well, they ushered in the new generation,' " Boddy says. Boddy, now vice president of publicity at Capitol Records, says you can see that in the handmade T-shirt Cobain wore for the band's 1992 cover shoot with Rolling Stone magazine, which read " Corporate Magazines Still Suck." Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was famously ambivalent about the band's success. "It's perfect for the generation it represented because this was a cohort that was so ambivalent about any traditional values conventional success." " 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' is an unusual anthem because it refuses the role of the anthem," says NPR Music critic Ann Powers. That was the genius of the song: It combined a fierce commentary on shallowness while still having a mass-appeal musicality. ![]() We were too jaded for a feel-good, sing-along anthem. Lyrics like "I found it hard, it was hard to find / Oh well, whatever, never mind" cut to the heart of Gen X, a group that includes this reporter. This song in particular felt so ambivalent about its own success." "As a teenager, I think you're really trying to figure out your place in the world. "Like millions of kids my age, this is the first thing that felt like it was mine," Hsu says. Nine months after playing the song live for the first time, Nirvana was performing it on Saturday Night Live. The music video, featuring cheerleaders with the anarchy symbol scrawled on their black uniforms, was in heavy rotation on MTV. ![]() "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was all over the radio. The album Nevermind had just come out on a major label. He was a 14-year-old in suburban Northern California when he first heard the song in September 1991. "I just remember feeling as though it was this inescapable presence in my life," says Hua Hsu, a staff writer at The New Yorker. ![]() The song forged an instant connection with Generation X - the generation sandwiched between baby boomers and millennials - which was deeply skeptical about the music and culture of its parents.Īn anthem, in other words, for a generation that didn't want one. Within months, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" would make Nirvana famous around the world.
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