Nirvana, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’: One day, it changed

Nirvana
‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 7 on December 1, 1991

Everyone who creates stuff dreams that their stuff will go on to change the world.

I’m doing it right now. As I write this essay, I’m trying to foster some sense of connection, to make you feel something. I know that if I can just find the right combination of words, I can make you, the reader, go ding.

(Ding is the sound a human brain makes when an idea strikes it in just the right way.)

If I can somehow get you to ding, your next instinct will be to share this feeling with the people you care about. Hopefully, they will also ding and share it with their friends.

And, if all goes well, it will lead to a ripple of simultaneous dings ringing out across the globe, like all of our alarm clocks going off at once.

This kind of mass ding-ing used to be rare. In the digital age, it happens multiple times each day. We had to invent a term for it — going viral.

But virality is fleeting. The moment passes, and everything goes back to the way it was.

Artists dream of is something beyond that. They want to make something that causes a ding so deep and profound that those who experience it are transformed forever.

On November 28, 1991, Nirvana did a ridiculous, chaotic, piss-take version of their new single, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, on Top of the Pops. And at the time, it felt to me like everyone I knew had watched it and went…

Ding.

Quick bit of background here:

For a long time, there had been a feeling among myself and my 14-year old cohort that we were musically homeless. We had cringey mainstream rap like Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer. We had repetitive techno that all sounded the same. We had the dying wails of the hair metal dinosaurs, such as those on the Use Your Illusion records.

Metallica’s black album had resonated most loudly with my peers (pasty, white, catholic, bourgeois, horny, angry boys), but it had given us the sense that we were part of a movement.

I missed Nirvana’s Top of the Pops performance that night. But when I came to school the next day, everything had changed.

And I mean, everything. There was flannel everywhere. People had started combing their hair differently. Boys walked with this disaffected slouch, as if bored and resentful for being alive.

I felt confused and disconnected until I heard the music, and then I got it too.

(Confession: I didn’t get grunge immediately. I was puzzled by ‘Teen Spirit’ for a while, and then I heard ‘In Bloom’ and it all clicked.)

The only time — and I say this without a hint of exaggeration — the only time I have seen a cultural transformation as complete and as rapid as this was in March 2020, when Covid drove the whole world went into lockdown.

Sometimes, a generation of teenagers will get the feeling that they are the axis upon which the world is spinning.

It’s the feeling my parents’ generation had when they heard ‘Houndog’, or when early Gen Xers saw Bowie do ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops in ‘73.

In that ‘Starman’ performance, Bowie sings “I had to phone someone so I picked on you-ooh-ooh”, and as he says “you”, he stares right down the barrel of the camera and points at the viewer.

In that moment, you understand that this really is all about you. All of it. All of pop. All of music. All of art and culture. The whole world exists just for you. You are young and alive, your brain is fresh and uncluttered, and the world can be whatever you want it to be.

You are the children of the revolution. You are the kids in America. It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, and you’re feelin’ good.

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven.

When does that feeling slip away?

I don’t know. I remember being in my early 20s, fresh out of college, sitting in a cafe with a newspaper. There were a bunch of kids outside, maybe 16 at most. They were dressed like it was still 1992. Flannel and Converse, t-shirts with the Nirvana smiley face.

I felt a little sad. Nirvana was to them what Bowie had been to me at their age. Something awesome but something old, the sound of a party you missed. They wouldn’t know what it was like to have Nirvana happening right now.

I wished their own movement for them. And, six months later, I saw them all again (or another ground of teens, I wasn’t stalking them or anything) dressed as emos.

Did emo give them the same feeling grunge had given me? I hope so. I suspect it’s nothing to do with the music. Maybe it’s just about being young and realising that your youth is a kind of power.

Yesterday, while buying groceries, I saw a middle-aged woman behind me in the queue. She was dressed sensibly, with a nice warm winter coat and a cloth mask. Grey hair under a bobble hat.

But peeking out from under her jacket was the unmistakable central V of the Nirvana logo. There’s no denying the garish yellow, or the weirdly formal serif font.

I looked at her and my first thought was, “wow, that old lady is a Nirvana fan.”

Approximately one second later, a wave of crushing self-awareness beat down on me. It’s that feeling you get when you walk into the bathroom and think, “shit, there’s a weird old man in here. Oh, no, wait. That’s just the mirror.”

My daughter is now the age I was when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ dropped. She’s heard the song many times, most recently as a sad piano ballad at the start of Marvel’s Black Widow. To her, it’s just some old song.

But sometimes she’ll breathlessly play a new song for me, something that has resonated with her and seems to be resonating with lots of people her age. It doesn’t resonate with me. I am too old now.

But I’m glad she has that moment where the world feels open to her. I’m glad she gets her turn to find things that make her go ding. I already had my moment, and I enjoyed it.

---

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this, here are two things you can do next.