Nirvana made something iconic on August 17, 1991. Thirty-four years ago today, Nirvana shot the music video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a piece of media that became iconic.
Videos by American Songwriter
The video, which showed a school concert ending in a riot, was inspired by Over the Edge. The 1979 movie showed kids rebelling and demolishing a school.
First-time director Samuel Bayer helmed the video, which was shot for under $50,000. He got the job because Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain thought his reel was the worst submitted.
“I had a pretty bad reel, and I think that Kurt Cobain decided that it was a very punk thing to do to pick the nonconformist to do his video,” Bayer told Slashfilm in 2010. “And I saw it as my big break.”
Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Music Video
When Bayer actually arrived at the Culver City set, though, he and Cobain “fought like tooth and nail” and had “a very intense experience.”
“Kurt really was so unhappy with what I was doing, he refused to lip-sync the song,” Bayer recalled. “… I turned to the head of the record company and I said, ‘Look, you’re going to have an amazing video if you just let the guy sing the song one time. I don’t care how much he doesn’t like me, just sing the song one time.’”
“And he gave this incredible performance that was kind of directed at me that was filled with venom and anger, and everything—and angst—and everything else, and it’s this weird thing of pushing people, whether they wanted to be pushed or not,” he continued. “It’s like he gave this incredible performance that really became the heart of the video.”
The video ended with the extras who were recruited by the band to appear in the video destroying the set. That was not a scripted scene. Rather, it was the result of the young people being annoyed at sitting around all day.
“Once the kids came out dancing they just said ‘f**k you,’ because they were so tired of this s**t throughout the day,” Cobain told author Michael Azerrad, per Business Insider.
Bayer backed up that account.
“The last 30 seconds of that video is those kids destroying the set,” Bayer told Cnet (per BI). “I just happened to have a roll of film in the camera.”
The Legacy of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
When it came down to it, Bayer said he thinks that the resulting video “looks pretty cool.” The public largely agreed, and the video went on to win two MTV Video Music Awards. In 2000, Guinness World Records named “Smells Like Teen Spirit” the Most Played Video on MTV Europe.
“The cheerleaders were strippers. The janitor in the video was the janitor from my apartment complex in Venice, and he had an asthma attack from all the smoke on the stage. The kids I recruited from a show at the Whiskey A Go Go. They were drinking and they destroyed the set,” he told Slashfilm. “[It was] just a really amazing day.”
Photo by Paul Bergen/Redferns
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