In 1991, Nirvana scored their first Top 5 hit with “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Written by band members Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, and Krist Novoselic, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is from their sophomore Nevermind record.
The party anthem says in part, “With the lights out, it’s less dangerous / Here we are now, entertain us / I feel stupid and contagious / Here we are now, entertain us.“
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“Smells Like Teen Spirit” is diamond-certified, for sales in excess of ten million units. It’s a surprising success story for a song Cobain later said was really his attempt at copying another band’s sound.
“I was trying to write the ultimate pop song,” Cobain later admits to Rolling Stone. “I was basically trying to rip off The Pixies … When I heard The Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily, I should have been in that band — or at least in a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.”
What Kurt Cobain Said About Writing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” For Nirvana
Cobain might have been trying to emulate The Pixies, but that isn’t the only band he was trying to pattern the song after.
“‘Teen Spirit’ was such a clichéd riff,” Cobain says. “It was so close to a Boston riff or ‘Louie, Louie’. When I came up with the guitar part, Krist looked at me and said, ‘That is so ridiculous.’ I made the band play it for an hour and a half.”
Cobain later concedes that he stopped liking the song long before their fans did.
“For a few years in Seattle, it was the Summer of Love, and it was so great,” Cobain recounts. “To be able to just jump out on top of the crowd with my guitar and be held up and pushed to the back of the room, and then brought back with no harm done to me — it was a celebration of something that no one could put their finger on. But once it got into the mainstream, it was over. I’m just tired of being embarrassed by it. I’m beyond that.”
Not only was “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Nirvana’s first hit, but it remains their biggest. Their follow-up single, “Come As You Are”, hit the Top 35, their last radio hit. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” gave Nirvana two Grammy nominations.
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