On this day in 1991: Nirvana release 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'

 On this day in 1991: Nirvana release 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'

Today in 1991, Nirvana's single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was released in the U.S. The unexpected success of the song in late 1991 propelled Nirvana's album Nevermind to the top of the charts at the start of 1992, an event often marked as the point where alternative rock entered the mainstream.

29 years ago today, Nirvana released their classic single, 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', ahead of their second album Nevermind. To mark the occasion, we're revisiting Peter Murphy's reflections on the legacy of the iconic band, originally published in Hot Press in 2003.

To hear Kurt Cobain singing ‘You Know You’re Right’ on radio or MTV this winter was to witness Banquo’s ghost showing up at the Headbanger’s Ball looking for his voice back from the likes of Nickleback and Puddle Of Mudd and The Vines.

Granted, Nirvana themselves were not the most original band in the world so much as a meld of vintage UK punk 45s, ’80s straight-edge, itchy ’n’ scratchy Amerindie acts and melanchoholics like The Replacements. As Dave Grohl pointed out in these pages a few weeks ago, it could’ve happened to anyone: Hüsker Dü, Jane’s Addiction, The Pixies.

But it didn’t. It happened to Nirvana, in one of those once-a-decade package deals. The band had no real successors, mainly because their music was made luminous by the kind of spirit that doesn’t show up on a Xerox machine. Post Nevermind, the trio became one of the most cloned acts of the era, but the second X-generational acts who sounded most like them were least capable of tapping into their primal, Stooge-like thrust.

“I was getting tapes from bands that didn’t sound remotely like the Pumpkins or Nirvana, and (record companies) thought that I could somehow transform their artist into that sound,” remembers producer Butch Vig. “It was ludicrous in some ways.”

So, American hard rock in the ’90s was distinguished, if that’s the word, by depressingly generic recycling enterprises. Any major band spawns tadpoles of course, but post-grunge acts like Silverchair and Stone Temple Pilots and Fred Durst’s cabal of dullards and the Green Day/Blink 182 pension plan punks were the bottom of the barrel, mainly because they were copping off bands who themselves were revisionaries. It was a sort of musical inbreeding programme resulting in a whole slew of tattooed, short-trousered yokels, a gob-smacking number of whom lucked into platinum discs.

That said, the further we got from Kurt’s death, the more bands you could find mining Nirvana’s molten soul rather than merely aping their vital statistics. For example, At The Drive-In, And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Dead and Queens Of The Stone Age, the latter boasting direct Cobain connections via Dave Grohl and Mark Lanegan. As Queens’ singer Josh Homme explains, the crucial difference is being able to differentiate between the logo and the logos.

“You’re talking about bands that are pursuing the identical idea (as us): to play something they’re passionate about,” he says. “They realise the obligation that, if you’re lucky enough to be a musician, you better go as far out as you can go, don’t give me this half-assed crap, this homogenised two per cent milk. So we all have the same idea, it’s strangely close, but none of us sound the same. I think too much of the time people get caught on the example and not the idea. Calculus is an example of complex problem solving: separate, put in order of priority, and then put in a list of operations on how to solve it. (But) it’s not really the fuckin’ numbers; what I’m trying to explain to you is the idea.”

‘You Know You’re Right’ seemed illuminated from the inside by that idea; that spirit, that logos, whatever you want to call it. Hearing it for the first time was a minor shock, because spend any time away from a Nirvana record and unknown to oneself, you start to think of them in Reader’s Digest terms: “Oh yeah, Nirvana: loud/quiet, Kurt yowling, big drums, heroin, suicide, plaid shirts.” But ‘You Know You’re Right’ rejoiced in contradictions. It served both the band’s FM tendencies (big chorus, even bigger dynamic shifts) and their contrary aspects (a lame dog verse melody, dissonant Sonic Youth style guitar noises). Strangest of all, the whole thing seemed based around a chord progression almost as gnarled as the ‘Louie Louie’ figure on which ‘Teen Spirit’ was built.

The legal row over whether to put the song on a box set, as advocated by Krist and Dave, or to maximise its commercial potential by sticking it on a Best Of package, as prescribed by Courtney , represented Nirvana’s ethical conflicts in a microcosm: were they The Beatles or Shonen Knife? Sonic Youth or Cheap Trick?

Of course, the answer was/is all these and more. The hardcore Nerdvana brigade often profess In Utero the band’s masterpiece, the truest recorded representation of its sound via Steve Albini’s ribbon mics, but Nevermind was a more

Loading...