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Topics: Music
Hannah Smith
It's one of the most iconic rock songs of all time, but it turns out the genius behind Smells Like Teen Spirit didn't actually think it was all that great.
Snobby Nirvana fans love to criticise people who 'only listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit,' and while that's probably not all that fair, in some ways they do have a point.
Before his tragic death in 1994, Kurt Cobain had himself spoken about his thoughts on the song that launched Nirvana to superstardom, and it's fair to say he found the hit single's popularity confusing.
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'Everyone has focused on that song so much. The reason it gets a big reaction is people have seen it on MTV a million times. It’s been pounded into their brains,' he told Rolling Stone in 1994, claiming that he sometimes found it 'embarrassing' when it came time to play the song during their shows.
Cobain wasn't wrong. Upon its release in 1992, Smells Like Teen Spirit quickly became one of MTV's most requested music videos of all time, and is widely credited with launching grunge into the mainstream and changing the course of American pop culture.
Over the course of the band's all-too-short career, Nirvana went on to release plenty more now-iconic singles, with Come As You Are and Heart-Shaped Box probably the best known songs outside of Teen Spirit, but Cobain always wrestled with the fact that he felt some of his lesser-known songs were way better than the ones that charted the highest.
'Teen Spirit was such a clichéd riff,' he said. 'I think there are so many other songs that I’ve written that are as good, if not better, than that song,' he said in the same Rolling Stone interview. 'Like Drain You. That’s definitely as good as Teen Spirit. I love the lyrics, and I never get tired of playing it. Maybe if it was as big as Teen Spirit, I wouldn’t like it as much.'
The last sentence in that quote actually tells you quite a lot about where Cobain's conflicting feelings about Teen Spirit actually stems from. The singer's struggles with the impact of Nirvana's fame and his own role as a cultural icon are well documented, with many of his closest friends saying that he'd never wanted to reach the heights of fame that he achieved in the early 90s.
So perhaps its no surprise that the very song that made him a star is the one Cobain liked the least.
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