Rock is dead.
or at least that's what the music press have been telling us for the last half decade.
There's not been a genre-defining rock act that has gripped the public consciousness in forever.
Crunching guitar-based music is mostly gone from the charts.
Hip-hop, day-glo pop and synths are the new dominating force.
A lot of these RIP Rock articles envision a shake up.
A new sound that is going to make rock music culturally relevant again,
Simply put, we need another 'Smells Like Teen Spirit.'
But what made 'Teen Spirit' so essential anyway?
I'll set the scene:
Late 1980s. Hair Metal. Extended guitar solos. Excess. Hairspray. 'Cherry Pie.'
The songs were big. The bands and their lifestyles were even bigger.
Rock Gods like Bon Jovi, Guns N' Roses, Motley Crue, Van Halen and post-smack Aerosmith
stalked the landscape, unopposed.
Thematically, there was an overwhelming focus on self-image and sex
but ultimately the music was shallow, often with sexist and homophobic under currents.
For the scruffier, more underground demographic, it sucked.
Its image and skill-based aesthetic signaled that this music was not for them.
In the other corner were Aberdeen, Washington's Nirvana.
They formed in 1987, the same year as hair metal's zenith, Appetite For Destruction.
Two years later, they released their debut album, Bleach,
a scrappy, distorted and misshapen little thing that was equally obsessed with Black Sabbath as The Beatles.
The NME called it:
They signed to major label Geffen Records the next year and began to work on their follow up.
Little did they know that with one track this band would change the face of rock music forever.
That phrase is used a fair deal, especially when talking about Nirvana.
But it is remarkable what a five minute pop-rock tune can do to the musical landscape.
Pretty much overnight the Seattle grunge scene shifted from being a niche in-the-know occurrence
to the defining rock movement of the 90s.
Bands like Poison, Cinderella and Ratt were immediately uncool.
Warrant, who'd had a massive hit with 'Cherry Pie' in 1990, were dropped by their label in 1992
because they didn't sound like Nirvana enough.
Unknown bands that just sound vaguely like Nirvana or happen to be from Seattle got signed to major labels.
Nirvana's Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the US Billboard chart.
Change happened.
And not just in a sonic, Superfuzz pedals are now in kinda way.
Nirvana's brand of grunge was a harder nosed new wave,
the commercial embodiment of punk's inclusive DIY ethos.
Simple music that was reachable for everyone.
You didn't need to spend countless hours practicing scales to play 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.
It's four-chords at most.
Kurt Cobain shouted to a million frustrated musicians, "You can do this!"
Though there were bands before with the same rudimentary philosophy
none of them had the platform that Nirvana had.
Cobain was the anti-Van Halen.
'Teen Spirit' is deceptively simple in structure.
It is at its essence a big dumb pop song with big dumb pop song production courtesy of producer Butch Vig.
Its influences are a mixture of underground loud/quiet dynamics from the Pixies,
punk's ragged intensity,
combined with the chugga-chugga riffing that has been compared to Boston's 'More Than A Feeling'.
And though you might want to break down the song to its raw parts
there's something incredibly primal about 'Teen Spirit.'
The drums thrash, the bass judders and this small blonde man hollers like he's exorcising a demon.
It's rock music at its purest, rewired and repackaged for Generation X.
If you watch the first live performance of the song, five months before its release
the crowd instantly love it.
Most new songs are greeted by ambivalence.
These kids are stage diving from the first moment the drums kick in.
Obviously, hindsight helps us a lot
but it feels like even on the first listen with unfinished lyrics
everyone in the room knows this song is special.
But what is Kurt singing about?
Through slurred and distorted yelps its very hard to make out what the lyrics are,
much less what they mean.
"And before I was just using pieces of poetry and just, just garble, just garbage"
"Just stuff that would spew out of me at the time."
"And a lot of times when I write lyrics it's just at the last second cause I'm really lazy."
Cobain on many occasions confessed that there were never any intended meaning.
But in a way, this solidified 'Teen Spirit''s anthemic status.
It's about whatever you want it to be about, misheard lyrics and all.
As rock critic Dave Marsh said:
This accidental genius extends to the title of the song itself.
The story goes that Kurt while drunk with Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna
spent the evening graffiti-ing the streets with feminist slogans.
After returning to Kurt's motel room, Kathleen in Sharpie marker wrote:
"Kurt smells like teen spirit" all over the walls.
Kurt thought this sounded like another sloganeering call-to-arms
but in fact this is a reference to Tobi Vail, Bikini Kill drummer who was dating Kurt at the time
and used to wear Teen Spirit deodorant.
Kathleen was implying that Tobi had marked him with her scent.
He wouldn't learn that Teen Spirit was a deodorant until a couple of months after the song's release.
Quite simply, the song is a blank slate to be your anthem,
whatever you intend the meaning to be.
Nirvana wrote better songs but 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' will always be what they are remembered for.
This perfect moment where the whole rock listening world turned and went: "This is fucking awesome!"
There have been moments since where similar but lesser turning points have happened.
But nothing on the same scale.
But rock music still thrives in the underground, where the normals can't hear it.
Outside the mainstream, oddballs can experiment with weird new, confrontational music
without the fear that the music isn't commercial enough or an album doesn't have a hit single.
For example:
It's awkward, abrasive, sometimes atonal but most importantly, it's searing vital music.
Kurt may have been happier in this modern rock climate.
He wouldn't have to be the voice of a generation.
He would just play to whoever wants to listen.
As a great man once hollered: