The Devil's Music : Smells Like Teen Spirit
* I’ve been into extreme metal and other forms of subversive self-expression for over twenty years. I wasn’t born like that. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. Every month I will tell you the story of how and why I began waging war to my eardrum. This is how I got into the Devil’s Music. *
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I was eight years old. About to turn nine. It is unclear which one of Metallica, Iron Maiden, Slayer or Nirvana came first. But the first three were introduced to me via my cousin Erik and his father’s cassette tapes. Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit is the first song that the devil bestowed upon me via popular culture. In 1991 and 1992, they were inevitable. The song played everywhere. Everyone had the album and tried to decipher what that transcendent anger was all about. When I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit, I was enthralled and terrified all at once.
The last rebirth of rock n’ roll
My eight years old self wasn’t emotionally prepared for such existential turmoil. The video mixed elements from my life I could recognize (school, gyms, cheerleaders) and gleefully corrupted them with destruction, chaotic energy and latent, repressed sexuality. Things that were inherently a part of me, but didn’t understand yet. The video for Smells Like Teen Spirit is perfect. It’s like being trapped in an eight years old’s nightmare. Kurt himself transforms into an angry cheetah during the pre-chorus and jumps on us with his fangs out at With the lights out…
Kurt Cobain’s predatory anger was earnest, powerful. It felt real. Insanely more so than what bands like Guns N’ Roses were doing at the time. He was attacking us with this song. Not literally, but metaphorically and existentially. After a decade of deliberate artificiality (which was all I knew of music then), there was real rebellion. A genuine fuck you to the way things were done. It was my first real contact with the rock n’ roll ethos that would become so important for me. But shouldn’t it have been more liberating? Why did it make me feel such inexplicable terror?
There are two reasons for it and the first is completely incidental: the video was meant to a slightly older audience and mixed elements that seemed harmless to me with a violence I deemed unnecessary and inexplicable in my eight year old brain. It was a glimpse into my own future. The manifestation itself of the idea that I could change and become someone else. Someone I wasn’t ready to accept and sure shit didn’t understand. When Kurt jumped into With the light out… , it’s my innocence he prowled on. Something I’m really thankful for today.
We all lose our innocence eventually. Losing it to a rock n’ roll song is both badass and pretty constructive way to go at it.
Inexplicable anger
But what was Kurt so angry about in Smells Like Teen Spirit?
That is the genius of thing song and that’s why it broke my brain at such an early age. Smells Like Teen Spirit is a song about nothing. It eludes interpretation. It’s full of violent imagery: guns, sex, sickness, mosquitoes, but it deliberately doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts. There is a vague sense of existential dread (I feel stupid and contagious), but there is no message. Well, the medium is the message. Or rather, the melody. It’s song for teenagers and young adults to blow off some steam to. The musical structure precedes the lyrics.
That was also new to me and it was new to a lot of people in such an earnest context.
The story of how Smells Like Teen Spirit came to exist is legendary. The title comes from a sentence Katheen Hanna from Bikini Kill spray painted on a wall: “Kurt smells like teen spirit”, which gave him the idea to try and write the ultimate pop song. To rip off the Pixies as much as possible, like he often said in interviews. To start quiet and work their way up to loud. He arguably did it better than the Pixies were ever able to. Smells Like Teen Spirit IS the ultimate pop song if you ask me. It is the catchiest, most infectious and efficient rock song of a generation.
Being confronted to Smells Like Teen Spirit at eight years old was quite an existential ordeal for me. For the first time, I was confronted to something that adult didn’t have an explanation for. That I couldn’t understand and forget once I went to bed. I couldn’t go back to my kid’s life after listening to it. But I didn’t want to. Smells Like Teen Spirit was the first time in my life where I had to create an explanation for myself and whatever my eight years old brain could come up with would be as valid as what adults said. There was no more order in the universe.
It would take a while to process, but learning this so soon would turn out to be a blessing.
