Why Teen Spirit?

Chronologically true, but November Rain was a top 10 hit before SLTS was.

 

The other songs you mentioned were anywhere from good to fantastic. Teen Spirit, though, hit like shotgun the second Dave Grohl starts in and Kurt switches to distortion. I also think that many of that time identified more easily with KC. He just seemed to fit with many of the angry, depressed, punkish kids of the day.

 

Debatable.
I th

Fair enough...I have both the said Husker and Pixies albums before Nirvana ever hit the scene so I just said Pixies cause they came to mind.
Radiohead shamelessly ripped it off with Creep trying cash in on Nirvana's success.

 

this is going to sound trite but for want of a better term, the only way I can describe the experience of hearing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for the first time in early 1992 is as follows: transcendent.

to many folks of my generation, it was like an entire universe opened up because of the opening notes of that song. it wasn't that we really believed we were hearing something completely original, but its uniqueness was that it spoke to us exclusively. and where the mainstream was concerned in 1991-92, there wasn't anything emanating from music television or corporate radio that did what "Smells Like Teen Spirit" did. hell, the day I bought a cassette copy of the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" single from a local flea market, I was also trying to buy a copy of "Jump" by Kriss Kross. ironically, the "Jump" single was sold out and I could only buy Nirvana.

 

It's a exaggerated figure of speech...albeit over-the-top

I just meant that some of us Nirvana fans didn't buy the hair teased crap bands MTV spoon-fed everyone in the 80's
THAT'S why they weren't the "game changer" band for me.
I didn't have to hide my Madonna, Warrant, GnR, Ratt, Motley crappy Born in the USA albums...because I was collecting great original Punk bands like Nirvana since 1976. (or so)
I put Nirvana right up next to my Wipers, Meat Puppets, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Minutemen, Mats (to name just a few) CDs/Vinyl with pride.

 

A great honest post... and as an original Punk myself I thought like Sonic Youth...
Wow...this is the year "Punk broke" into the mainstream.
People now know who the Pixies are.

 

and that's what Nirvana did for me with dozens of bands.

just an fyi, I bought a copy of Dirty the day it came out because of Nirvana.

 

Besides giving us great music...THIS is one of their greatest legacies.

 

Cobain and Nirvana were the hammer of the Ubermensch, the very embodiment of nihilism, and they spoke directly to the (mostly white, suburban) kids that were listening in an understandable dialect. The lyrics may have been nonsense, and the music not terribly original, but the recipe was new and the force was undeniable; and it was with a force that other bands had a little of, but yet were not living, breathing and as madly destructive as Nirvana. Smells Like Teen Spirit was a perfect title that captured the cynical outlook on consumer culture that all were reveling in.

I thought they were OK then, and I don't really care to listen to them now, but I can understand why people are fans and love them.

 

Please elaborate.
There were already Punk bands melding Pop with Punk
There were already Punk bands melding Hard Rock/ Metal with Punk

 

Indeed. It's hard to explain, but these bands (for the most part) were doing it in their own way respectively and they all had their way of communication and fusing various styles together. But Nirvana was thee one that captured the zeitgeist of jaded suburbanite kids. I used to listen to a lot of punk, and preferred most punk over Nirvana. But punk bands largely spelled out what they were doing/saying or trying to get at. Nirvana just was, they didn't explain themselves so much as their aural essence just giftwrapped what they were about kids connected with it. The nonsensical lyrics weren't just by accident or happenstance. They were one of the most important ingredients here.

 

People are over thinking it. Nirvana just plain made good rock music at a time when it seemed like fresh air again, melding good old fashioned hard 70's rock with punk/indie. I don't recall any jaded suburbanite kids at the local shows in 89-91. Maybe in hindsight that was so after 'grunge' flashed over to the big time, but I think for the rest of us they represented something more organic and grounded than the comically silly hair bands with their dangling crucifix earrings and acid washed / razor cut jeans.

 

(Struggling to see what point you're trying to make...)

 

The chorus hook for me. Four power chords is all but how he attacked them rhythmically was the key. Going from clean to dirty smashed you over the head. Dave Grohl and the other guy helped.
It did not top Alive though for me. They were on the same level.
The song was never some grand statement or deep chord or anything like that to me. It never made me think of anything other than it was a great pop song that made me want to grab my guitar and play along with it when it played.
The lyrics were great also even though I was not sure what they meant. That did not matter.

 

"Smells Like.." was an anthem for the Whatever generation. They didn't identify as much with Axl's near death experience with excess, AiC's references to living in a box with feces, or James Hetfield singing ballads.

It came out at exactly the right time for an audience that could identify it. It also had a easily identifiable riff and drums that drove the song.

As compared to other genres, the grunge movement didn't have a very long shelf life. I enjoyed the music that immediately followed it much more.

 

My point was that Motley Crue replacing their singer didn't have anything to do with them trying to follow a grunge trend and that Vince Neil wasn't suffering for being a "screamer" as evidenced by his moderate solo success. They would have probably been able to stand on their own, as an established act - they had been around over 10 years at that point. their complete disappearance was probably more of a result of inner tensions, declining frequency of musical output, and Tommy Lee's focus on being married to Pamela Anderson and their *ahem* amateur filmmaking career. Sure, their audience was shrinking, but that would have been expected anyway.

 

I disagree. I think it's pretty clear what the band were trying to do with the album, singer and direction.

We can't really judge anything by the hypotheticals you suggest. Maybe they would have had huge success releasing another Dr. Feelgood with Vince Neil or a more similar replacement, maybe not. Clearly they weren't convinced or they would have tried.

 

At the time, GNR seemed like a relic of the hair metal era, and that they made a bloated double album just ahead of the explosion of the grunge scene in the mainstream did them no favors either. Axl in particular was too easy to lump in with what were seen as the excesses of the mainstream "metal" movement; to a lot of people who were embracing flannel, t-shirts, ripped jeans and chuck taylors, GNR and their ilk came across as dinosaurs. Metallica, similarly, were easy to lump into the remnant category, but to be fair they really got massive in 1992 when the various "Black Album" singles all blew up. And yes, that crappy ballad gained them a ton of exposure on MTV. Megadeth was another band that got a lot bigger concurrent with the rise of grunge in the mainstream - a lot of people forget that. I think bands like Metallica and Megadeth seemed a bit more credible and to be fair, their songs rocked. Axl just seemed like a massive tool trying to prove he was a rockstar, and GNR became something of a running joke in those days.

Alice in Chains is a band I never rated at all, mostly because when I first heard them in 91/92, I found them ponderous musically, and I never bought into the Layne Staley mythos after he died. Their two biggest singles from that period, "Down in a Hole" and "Rooster," are just atrocious songs.

 

I don't know what they would have released, but I didn't see that Corabi album as being grunge like at all. Maybe that is because I thought it sucked, and I was kind of sick of them at that point. I didn't even like Dr. Feelgood.

 

With a few exceptions, rock n' roll is about the sound, the musicians and the delivery, not really about the lyrics.

 

To me, the Corabi album was definitely aiming at a dirtier, less refined sound. Hell, they even dropped the umlauts with that album. It was like the band wanted to almost reinvent themselves as a "grunge" band. It didn't work, though, as the album bombed and they had to resort to going back to Vince Neil and do the "tough guy rock" with him with Generation Swine. That album sucked.

 

I was also sick of them by then - and really all of what I considered to be hair metal "poser" music. But I quite liked the direction they took with the Corabi album - and to this day I prefer his voice to the off-key whine of Vince Neil.

 

Nirvana were A good band that touched listeners at the right time & I still listen to them.
Music evolves, nostalgia grows.

 

This thread has inspired me to put on Nevermind, Teen Spirit here I come....

But to answer the op's question, which has been answered many time correctly IMO anyway.
Great Video and a Great drinking song from college days and Godshifter had it exactly right...

 

I remember that quite a bit differently- a lot of people were eagerly waiting for the proper follow-up to Appetite for Destruction before the UYI albums dropped. Though there had been plenty of signs of things cracking at the surface before the UYIs (Axl making the in-concert comments about the band likely to split if certain band members couldn't get clean, Steve Adler getting fired), they weren't seen as relics just yet. This was still '91, and there was a lot of musical climate change happening at the time.

They became relics once the news reports of the riots, no shows at concerts, seeing footage of Duff and Slash so wasted they could barely play their own songs and all the Axl Rose domestic violence incidents started appearing in the media. That's when I completely lost interest in the band and believed that implosion was imminent.