Smells Like Teen Spirit

I had heard Soundgarden, Dinosaur Jr and Pearl Jam before Nirvana. I liked the song but found Nirvana to have been too marketed for me, which kind of turned me off to them. That whole Seattle music scene changed the face of rock. For the better. Swept the pop music and hair metal up and into the waste bin.

 

Nirvana's impact was big if you were a devoted viewer of MTV and/or a listener of standard "Top 40" radio... I was neither at the time, because A) We didn't have cable, so no MTV anyway, and B) I really pretty much hated the local Top 40 radio station, so I didn't listen to it, so I didn't hear when they (Nirvana) broke into the mainstream either.

As I said previously, they had a few okay songs, I don't hate them by any means, but I never bought into the whole "He's the spokesman for our generation" bull that was going around after they hit it big...

 

Queen became more classist again and were back in vogue with the critics. AC/DC experienced the best sales in at least a decade and I would argue the same went for Queen as well. Whatever or whoever, rock was already rearing it’s head at the turn of the 90’s.

 

And here we are 27 years later and it's back to square one, except now instead of "Hair Metal" it's "Hip-Hop" and "Pop" is just as big as ever, with the likes of Beiber, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and the like... The more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

What goes around comes around. Different generations.

 

I was in 9th grade.

It sounded almost alien to me. Otherworldly.

All in a good way.

 

I guess it depends on how you define i

Their were subtleties, everything didn't happen all at once, and you do a good job of accounting for some of them**. But the revisionism here is your account, because the way I described it is the way it was described at the time.

Note however that revisionism doesn't necessarily mean you are wrong. Sometimes, things believed at the time they happened are wrong, and later on, people come to realize that. It just means that you are creating an account of events long after they happened.

You're like a historian in 2000 or something arguing that Robert E. Lee shouldn't be regarded as a great civil war general. Maybe that's true, but it would still be revisionism, because it is true that at the time of the civil war, he was regarded as a great general.

In this case, IMO your revisionism is wrong. Despite some exceptions - like Def Leppard having a hit album in 1992 after Teen Spirit had arrived, the general point stands - Hair bands that dominated the air waves before Nirvana fell off a cliff after.

** Though not perfectly. E.g., while Def Leppar's 1992 album was a hit, it wasn't anywhere near the hit that their hair-metal years LPs had been. They suffered about a 75% decline in sales. The same is true of Bon Jovi's 1992 album. Both of those records were a mere whisper of what their hair-era LPs did.

GnR's double albums came out before "Spirit" made its impact, and plus, GnR were never fully a Hair Band to begin with. They had a gutter-punk sensibility that was contrasted with e.g. the slickness of pure Hair acts like Bon Jovi even in 1987.

 

I think it was game and life changer really. It had major impact, I loved it right from the very first time I heard it in 1991 and Nirvana has remained one of my absolute favorites. Very soon after hearing SLTS I just had to buy Nevermind-lp and the original-cd which also still sounds great.
It was important and interesting time as I was so into heavy metal, punk and alternative bands and Nirvana changed a lot of things, they opened my eyes to totally new things. There were really interesting stuff being released but all the bands weren't much at all being played on radio/MTV.
I like to think that Nirvana became legendary band among other bands like Sex Pistols, Joy Division etc which have had great influence on anything that came after them.
All the albums from Nirvana were great, especially In Utero (which was good left turn after the success and polished sound) and Unplugged (which is my favorite in the whole Unplugged-series), but unfortunately we never got to hear the next album (would have been interesting to find out the more acoustic side and how Unplugged had effect on them).

 

I just have to share the awesome and powerful choir version of SLTS which was played in Kurt Cobain Documentary "Montage of Heck" in the background as the screen showed montage of SLTS outtakes from the filming of the music video.
I did little review of the documentary when I saw it in the cinema (in may 2015):
Upcoming Kurt Cobain Documentary "Montage of Heck" includes his partial cover of 'And I Love Her'
Scala & Kolacny Brothers - Smells Like Teen Spirit

Awesome, powerful cover, it really gets into my feelings. I had heard this cover before the movie, but now it made such an impact I won't forget and I had some little tears running while the movie rolled.
I just wish that I could have helped Kurt somehow...

 

I was 22 and hated it. I was into 80s underground music/college alternative stuff and was getting into early 90s NYC/SF/Japanese garage rock/punk which I thought had way more rock n roll spirit than Nirvana. I'll also never forgive them for everyone getting ugly all of a sudden LOL. Going to high school in the 80s, I found the girls so cute with the pretty clothes and makeup, etc. All of a sudden everyone was in flannel and looked like crap.

Listening now I can see why it was popular. There's something good about it, but I can't remove it from the context of living through it and thinking it was so bad back then. Still Nirvana > Pearl Jam all day long.

 

I also didn't have cable, so (A) no MTV
and (B) I had long ago stopped listening to Top 40 radio.

I was in a cabin out in the sticks... FM station... SLTS came on and, as I said previously, it was like something from a wonderful, weird distant planet.

I still view "Nevermind" and "In Utereo" as the best albums I've heard since 1975 or so (with the exception of Elvis Costello's "This Year's Model").

.

 

I was also much more into the britpop scene beginning with the just as game changing (more so in the UK) "The Drowners" by Suede. Not a fan of grunge except for a few songs by Nirvana and one or two others.

Having said that I recall seeing the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and knew there was something revolutionary going on.

 

Yeah grunge and British alternative pop/rock held sway for a few years but by 1999 Britney and her clones were back at the top of the charts

Oh and the Pumpkins were a better band

 

I was there (I am 45 and watched the snot out of MTV in the 80's and early 90's), so I remember. Many hair bands simply stopped releasing material or fell off the map before grunge. Ratt, Europe, Motley Crue, etc. all either broke up or went through personnel issues that had nothing to do with the rise of grunge. And many of the 2nd and 3rd tier hair bands were essentially one hit/album wonders who were gonna have the shelf life of a carton of milk no matter what.

The sales of Def Leppard dropping off probably had more to do with that album being the follow-up to Hysteria more than anything (first week sales of a monster album almost always do well, but if the album isn't as good, sales quickly fall off), and the same could be said for Bon Jovi, who couldn't realistically be expected to have a 3rd monster hit album in a row (following Slippery and New Jersey).

We can agree to disagree about G N' R (I agree they sounded more ballsy than hair metal, but they had the same look, and hair metal was often about what a band looked like).

 

I suppose a good equivalent for those on the other side of Greenland would be the first time you heard "Supersonic".

 

Well, that's the pop cycle for you.

 

I agree with with George Co- Stanza........Hair Metal was hanging on by one finger when Nirvana came along. Hair bands had been around for nearly 10 years, and the genre was played out.

 

I was blown away. It had everything: attitude, energy, noise. I still shake the walls with it. I also prefer Lithium.

 

I was in the Philadelphia Spectrum waiting for Guns n Roses to play and they played Teen Spirit over the pa. It was the 1st time I heard it and it was amazing to see the sold out crowd all react in unison to what we were all experiencing.

 

Similar situation here. Pre-internet, pre-cable, college radio only up in New Hampshire...I didn't have access to the British metal magazines so I had to rely on the two hour long metal show we had and the snobby guy that hosted it. How did we survive like that?

I'm only 47, but 'kids today' have no idea how good they have it. I can't imagine having this much access to music.

 

The Drowners was fantastic. Blur's Popscene was a record I loved then too. It wasn't a big hit as Blur were far from cool or a critics favourite then, but it didn't sound like anything else in 1992 and is now considered among the first 'Britpop' records. They played it on The Word around the same time Nevermind was released even though it didn't come out until around six months later. I remember being surprised as Leisure had only just been released and they played a new song instead of anything from it.

 

I had a similar experience with a different song, Faith No More's "Surprise, You're Dead" played before a Red Hot Chili Peppers show. The floor went nuts...one of the first mosh pits I ever witnessed.

 

It would be "The Drowners" in the UK. -though I suppose some may cite The Stone Roses. The birth of British alternative / Britpop. Oasis had an impact though

 

I was in college when Nirvana broke big... and suddenly everything was grunge, grunge, grunge all the time.

From my point of view, it really did provide the (near) death knell of new wave and other alternative music. A lot of more interesting music - at least to me - seemed to have not gotten the due it would have. At least where I was I didn't hear a thing about Britpop, or some of the shoegaze stuff. And my favorite magazine, Forced Exposure, was getting more sporadic. So I buried myself in New Zealand pop music and Big Black records.

Again, I was never a Nirvana fan. I had actually heard them via the Sub Pop 200 (?) compilation before they had any large national popularity and it sounded like a return of 70s influenced rock music with less intelligible lyrics. I tried, very recently, to give them another listen. And still no effect.

 

I was 15 when SLTP started being hyped and heavily played where I lived at the time (rural France). It was clearly promoted and sold to us as "the new rock phenomenon" based on its success in America and the UK. Early 92 I guess. The song really did have an impact, helped by the fact that, if you liked the single, Nevermind didn’t disappoint. A killer album front to back. My friends all loved the band instantly.

But, and that’s where I agree with others in this thread, none of us stopped listening to Guns n’Roses. I don’t remember anybody suddenly getting rid of their Use Your Illusion cds. Most people still really liked U2. AC/DC and Metallica were huge. Other, completely different bands kept breaking. Red Hot Chili Peppers. Rage Against The Machine. REM. Maybe the difference is Nirvana opened the door to a lot of stuff we probably would have never heard of in our small French town. Mainstream and local radios started playing lots of indie rock and anything labeled as "grunge" (for better or worse).