Smells Like Teen Spirit

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Helter Skelter, Dec 7, 2018.

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  1. Man at C&A

    Man at C&A Senior Member

    Location:
    England
    I saw Oasis live at Middlesbrough Arena the night the news came through that Kurt had died. A joint headlining tour with Whiteout! Poor Whiteout, they had some good tunes.
     
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  2. George Co-Stanza

    George Co-Stanza Forum Resident

    Location:
    America
    Good points.

    My beef is that professional critics act like they are so smart and that fans are so dumb, like we are capable of only embracing one type of music at a time ("OMG, this grunge is great, let's throw all of our other music in the trash!"). Plus, critics almost always hated music that was viewed as fun, which hair metal was, so they loved the idea of writing a narrative where a new style of music killed something fun, even though it was a total BS narrative. But hey, they have spouted it enough over the years where many actually believe it now. *shakes head*
     
  3. James_S888

    James_S888 Forum Resident

    what's the 12" single of this like?
    the album mix, not the radio edit.
    I have the ORG Nevermind. is the 12" worth picking up?
     
  4. hhjack

    hhjack Forum Resident

    Location:
    Oak Park, IL
    There was a radio show I use to listen to on Friday night (really wish I could remember the name of it) when I was 14 years old. The program was basically a call in show for teenagers. It would go late into the night so it would often take calls from stoners and kids on their way to see midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I vividly remember one group of kids calling in and rambling on about seeing a dragon fly over their car. The show was pretty out there. Every once in awhile they would play a song to break up all the calls. One night, they played "Smells Like Teen Spirit". I had never heard of the song at that time but it really blew me away the very first time hearing it. I thought I was in some very exclusive club hearing something so unique. Then on Monday, I saw the video on MTV. And then, of course, it was everywhere.

    Another story: a friend of mine (older than me) was doing a local TV show in Chicago highlighting rock bands that would come through town. At the beginning of the week, he would make a plan on which band and venue he would cover for the show. He was able to capture some amazing shows this way including a full early show of Pearl Jam. Anyway, his friend gives him a tip on a band that he should cover for the next episode. Not recognizing the name of the band, my friend decides to play it safe, and cover Widespread Panic. After the weekend, he turns on MTV, and sees the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video. Immediately, he calls up his friend, and confesses "I screwed up. I really screwed up."
     
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  5. Moshe

    Moshe "Silent in four languages."

    Location:
    U.S.
    I felt the same way.
    Everything got “ugly”.
    I remember I went to see Laurie Anderson at a book signing in the 90s and she was wearing a flannel shirt...
    Everyone was wearing a flannel shirt.

    The sylishness, creativity and individuality of alt 80s were gone.
     
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  6. Stephen J

    Stephen J Forum Resident

    Location:
    Austin, TX
    I was there as well, so we'll have to agree to disagree about everything. IMO, the dominant narrative is correct - Nirvana ended the reign of Hair Metal ** . That's the way it was experienced at the time. The fact that some HM bands had declined or disappeared before SMTP is no more meaningful than the fact that many rock and roll bands came and went during the 1960s - the genre as a whole was still the dominant genre of pop music during that time frame.

    I'm all in favor of questioning received wisdom about an era or what have you, but in this case, that wisdom is correct.

    ** It actually did more than that. It reverberated beyond HM - artists like Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z have talked about how the rise of Nirvana impacted their areas of the pop music universe as well. The rise of Nirvana was a major pop cultural upheaval that impacted not only pop music but also youth fashion and ideology.
     
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  7. drbryant

    drbryant Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles, CA
    It was huge, and it was very important. Cobain’s death is irrelevant - the legacy of the song was etched in stone well before he died.
     
  8. Babysquid

    Babysquid Forum Resident

    Location:
    England
    I think it depends where you were. It was certainly a very significant event in mainstream popular music. I was a 15 year old kid in the Uk when I first heard it during break at school on the mid morning radio 1 show. It was different from everything else they were playing and certainly louder. None of knew who it was and none were at all aware of the Seattle scene at that time. In fact I recall one kid suggested it might be Sting’s new single!!!
    I suppose if you were up to speed with what was happening in Seattle you might have been disappointed and even possibly felt it was a bit of a sell out after what they had done before. However that can’t take away the fact that after this song Nirvana were everywhere. As to wether they singlehandedly changed the face of music as expunged corporate rock from the charts I might disagree. There was a lot more than just grunge happening at that time, and much of it seems to be forgotten by a lot of music historians. Corporate Rock had a good run in the late 80’s but after that ( In the Uk certainly) there was the rise of rave culture, Gangster Rap and homegrown indie music with its roots in 60’s psych/70’s punk and the dance scene. Bands like Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine and Jesus Jones were very successful and you couldn’t walk down the street without seeing someone wearing a James t shirt or 30 Something top. Even here Nirvana had its asscendents , during the summer of ‘91 one of the hippest US groups was Jane’s Addiction and they certainly helped open the floodgates for Nirvana and what followed. Certain bands like the Levellers and Ozric Tentacles were popular in schools and colleges even though “cool” music papers like the MM and NME ignored or derided them. The other thing is a lot of corporate rock acts continued to be successful after Nevermind, Bon Jovi, Extreme, Aerosmith, Guns n Roses etc..
     
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  9. Babysquid

    Babysquid Forum Resident

    Location:
    England
    Definitely true
     
  10. S. P. Honeybunch

    S. P. Honeybunch Presidente de Kokomo, Endless Mikelovemoney

    Are you actually trying to argue that glam metal was a dominant commercial force in 1991? By what standard would you try to claim that? The biggest pop hits in 1991 were from:
    1. Bryan Adams
    2. Color Me Badd
    3. C+C Music Factory
    4. Paula Abdul
    5. Timmy T
    6. EMF
    7. Extreme
    8. Hi-Five
    9. Surface
    10. Amy Grant
    The number one albums in 1991 were from:
    • Garth Brooks (8 weeks)
    • Vanilla Ice (8 weeks)
    • Mariah Carey (11 weeks)
    • R.E.M. (2 weeks)
    • Michael Bolton (1 week)
    • Paula Abdul (2 weeks)
    • N.W.A. (1 week)
    • Skid Row (1 week)
    • Van Halen (3 weeks)
    • Natalie Cole (5 weeks)
    • U2 (1 week)
    • Guns 'n Roses (2 weeks)
    • Metallica (4 weeks)
    • Michael Jackson (3 weeks)
    The public had largely not been interested in the new glam metal of 1991, was quickly becoming interested in Nirvana, but put Def Leppard's Adrenalize to #1 on the Billboard 200 in April and May of 1992 after Nirvana's album had already peaked on the same chart. Adrenalize had two Billboard number one rock tracks and four other top fifteen rock tracks. Further, Slaughter had a #8 Billboard 200 album around the time of Adrenalize peaking on the same chart. Slaughter's album, The Wild Life, had four top ten rock tracks.

    Looking back to 1991, for all of the bands who released glam metal albums in that year, it was a death sentence of sorts in the United States. L.A. Guns, Europe, White Lion, and BulletBoys never had any kind of album success in the United States afterwards. There was a glam metal stagnation of sorts in 1991, but not one that Slaughter and Def Leppard weren't able to overcome in 1992. It became more and more risky for labels to release a glam metal album due to the 1991 failures, but the ongoing popularity of Leppard and Slaughter in 1992 shows that Nirvana didn't have any sort of magical power to prevent people from listening to the music that they liked.
     
    Last edited: Dec 9, 2018
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  11. kaztor

    kaztor Music is the Best

    Unfortunately it’s really hard to try help a man with bi-polar disorder, a heroin addiction and chronic stomach pains. :shake:
     
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  12. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Good post. I think many people tend to amplify the importance and dominance of the music they were into at a given time, and marginalize or ignore things they didn't like.
     
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  13. Stephen J

    Stephen J Forum Resident

    Location:
    Austin, TX
    First, I never said Hair Metal was the only popular form of pop music. E.g., in 1987, when Hair Metal was obviously an important force in commercial rock, acts like Michael Jackson, U2, Whitney Houston, and George Michael all had massively popular, diamond-selling albums that were in the same sales league as the top Hair acts. My focus has been on rock culture in the USA - I've also never tried to speak about what was happening in other countries as I didn't experience that.

    Second, I don't get the laser-like focus on 1991. IIRC, none of the dominant Hair acts of that time - Crue, Bon Jovi, Poison, Warrant, Def Leppar, etc. released albums that year, so it is natural that Hair wouldn't dominate the charts. The one exception was Skid Row, who released an LP just a couple months before Nirvana exploded. That album went to #1 and platinum.

    Third, I've already talked about Def Leppard's Adrenalize. It's the same thing with Bon Jovi's Keep the Faith from the same year: While both records sold around double platinum, both were huge come-downs from the massive sellers they released during the peak of the Hair era. Both sold only about 25% of their previous LPs, and neither dominated the airwaves like their predecessors had. IIRC, DL's Hysteria produced six top 10 pop hits, Adrenalize produced zero. Both bands were vastly diminished in terms of their pre-Nirvana rock and cultural profiles.

    The fact that both records did still some copies merely shows is that few things in life are 100% totally abrupt. BJ and DL were mega-sellers before Nirvana, so their sales didn't go literally to nothing like say Warrant's did. But they still took tremendous blows, and neither was anything like the commercial force they were before. It's kind of like looking at the fossil record and finding that a few dinosaurs lingered on for a million or so years after the big comet hit 60 million years ago. That doesn't change the fact that 95% of them died instantly and thus it is fair to call the comet an Extinction Level Event for the dinosaur class as a whole.

    Bottom line: At the time Nirvana exploded, it was recognized almost immediately that they swept away Hair Metal and initiated a major change in USA rock culture. That's how I personally experienced it and remember it as well.

    And of course this didn't effect with the individual listener did. I owned several albums from the Hair era - LPs by Motley Crue, Cinderella, Skid Row, Ratt, BJ, DL, Poison, etc. - and I still played them and still to this day do. But at a cultural level, that doesn't affect the fact of the huge cultural shift Nirvana inaugurated.
     
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  14. Dave S

    Dave S Forum Resident

    A minor detail: Dinosaur Jr. were from western Massachusetts. Two of them were in the punk band Deep Wound.
     
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  15. Hardy Melville

    Hardy Melville Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York
    The first big grunge song I remember was more Man in The Box, and then Ten as an album really got my attention. I continued to prefer Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains to Nirvana. But I liked Nirvana as well very much. On the subject of Teen Spirit, though, I thought In Bloom was the better song from their first album.

    I also did feel like there was a certain amount of hype going on with Nirvana, but I don't recall being bothered by it. Only made me wonder when I came across people who seemed to prefer Nirvana to Alice, PJ and also Soundgarden and STP. Since I preferred ( and still do) all of them to Nirvana.
     
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  16. RichC

    RichC Forum Resident

    Location:
    Charlotte, NC
    Heh. Rolling Stone made that exact joke 27 years ago in their 3-star review/dismissal. (Retroactively changed to a 4-star review when they realized how badly they'd missed the boat on a seismic musical shift.)
    It's about as funny now as it was 27 years ago.
     
  17. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Hah! They have no convictions, do they?
     
  18. BZync

    BZync Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Like many bands that shook things up before them, Nirvana was the perfect storm. Great sound, great songs and, importantly, great timing.

    I was listening to "alternative" radio at the time - KROQ in Los Angeles. That type of music was going through, what I see in hindsight as, a transitional stage. The 80's were well over but no particular type of music was steering the ship. Additionally, like others have noted, hair metal was getting a bit old. So, both types of "rock" music were getting kind of stale when Teen Spirit broke.

    I do remember when that song was introduced on KROQ. It sounded unlike anything else and had a ton of energy. Looking back, it was energy that I think we needed. A year later you wouldn't have recognized KROQ. Attitude became hip again. It was Nirvana that opened the door for someone like Alanis Morrisette (isn't it ironic?). Anything "edgy" was hip again. It wasn't just "grunge".
     
  19. uzn007

    uzn007 Pack Rat

    Location:
    Raleigh, N.C.
    Can someone explain what the similarity is supposed to be?
     
  20. joeconn4

    joeconn4 Forum Resident

    Location:
    burlington, vt
    I remember the first time I heard SLTS. I was driving home to see my parents who lived about 3 hours away. Was flipping around the FM dial, which is unusual because usually I'd be playing cassettes. At the time I was into alt pop (college rock type stuff), Springsteen, still liked hair metal which was huge when I was in college although wasn't really into too much of the newer bands of that genre. "Appetite For Destruction" was in heavy rotation in my truck. I was getting into some of the OG rap of the day like Ice T. I'm driving along and on comes SLTS and I haven't heard anything like this before what the heck is this. After about 20 seconds I pulled over to the side of the road to listen more closely. Literally pulled over. Would have been early to mid September 1991.

    Song ends DJ says it's a new band called Nirvana. I continue on my way. See my folks, call up one of my high school buddies go over to his house to hang out. We're talking music he says "you heard this new band Nirvana?" We were both knocked out.

    Picked up the cassette for the drive back to Vermont. Heavy rotation for a few months, along with "Use Your Illusion", which came out that same month. "Nevermind", "...Illusion", Ice T's "Original Gangster", and Def Leppard's "Hysteria" were my go-to albums that winter.
     
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  21. Freelance_Philosopher

    Freelance_Philosopher Well-Known Member

    Absolutely. It made ugly mainstream--the defining aesthetic of '90s rock.
     
  22. Lil' Brian

    Lil' Brian Forum Resident

    Location:
    Iron Mountain
    We were introduced to Nirvana (and many others) initially through the Sub Pop singles club. A periodically mailed 7", many times on colored vinyl. Those were fun days.

    Sub Pop Singles Club
     
  23. BZync

    BZync Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    My 18 year old daughter makes fun of the photos of my wife and I during the 80s. Yes, we did look silly, but we dressed UP, not down.
     
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  24. Poison_Flour

    Poison_Flour Forum Resident


    It really stood out between the Farnsy and Barsney that Australian radio loved at the time
    Nirvana and Ratcat really did change my life in 1990/1991
     
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  25. George Co-Stanza

    George Co-Stanza Forum Resident

    Location:
    America
    I don't think I or anyone else is denying the major impact that Nirvana and Smells Like Teen Spirit. The only think I am pushing back on is the false narrative that it killed hair metal.

    But again, hair metal, outside of a few acts, had already mostly faded away, so it was more of a timing thing. Had Nirvana never happened, hair metal still would have met the same fate.
     
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