Nirvana, the band fronted by famously tragic figure, Kurt Cobain, released its most famous album, Nevermind, including the still-popular song, Smells Like Teen Spirit, in 1991.
Central to the emerging 1990s grunge scene, the song is often referred to as an anthem of the generation out of which it was born, expressing the deeply ironic and jaded response of the youth en masse to a hollow, fading, materialist world.
Communicated through intense electric guitar riffs hauntingly contrasted with Cobain’s aching voice, it places the listener inside a teenage social milieu. One listens from a state of almost clinical observation, seeing the apex of teen existence expressed in some kind of collision of personalities, egos, insecurities, and shrunken desires in a suburban living room.
It is not a song that lifts the heart, as is arguably the purpose of art—a concept worth accepting but vigorously and seriously debating the parameters of—and yet beauty leaks through.
Primarily, the particular beauty made manifest is the decisive masculine strength of Cobain’s voice, and the visceral longing for something more in the midst of his angst and flirtation with despair—a despair that would eventually consume him in his death by suicide a few years later.
It is my deliberate choice here at The Beauty Rebuild to explore a tremendously wide breadth of artistic works, in part to challenge reductive understandings of beauty that have taken hold in the necessary but often shallow discussions of beauty online.
Many would define beauty simply as pretty, forgetting that both Gothic cathedrals and oceans are beautiful—and that ‘menacing’ and ‘terrifying’ are correct words to also describe these, along with beautiful. This song, in its own unique medium, captures something of that same contrast, despite its fundamental theme of disillusionment.
The song’s lyrics are, in essence, abstract, although evoking something specific every heart and mind immediately recognize. Cobain, with band mates David Grohl and Krist Novoselic, say almost nothing directly, and yet somehow, as the poets have always done, cause a spontaneous, intuitive understanding in nearly every attentive listener.
No one knows what it’s about, and yet everyone does.
This is the power of music, of honesty, of vulnerability couched in a strong, masculine form.
One sees in the midst of an expression of a fundamental nihilism, an honorable dissatisfaction with that same nihilism; in fact, one seems to turn to nihilism, embodied in the lyrics as attempts at pure entertainment as the last alternative to hopelessness, only because the thinness of existence elsewhere is unbearable.
We see this in the refrain’s lyrics:
With the lights off it’s less dangerous
Here we are now: entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now: entertain us
They are not wrong.
The band, like every soul that has ever existed, evidently aches for the divine, for a rich life beyond the current confines—and one which modern society has mostly hidden behind the walls of reductive materialism, both in the strict owning-objects-as-goal sense, but also in the sense of humanity as pure matter without soul.
When the deeper realms of the heart and inner life are denied, nothing is left but materialism and its lonely derivatives.
In that reality, nothing can fill the existential ache.
Smells Like Teen Spirit does not provide a way out. Cobain and his band mates do not provide an answer. But the song decisively captures the question, challenging the disappointing limits of a culture anaesthetized by comfort, ease, and the denial of the bursting human spirit.
This song is particularly interesting now as many look back on the 1990s with nostalgia and an ache to go back to it: to a world without phones, internet, intense daily political polarization; to a world with neighbors you know, with general stability, with groceries, gas, homes, and education you could afford.
But Nirvana’s song reveals something we have allowed unbridled nostalgia to forget: the world was already aching and splitting apart then, and the poetic prophets could already feel the rumblings of the tectonic shifting we now see in full force.
In the modern western culture of the 1990s, families were already crumbling, rich meaning had been sidelined in favor of the market rat race, honor was dying, and the human heart had already been hollowed out by an increasing lack of love. People had already started to become brittle shells.
Cobain and the others saw this starkly, even if they didn’t directly name it.
While living in the space of both beauty and terror, the Gothic cathedral points to heaven and the ocean teems with abundant life. So also art in its fullest sense has an ultimate orientation to redemption and hope.
Here Smells Like Teen Spirit fails, where authors like Flannery O’Connor find a way into a similar hopeless mire while fusing it with the blurry edges of mystery and eternity.
But art serving a diagnostic role has also always been a key feature. From this frame of diagnosis, paired with Cobain’s desperate heart bleeding out into the vocals, we see in the song the inescapable power of something beautiful and real, even if stunted by a compulsion to despair.
Smells Like Teen Spirit remains captivating all these decades later because of all of these layers of meaning, as well as because of its final warning in Cobain’s own despairing end.
A materialist world cannot satisfy the human heart.
Nirvana was right to proclaim this, leaving us decades later still challenged and aware of our ache for more.
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