It is a fact that there are songs that, of course, are much more than that. They serve to remember a time, a way of living life and that, even, became a change in our days. Something similar happened with Nirvana, Kurt Cobain’s band, when they released one of their great anthems: ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.
The history of Nirvana was short but meteoric. The group led by Kurt Cobain marked a before and after in Grunge history. With the bass of Krist Novoselic and the drums of Dave Grohl, the group from Washington composed the soundtrack of an entire generation, marked by disenchantment, rebellion and rejection of the prevailing social order.
Cobain wasn’t your average rockstar, and Nirvana avoided topics bands like Led Zeppelin.
“Although I listened to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, and I really did enjoy some of the melodies they’d written, it took me so many years to realise that a lot of it had to do with sexism,” Cobain said to Rolling Stone in 1992. “The way that they just wrote about their dicks and having sex. I was just starting to understand what really was pissing me off so much those last couple years of high school.”
“And then punk rock was exposed and then it all came together,” Cobain continued. “It just fit together like a puzzle. It expressed the way I felt socially and politically. Just everything. You know. It was the anger that I felt. The alienation.”
Kurt Cobain may not have been very clear about what he wanted to become, but he did know what he didn’t want; the fundamental reason why he spent much of his youth cloistered in the house he shared with his first girlfriend, without work, reading everything he caught, devouring junk television programs, composing and, ultimately, configuring a personality so special and his own who came to lead a whole new generation.