Sunday Jams - "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana

There has been a lot of ink spilled over the years about the importance of Nirvana's explosive "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to music and culture. It didn't just define rock music in the '90s, it defined the '90s, full stop. It's hard to imagine that decade without Nirvana and the influence their music had on nearly everything in that decade, directly or otherwise.

I was only a couple of years old when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" dropped, but even at my wee age, I wasn't immune to its influence. My parents are both Gen Xers, and were both at the exact right age in 1991 to get taken in by the sudden boom of what would become known as "grunge." My mom took to Nirvana pretty quickly after they popped into the mainstream, and accordingly, I would wind up hearing a lot of their album Nevermind as a child, and a lot "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in turn. It left a big imprint on me and my taste in music, but the song's lasting ubiquity also had a strange secondary side effect for me: it became mundane.

When I was in high school, a few friends of mine and I put together a band. Only one of us really had the know-how to write any decent music (shout out to my lovely longtime friend Sam, who I really should call more often), so we stuck to playing covers, one of which was "Smells Like Teen Spirit." As the group's vocalist, I had a fun enough time singing it because I was getting to sing, but I wasn't quite clicking with the song in a deeper way. By my teenage years, I had heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" so many times, in so many places, in so many different family-safe contexts, that it had lost its edge and its power for me. I was just going through the motions and enjoying the physical act of singing; I didn't feel anything from the music or the words. This was my parent's music, not mine.

I don't remember exactly when this changed for me, but at some point in my later teens and early twenties, Nirvana clicked for me again. I think it may have been the the one-two punch of the re-release of Bleach and the official release of the once-bootleg Live at Reading that reignited my appreciation for the band's music. If I'm remembering correctly, I had bought the CD/DVD release of Live at Reading for my mom as a Christmas gift in 2009, and ended up watching the DVD at some point. I was blown away by the performance; they tore it up, top to bottom. It clicked, and I was back into Nirvana.

Every few years after that, I've gone back and revisited Nevermind when the mood strikes, and I get blown away time and again by how hard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" hits. Giving myself some distance and listening to the song with relatively fresh ears has helped to preserve its impact, and what an impact it has. Despite being so far removed from its cultural context, there's still something about "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that feels transgressive and dangerous when taken on its own terms. It still kicks, it still bites, and that's cool as hell.