While making my daily commute, Smells Like Teen Spirit came on the radio and I began thinking about those days when it first came out.
I hung out with skaters and punk fans, so I wasn’t unaware, by any means, of the music that lay beyond and beneath the songs playing on the radio – Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Circle Jerks, Black Flag – but none of us were too jaded to be struck by that song and by the Nirvana in general.
Maybe it was like the first time someone heard MC5, the Sex Pistols or the Clash. I don’t know. But certainly, Smells Like Teen Spirit was of that moment.
It was representative of the break from postmodernism and the rejection of a postmodern irony that evolved into kitsch. There is, yes, irony, in the title, but mostly the song seems to rage against disaffected irony.
Un cri de coeur. Whatever. We liked it. I affected us.
But what perhaps I didn’t fully appreciate as a 16 year old in suburban Florida was the quality of the songwriting.
I can’t sing, I can’t play, so I am just talking about the lyrics. But this is a rare song that, I would argue, actually works on the page, as well (only Leonard Cohen consistently writes songs that could also be good poems).
To me that is the real test of a poem, and perhaps at the root of my discomfort with the slam culture. When you take away the performance, what value (or is value the wrong word? should we assign something as capitalist and market oriented as ‘value’ to poetry and art?) remains in the words themselves?
Listening to the (granted, sometimes mostly unintelligible) lyrics, I could see them put down on the page and having value (that word again) as poem, stripped of the music and stripped of the connotations now associated with it and with singer/songwriter Kurt Kobain’s death/suicide/martyrdom (I use the word ‘martyrdom’ not to make any sort of judgement either way on his suicide nor on what ‘killed him’ but as a statement on its meaning for us – he was a sort of liberator and the early death of a liberator is always a sort of martyrdom).
the coffee philosopher 
“Smells like Teen Spirit” is such a brilliant song and a beautiful piece of poetry. I’d played it thousands of times without really listening to the lyrics, but enjoying the music. Now when I hear it, I’m thinking about the imagery behind the lyrics. Are these scenes from a post-apocalyptic American landscape where bored teenagers are fighting in some kind of guerrilla war? “Load up on guns and bring your friends/ it’s fun to lose and to pretend.” Or are these bored teenagers looking to cause trouble on a Friday night by bringing along weapons and deodorant sticks?
To me the chorus seems almost Orwellian “With the lights out it’s less dangerous/ Here we are now entertain us” are those lights a surveillance state? The safety is in the shadowy darkness. As Americans we avoid participation and human interaction through entertainment, we avoid being human through the act of watching others on screens. Then he says “I feel stupid and contagious.” If one reflects on the action of wasting time watching others living in television shows, movies, and internet, one would feel stupid for having wasted so much time with the vice of entertainment.