Smells Like Teen Spirit

The title came off Kurt Cobain's bedroom wall. His friend Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill had been joking with bandmate Tobi Vail — then Cobain's girlfriend — about a grocery-store deodorant called Teen Spirit, and later sharpied 'Kurt smells like Teen Spirit' on his wall. Cobain, who'd been talking anarchism and punk with them, read it as a revolutionary slogan; he said he didn't learn the deodorant existed until months after the single came out. The song itself he described as an attempt to write 'the ultimate pop song,' borrowing the soft-verse, loud-chorus dynamics of the Pixies.

DGC released it on September 10, 1991, as the lead single from Nevermind. The video — director Samuel Bayer's first, shot August 17, 1991, on a Culver City soundstage for somewhere between $30,000 and $50,000 — staged a high-school pep rally curdling into riot, with cheerleaders in anarchy-symbol uniforms and bleachers full of extras whose set-trashing finale required no acting: they'd sat through an entire afternoon of replays. It premiered on MTV's 120 Minutes that September 29 and moved into rotation so heavy that an MTV programming veteran later said it 'changed the entire look' of the channel.

The single peaked at number six on the Billboard Hot 100 the same week Nevermind knocked its way to number one on the albums chart, hit number one in Belgium, France, New Zealand, and Spain, and logged 184 weeks on the UK chart. Critics dubbed it an 'anthem for apathetic kids' of Generation X — an anointing Cobain squirmed under, insisting the lyrics were partly contradiction and joke. It has sold over 13 million copies, making it one of the best-selling songs ever; in 2000, Guinness named it the most-played video in MTV Europe's history. Not bad for a phrase that was literally an ad for deodorant.