Was Smells Like Teen Spirit really named after a deodorant?

Like many famous songs, Nirvana's seminal hit Smells Like Teen Spirit has an unusual history. For starters, the author of the 1991 song (Nirvana's lead singer Kurt Cobain) did not know what the term "teen spirit" meant when he used it as the title; he thought it was an arcane anti-establishment motto, when in fact it was the name of a mildly popular deodorant aimed at young females.

In this sense, the song resembles the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds: the public at the time, quite naturally, thought the song was about LSD, the public's favorite drug, while John Lennon always insisted that it was actually an innocent tune inspired by one of his son Julian's drawings. The fact that the dreamy song alludes to such phantasmagoric entities as "newspaper taxis" and "plasticine porters with looking-glass ties" has led many observers to believe that Lennon was not being on the level here.

Smells Like Teen Spirit is generally conceded to be one of the most epochal songs in the history of rock'n'roll. This is because it constitutes the fault line separating the "alternative", grunge era of the early Nineties from the "hair-band" era of the Eighties. As has been noted before, Nirvana was both the kiss of death and the death of Kiss. Grunge had been around for quite some time before Kurt Cobain showed up, but Smells Like Teen Spirit was more catchy and sophisticated than the average grunge song. It was both primitive and complex, both cerebral and coarse. From the moment MTV began playing the grainy, bizarre Teen Spirit video on a late-night program devoted to music it didn't really expect its audience to enjoy, the inane, interchangeably pointless hair bands that had dominated the previous decade understood that their time had passed. Except for Bon Jovi.

No one knows where the riff that defines Smells Like Teen Spirit comes from, other than from Kurt Cobain's head. But the phrase "smells like teen spirit" had been scrawled on the wall of his apartment by Katherine Hanna, the lead singer of the band Bikini Kill. Hanna wrote this as a joke because her bandmate Tobi Vail, who happened to be Cobain's girlfriend at the time, was a fan of the Teen Spirit deodorant. Teen Spirit was manufactured by the Mennen Corporation, which had developed a line of very popular, somewhat "alternative" deodorants for men in the 1960s.

Because Bikini Kill recorded on the Kill Rock Stars label, and was generally contemptuous of mainstream American society, Cobain mistook the phrase for a seditious catch phrase, like "À Nous La Liberte!" or "El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido." Cobain, it will be recalled, grew up in suburban Washington State, which had no history of sedition, being best known for logging, fishing, anomie and precipitation. When Cobain found out what Teen Spirit was, he was highly upset and very possibly humiliated, but as he didn't live very long, and was always in a bad mood anyway, naming a song after a well-liked deodorant probably didn't hurt his career.

Cobain later said that he wrote Smells Like Teen Spirit a few weeks before the band's breakthrough album Nevermind was released (his bandmates are listed as co-writers because they helped out on the musical end of things). He also said that the song was a deliberate attempt to rip off the Pixies. The Pixies, like the Smiths, were most famous for not sucking at a time that mostly everyone else did. The song was not expected to be a hit, but it was, and the album ultimately knocked Michael Jackson's Dangerous off the top of the charts. With the subsequent demise of the extraneous hair bands, alternative music began to dominate the Anglo-American pop cultural scene. Unfortunately, no one ever wrote another song as good as Smells Like Teen Spirit. Not Smashing Pumpkins. Not Pearl Jam, Definitely not Hole.

Cobain, who could not take "yes" for an answer, eventually grew uncomfortable with the song's preposterous success and sometimes refused to play it in concert. Like Frank Sinatra, who despised My Way, like Duke Ellington, an enormously prolific composer who did not write his signature tune (Take the A-Train), like Arthur Conan Doyle, who resented the shadow cast over his other works by Sherlock Holmes, Cobain ended up disliking the song that made him famous. This may be because the whole point of grunge was to never have a hit as big as Smells Like Teen Spirit for, in the Darwinian logic of grunge, once you had a monster hit, the Establishment owned you. It is thus not clear that Cobain ever really understood what business he was in. Nirvana's music was the last truly original idea in rock'n'roll; Cobain joins Jimi Hendrix in the ranks of supernovas that an art form long on energy and attitude but short on ideas could ill afford to lose.

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