Understanding Smells Like Teen Spirit

Some additional thoughts/corrections: 1) As I understand it, Hanna and Cobain were the only ones there when they vandalized the pregnancy crisis care center (basically a clinic set up to draw in women seeking abortions and then talk them out of it with misleading information, in case you were wondering what that was about.) and then Grohl joined up with them later when they went back to Cobain's place. I simplified the narrative a bit for the video because those details weren't important to my actual point. 2) Going back and looking- at More Than A Feeling in the context of this song, I was surprised to find that they actually do change chords on beat 3 of the first bar, the just pull it back in the second. It's actually an almost entirely different riff. I suspect if Nirvana hadn't made the connection themselves, no one else would've. 3) I'm not 100% sure there are kicks on the beats in the fill for Burn Rubber On Me. I hear them, and it'd make sense for disco, but most drum covers on YouTube only put kicks on the offbeats so maybe I'm wrong. Not super relevant to my point, but wanted to clarify in case I'd made a mistake. 4) In retrospect it might've been a good idea to point out that the quiet section bass doesn't actually have the pull-chord syncopation in it. I don't really have anything much to say about that beyond "it reduces the energy level" which I already said about other parts of the section, but it's still a true thing. 5) In the specific instance of the verse vocals I used, he's pretty sharp on the low G, to the point where it might sound like he's actually just flat on an Ab. Looking at the rest of the verses I'm pretty sure that's unintentional, and I wanted to stick with the first statement 'cause otherwise I'd have to include an explanation for why I wasn't. 6) Also, technically, he does hit the G as the bass drops to a C, so I suppose it is sort of a chord tone, but again I don't view that C as implying a change in harmony. 7) The chords in the layered guitar part aren't actually completely unrelated. The first one is the same, the middle two are built on the perfect 5th of the underlying harmony, and the last one is nominally the same again although he does some decorative stuff to prevent it from being identical. So they overlap a bit, but the distortion is so strong that even that winds up feeling pretty messy. This also probably explains why it's so hard to hear in the mix: By keeping the part quiet, it kinda just sounds like overtones to the main guitar part, so my ears are struggling to separate it out into its own distinct part.

Kurt Cobain, probably: "I just thought it sounded cool"

I've always really respected how open Kurt was about his influences. I think it says a lot about him that he got this sudden, unexpected, worldwide fame and he used it to promote lesser-known acts that he loved.

"He acknowledges that he knows where you want him to go, but he pretty clearly doesn't want to be there" sums up Kurt and Nirvana perfectly tbh

Nirvana broke into "More Than A Feeling" at the Reading Festival 92' before playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" acknowledging this, and it's hilarious. "I wanted to write the ultimate pop song." Well done, Kurt.

I've always loved that origin story. The fact that Cobain didn't know what Teen Spirit was until after he released the song is priceless. Reminds me of the name Breakfast at Tiffany's. The author, Truman Capote, knew what Tiffany's was. But it was based on an overheard conversation from someone who didn't. They thought Tiffany's sounded like a nice place for breakfast. That inspired the creation of the Holly Golightly character.

I think I speak for all of the loyal 12tone viewers when I say this has been a LOOOOONG time coming, and I thank you for finally breaking down THE best song of the 90s!

I'm so glad you included the backstory (and Hanna's denial of the "scent marking" story). I'm from the PNW, the ties between Riot Grrrl and Grunge are so obvious when you know the scene but a lot of people don't acknowledge it.

Ok, as a non-native English speaker I probably don’t get most of your puns, but drawing a sink to illustrate ‘sync’opation is one of the most hilarious ones yet… 🙈😂

To be fair, from an electronics engineering perspective, distortion isn’t much more complex than that. Thanks for making these, and for highlighting the literal soundtrack to my early/mid 1990s youth.

This is one of the first songs I learned on drums. It’s still so fun to play and I’m thankful of this track for teaching me how to play

THANK YOU for mentioning and playing the buried guitar in the choruses. I've felt like I heard a guitar with a chorus effect on it in there for a while now but couldn't find anyone mentioning it, so figured I was hearing ghosts. Good to know my ears did not deceive me.

The idea that "untrained" musicians don't know theory is nonsense - they just learn it more haphazardly, and don't have the same language "trained" musicians have - but you don't make music seriously without having some kind of frame work to build upon.

it has been forever since listening to nirvana... i guess bc the older i get, the more kurt's suicide makes sense and i would rather focus on fighting for a world worth living in. thanks for reminding me why i used to like grunge so much

You inspired me to pursue a career in music during the pandemic. I giggled way more than I probably should have when you mentioned a motif and used the jaws doodle to represent it at 16:06. I'm always impressed by your subtle but witty doodles. You rock!

Of all the Nirvana tracks Teen Spirit has the most textural and environmental variation and is also the most produced. As you show here: solo chords, full band with distortion, drum/bass w/ vox and arp, "Hello" section w/ layered vox, full band with panned gtrs. and verbed vox, and the turn-around "yeah" riff that breaks the key and the loop. For a simple "punk" song it's actually quite savvy and quite a production. No other Nirvana track has this much variation and is probably one of the reasons why it is so successful. If you think of the track as being built upon the bass tone, it's really more 80s new romantic than Boston and The Pixies, which gives it that extra moodiness (and then it kicks your ass); much like a dramatic arch: filled with tension and release, conflict and climax and that oh so necessary pinch of chaos that AI's will never truly compute.

It took me a while to realize this video isn't 4 years old, surprised this took so long to cover! Also, Understanding Toxicity when?

Wooooow, that explanation @ 18:00 of those inharmonic guitar stems really helps to understand Nirvana’s thrashy guitar sounds. Awesome stuff

16:55 im glad someone finally mentioned the 2 hidden guitar tracks. They are definitely burried in the mix a bit but they come up in level now and then. Pretty genius actually, adds all kinds of overtones and such. These hidden guitar are actually on the same tracks as the feedback before the solo, the rhythm guitar for the solo, and also the feedback at the end of the song. Its most noticable at the first post-chorus when they move the levels up. its also pretty noticably at the end of the song.

Back in 1991, I loved music, but I hated music. I listened to old '60's psychedelic, classical music, a few other random things. Music was for rich, cool, tough, attractive people. The kind that hated me for being a bookish nerd who didn't like beating people up. The kind of people that everyone who hated me loved. But, as fate would have it, while I was flipping channels I passed by MTV and saw the last little bit of "Into the Great Wide Open" by Tom Petty. It made a very slight impression on me, and I wanted to hear the whole song. So occasionally, I would flip back to MTV trying to hear the rest of Into the Great Wide Open. . . usually it was just a commercial, occasionally, it was now swaggering hair metal guy singing about how rich he was and how everyone loved him. (Though, damn, I loved those loud guitars, but felt like if I hung out with the person making the music, it would just be them making fun of me.) Then one day, I heard instead: Dadum Da thakka-thakka da da duh / Dumda dah thakka-thakka dah dah dah. Wasn't pretty, it wasn't flashy, it wasn't clean. IT was ugly, it was dirty, it was angry, but it was smart. I was interested. This bedraggled guy started started mumbling how fun it was to lose with a tone that made it clear it wasn't any fun at all. I was fascinated. Then suddenly after one exhausted version of what I couldn't tell was "hello" or "how low" That guy who looked like the guy the popular kids were beating up next to me started screaming. I heard anger, intelligence, and art for the first time. I was enthralled. There was this thing mixed together into something as furious and seething as the sounds I heard in my head when I looked at this horrible world. LEss then five minutes later, the blonde guy on my TV screamed the last line with a slasher smile that immediately snapped away into a scowl. I picked up a notebook and a pen and started writing the first song I'd ever written in my entire life. I haven't stopped writing music since.