The 1991 Nirvana title none of the band understood: “I didn’t know that the deodorant spray existed”
Kurt Cobain wasn’t the kind of lyricist that everyone needed to completely understand every single Nirvana song.
Everyone could feel the pain that he was experiencing whenever he sang one of his songs, but there was a lot more nuance than just straight incoherence whenever they made a new record. Each of their singles had a much more artsy slant to it whenever they came out, but it turns out that some of their biggest songs have messages that even the band tends to get wrong every now and again.
But when you think about it, Cobain wasn’t the kind of person who wrote linear narratives all the time. Every now and again, there would be a few songs that would tell a story about a specific person, like ‘Polly’, but more often than not, there were tunes that had a few lines that seemed pretty on their own, but didn’t always make the most sense whenever someone said them out loud. But that was half of the point.
Not everything that he sang had a set meaning, but a lot of the best pieces describe emotions a lot better than anyone else in Seattle. Cobain wasn’t planning on trying to make these detailed descriptions like Bob Dylan or Lou Reed did, but you could feel that he was describing the kind of frustration and angst that every single kid from his generation was feeling whenever they turned on the TV.
And that extended into most of what ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was written about. Cobain was looking for the kind of slogan that would best represent how teenage alienation was supposed to feel, and all he needed was his girlfriend to help explain everything to him. All she did was write ‘Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on the wall of his apartment, but Cobain took the whole thing in a much different direction.
In his mind, Cobain thought that the song was all about pure musical rebellion, but the whole thing ended up being a play on a brand of deodorant that his girlfriend had heard about, saying, “I thought that was a reaction to the conversation we were having, but it really meant that I smelled like the deodorant. I didn’t know that the deodorant spray existed until months after the single came out.”
So if Cobain couldn’t figure out what the song’s title meant at first, it was going to be hell for anyone else to try to put the pieces together. ‘Mulatto’ ‘Libido’ and ‘Mosquito’ don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other, and even though Cobain was proud enough to show some of his lyrics off to the rest of the band, Krist Novoselic was more taken with the imagery of what the song was about than anything concrete.
But the song is one of the few anthems from the 1990s that didn’t need to make sense in order to be great. The whole tune is practically an emotional exercise, and when Cobain ended off his final verse by saying, ‘Oh well, whatever, nevermind,’ he was practically speaking for the entire generation. Everyone felt like they weren’t understood, so all they could do was rally together and scream out their feelings every single time Dave Grohl brought that massive drum fill back in.
Cobain wasn’t trying to make some grand statement about the state of the world, but when you look at the way that he constructed the tune, he had to have known that it was going to sound massive in some respects. He had his finger on the pulse of what adolescence felt like, and he was going to do everything within his power to create the kind of music that related to people who felt alone like he did back in the day.
