How Kathleen Hanna sparked a butterfly effect connecting ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ with ‘Wonderwall’
The friendship that blossomed between Kurt Cobain and Kathleen Hanna was fated from the get-go.
Both realised they couldn’t stand idly by at the world’s injustices from a young age. Hanna’s eye-opening moment occurred at one of Gloria Steinem’s talks; Cobain’s was at school, on the playground, ears filled with a handful of derogatory terms no one else seemed to be bothered by.
“It was the first time I had ever been in a big crowd of women yelling, and it really made me want to do it forever,” Hanna later recalled of Steinem’s event, matching Cobain’s disdainful, “Women are just totally oppressed. I mean the words ‘bitch’ and ‘cunt’ were totally common.” Of course, both upbringings were different in fundamental ways that the other could never truly understand, but they noticed something about the world that few did, especially at such a young age.
They’d both operate in tandem for several years before their paths eventually crossed; Hanna transitioning her spoken-word poetry to anthemic rallying cries and Cobain taking the road less travelled with music that looked inward and outward without reverting to the cheap vanity of his peers (look up why he hated Led Zeppelin). But when they did come together, somewhere in 1990, they decided to paint the town red. Literally.
Graffiting the words ‘fake abortion clinic’ on the side of a clinic in DC next to Cobain’s ‘God is Gay’, the night preceded a hangover Hanna didn’t know she’d come back from. “[It was] one of those hangovers where you think that if you walked in the next room, there could be a dead body in there,” she said. Waking up the next day, she realised she’d “smashed up a bunch of shit” during their overtures, alongside writing the words ‘Kurt smells like Teen Spirit’ on his wall, referring to the deodorant his girlfriend had been wearing.
Hanna had initially intended the words to be grating, emerging from an internal fire that stemmed from something others might call jealousy or bitterness. But Cobain saw something poetic in them, like a symbol of generational angst, perhaps, or the disparity that comes with trying to be a hero in a world that’s fated to destroy itself. The song, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, wound up representing exactly that, blossoming from a series of gruelling words scribbled in his bedroom the night after a particularly hardcore piss-up.
From these flames emerged a bigger, more thoughtful grunge movement that didn’t bother with any other aggression other than the type that already lurked within, like it shared punk’s abrasiveness but wanted only to talk about it all in a resigned manner, almost sluggish, like it wasn’t even sure if its murmurs came from a real place or if it all had just become lost in the haze of poor memory. For Cobain, though, and countless others, it was as real as breathing, more real than anything else, because it cut deep, like the scars of a hot iron rod that touched skin years ago.
But grunge didn’t just stick to one lane, it also caused a domino effect that signalled the emergence of a less restrictive genre, or genres, pushing out into American rock and its contrasting neighbour Britpop like it had sparked some kind of broader revolution that hinged on the fringes of opposing whatever emerged as the biggest, loudest, or most popular trope. By the time grunge had begun to lag, burnt out by the spark that had been left by the wayside, others, like Oasis, Blur, Pulp, and The Verve rose up: taking a localised, heady witticism to grunge’s coughed-up ashes.
At the height of all of this was ‘Wonderwall’. Oasis had already ignited something in the year before with ‘Supersonic’, but ‘Wonderwall’ didn’t just play into the gaps left behind by grunge, it took all of its quests to be authentic, inward-looking and socially-critical and made this into a messy party for the ages, like it no longer valued sitting in a dusty chair in the dark mumbling about why it’s fucked up, but arrived with an energetic charm that celebrated the perils of youth in spite of these frustrations. A little like that night when Hanna and Cobain painted their qualms across Washington, yearning for unity while knowing it was all a lost cause.
