When Nirvana came knocking on memory’s door

While preparing food for my hoard of Kitzanians, I started humming a song that I have not heard for decades.

It took me by surprise as first: I could not remember the name of the song, just the phrase: ‘Are we stupid and contagious? Here we are now! Entertain us!’ and second: I couldn’t remember the name of the band singing it.

It was a band from my teenagerhood in the 90’s with a monosyllabic name. I knew that the band’s leading singer committed suicide at the age of twenty-seven. Was it River Phoenix? No! I always confused those two and my brother kept correcting me. Yep! His name was Cobain as a phrase in the Red Hot Chilie Pepper’s Californication song says: ‘And Cobain can you hear the spheres singing songs off Station To Station’.

Aha! I remember now! They were called Nirvana and the song is Smells Like Teen Spirit! This process of trying to recall things from the past is what I call: The Middle Age Muddle, where all trivial past experiences get mashed up and stored in a tiny cell in the corner of the brain and becomes super hard to retrieve.

I coined this term after many futile conversations with my best friend Dalia regarding our school days. Her classic responses varied from: “Really? We had a boy called that in our class? Where was he sitting?’to’ In what class did we learn this exactly?” which made me wonder if Dalia was ever present in the class or just her apparition.

As for Nirvana, being a 90’s teenager meant that their songs were always played on MTV. They didn’t interest me at the time as I didn’t understand a word of what was said and my friends were into rap and dance music.

Yet I still remember reading the news about Cobain’s suicide in a weekly Arabic magazine and I felt sad. Years later while being abroad for university studies, I was exposed to a new culture where Kurt Cobain was a legend. Teenagers wore black t-shirts that had his picture or that of the famous suicide note that he left before shooting himself in the head in 1994.

The song Smells Like Teen Spirit is one of Nirvana’s best-known songs produced in 1991. But what was the story behind it?

According to Wikipedia, it was inspired from a phrase that Cobain’s female friend inscribed on his wall teasing him about his girlfriend: “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit”. Teen Spirit is a female deodorant that still exist in the market yet unknown to Cobain at the time. Instead, he interpreted the message as a revolutionary slogan which he decided to write a song about. It became an instant hit around the world, being in the UK charts for 184 weeks and topping other European charts.

The most interesting part of the song are the lyrics that are hard to understand because of Cobain’s guttural and slurry singing voice. As a result, many radios refused to play the song and MTV made a version of the music video that had the lyrics running across the bottom of the screen.

Apparently, the whole enigma that surrounds the song’s lyrics comes from a simple fact: human brains are built to make sense out of the senseless. There were many theories surrounding what Cobain’s lyrics meant as his own interpretation changed on different interviews from ‘being his generation’s ideas’ to ‘making fun of having a revolution’.

A music critic commented that hearing the incomprehensible song without understanding it was enough. Nevertheless, Smells Like Teen Spirit is an all-time classic appreciated by Rock music fans.