Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

Hey One Song Nation, we're off this week, but for now we're revisiting one of our favorite early episodes of the pod, our episode on Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. That's right y'all, this is one of my favorite episodes from the early era, like we were really hitting our stride at this point figuring out what the show was. Listen, I'll just say this one thing about our own show is that after we tape it and a year goes by, it's fresh to my ears to listen to it again. So if you missed it the first time, but even if you haven't, check it out again. It's our One Song episode on Smells Like Teen Spirit. A great story like Monsters Inc stays with you forever and Disney Plus is where you'll find your next great story from the return of the award-winning hit series Rivals. Welcome to the naughtiest show on television, to the unmissable crime drama High Potential, a lifetime of great stories awaits this spring on Disney Plus. 18 Plus subscription required, T's and C's apply. I'm actor, writer, director and sometimes DJ D'Alariddle and I'm producer, DJ and songwriter, luxury, also known as the guy who says interpolation on TikTok. And this is One Song, man I am so excited for this one. Smells Like Teen Spirit is a mainstay at the top of all those 100 greatest songs of all time lists. It's got over a billion streams on Spotify and personally for me, it represents a crucial moment in the history of pop music. We're going to be getting into all of that, including the flannel, the grunge and all the mosquitoes, albinos and even our libidos. This is One Song. So D'Alariddle, do you remember the first time you heard Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit? Yeah man, I was of the age where like after school I would go home and I would watch MTV to find out like what music I should be buying on cassette. You were a cassette guy? I was a cassette guy because you know I lived in Atlanta, a driving community. I would drive around, I had my cassette deck in my 84 Honda Accord. I was so proud. It had four doors. It had four doors. I was so happy. I didn't have to be that guy with the compact where it's like you have to lift up the seat and let people in the back. I was like, no you got your own door, Joe and Rashi. Y'all let y'all selves in. I was very proud of that. But I remember watching the video by Samuel Beyer. I was like a person who early on was like, you know, because MTV listed the director on there and I was like, wow, this video is cool. And it was like a bunch of really rock dudes in the stands and they were like the cheerleaders with the anarchy symbol on there. And then this song came on and you know, like nowadays like everybody gets content on their own time. But this is still in a time when you know, there was such a thing as like a water cooler moment. We didn't have water coolers in school. Obviously couldn't afford water in my neighborhood. But we would get at lunch and we would talk about stuff I'll never forget. The day after that song, we all heard it. I feel like the same day the next day at lunch, we were all like because we were all like it's a guys, it's an all black, you know, school environment. I always say there were only two non black kids in my school. There was Trannley and Josh, there was Jorge Ramos. I thought there was a Josh. There were three. You're right. Jorge Ramos and Josh. Oh my gosh, Joel Blesinger. So we had literally one Asian kid, one Latino kid and one white kid. Long story short, I'm sitting at a table with all my friends, all of them black and they were just like, yo, did you see that band Nirvana yesterday? And we were all like, yo, that song goes, we didn't say goes hard because that was an expression back then. I'm sure we were like, yo, that's dope. You know, like we all like that. It's so different. Like we nobody came to school talking about you hear that new white snake song? No, no, no, that was never a thing for some reason. Not a lot of Motley Crew fans and dodig. For some reason that song and Kurt's whole thing just connected with people all outside the rock community and the Seattle Pacific Northwest. Like we all felt it. We all felt that song. I can't even describe how much that song meant. But to me, that song still symbolizes how one song can change everything. Like it just, it's the Oppenheimer of songs. It's like after smells like teen spirit, nothing was the same. It created a genre and it absolutely really ripple effect that changed Atlanta radio. Like I remember just a couple of months after that song came out, everybody wanted to get into the new alt rock. I think it was called alternative rock and one of the stages to this day persists 30 years later. That's still a format that did not exist before. 99 FM became 99 X, you know, because they were playing your music. What about you, man? Do you remember the first time you heard it smell? 100% because I mean, it's interesting that your story was similar. The revelation was instantaneous and actually I have to give props to a friend of mine, uh, Cecily Jacobson. So you have to understand just back up a second. When I was in high school, my senior year, I was a DJ at the local college radio station. So like I'm literally on a Wednesday night, my senior year, I'm awake at two in the morning till six playing records and I'm kind of integrated into this college music world for the first time. This is like where all the cool kids and the new records come out. You get free copies, you get guest list at shows and stuff. A friend of mine who I met this connection through the radio station gave me a cassette tape, a mixtape. So it's interesting to get a cassette connection, but this mixtape had the forthcoming Nirvana record on it. It also had this band called Kias who then went on to become Queens of the Stone Age. This is like in my personal lifetime, this is a mythic cassette tape, epic with so much revelation on it. And it also had Jane's addiction. Oh my God. It had the new Jane's addiction. All this to say that that's the first time I heard the forthcoming Nirvana record. And I was like, it was an instant like, you know, it's like pouring candy in your ears. It's just like, you know, adrenaline and sugar high. And then when I heard it a few months later on the radio, it came screaming out of the speakers in my car. And in that moment, I was like kind of surprised that it was like on the radio because this was like an indie band in the college radio station world that I lived in. It was sub pop. It was this sort of cool obscure Northwest thing, but suddenly overnight, as you know, it was not an unknown underground band. It was on the radio. Minutes later, they were on SNL. And minutes after that, the frat boys were playing it coming out of the, that, that was the moment that I was like, whoa, what's happening here? This is not meant for these guys. I mean, were you a grunge kid? I mean, something tells me you were probably really into grunge in that moment. I was grunge. I was the personification. I mentioned on a previous episode, I had the dreadlocks already. You're the white guy with the red light guy with, I was actually one of two white guys at my school, the white men with dreadlocks. Yeah. Me and Josh, Josh was the other white guy with that. Why is it always Josh or Joel? Shout out to Josh who lives in Hawaii now. We just reconnected after many years. Great guy, but he and I were the two white guys with dreadlocks. We both love Jane's addiction. This is why we had the dreads and we were both Jews, by the way, should be noted. And yeah. So I was a grunge kid. I remember I was on some substance and walking around with my shirt off in college and I was, I was Chris Cornell from Soundgarden. I remember thinking I'm or Addo Durant's from Counting Crows. He had dreads and he was in a band. I can't tolerate that. I touched a nerve. He touched a nerve. I am so sorry. But for the sake of entertainment, we can leave it at a show. I'm okay with that. Fair enough. But I was not a Counting Crows fan just for the record. Let's put it out there on on the record. Can I just say real quick, I think it's interesting that you heard Nirvana before you saw the video. For me, the two are so integrated. The fact that my first exposure to the song was that video was just the rebellion in that video. With the visuals. I just feel like nowadays, yeah, absolutely. Nowadays, there's songs that I love and every now and then I'll be somewhere like a club or a bar and like I'll see, I'll be like, yo, Kendrick Lamar has a video for that song. Like these are like major, it never occurs to me to check out the video, but like there was a time. Yonsei didn't even have any videos from Renaissance. There's no videos from that record. See, I didn't even know that. And by the way, I feel like, I feel like music videos, like what a wonderful medium. They used to be ground zero for the culture. I mean, like the guy who directed smells like Teen Spirit went on to direct some of the seminal videos of the decade. He did No Rain by Blind Mellon. He did Come to My Window by Melissa Ethridge. Like he did like a lot of different, like he primarily did metal, but he did a lot of videos that sort of defined that decade. And now I feel like, you know, besides TikToks and things you see online, like music videos, like they're just not ground zero like they were when this song came out. And again, just changed everything. Well, and also just like to put a pin on that, like the video, their video is important now. But as you and I both know, it's more like the TikTok 10 to 15 second fragment that's important, not the full song as a music video experience. So that's like a huge, we've kind of lost that as an art format in and of itself. Absolutely. Think about it. Do y'all, my friend, are you ready to get into the one song this week on one song? I'm ready. Let's do this. So I'm going to start with the guitar part. But before we get into Kurt Cobain's playing, I'm going to set the scene a little bit for you. So they're on this label called Sub Pop, which is based out of Seattle, and it's Mud Honey and Green River who go on to become Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. It's the coolest label, at least in my world at that moment in College Radio. It was the coolest label that existed. They even had the singles club where I was a member of the Sub Pop singles club. Every month, I'd get a seven inch record with like, you know, one song by Smashing Pumpkins and the next week with Sonic Youth on the label. Sonic Youth was not on the label, but it's interesting you mentioned them because they become relevant when Nirvana signs with Geffen. Oh, that's okay. Yeah. Sonic Youth was on Geffen and that's perfect segue to the fact that the reason they wanted to sign with Geffen was because they already had Sonic Youth and that was credibility in there. Yeah. And they're like, if we can sell 50,000 records like Sonic Youth, we're going to be in good hands. I heard that story. Yeah. They're like, oh, we can just sell half of what Sonic Youth sold. And that's a big part of this story because in this moment, we're kind of in this area of time in American culture where there's a big distinction between the mainstream and the underground. Absolutely. And being in the underground, you had some pride about like not being mainstream and like, listening to different music from what the Jocks were listening to and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So all this is happening and part of why Kurt Cobain is such a fascinating character and person to like, not just the music, but the person is because we know he had these conflicts about being an outsider, but wanting to be accepted. I mean, this is a pretty universal feeling, but it plays out in his art and in his journals that we now have access to. We know that he wanted more. He was an ambitious person and an ambitious songwriter. He wanted not just to write cool indie underground songs because at the end of the day, that's actually kind of easy to like write something cool that not everyone likes. The big challenging thing is to break out of the cool underground scene and to be heard. So he was aiming high. He wanted to write like the Beatles. He wanted to write great, beloved, big songs. And that leads us into smells like Teen Spirit. It's a direct line because one of the kind of funny stories about the song, and I'm going to play you the riff in a second is once he played this riff for his bandmates, they all, everybody laughed because it was so big and ambitious. It was so clearly a moon shot, a riff. And for a minute, they were all like, are we sure we're doing this? Is this really our band? And then it just became inescapably like, this is just too good. We can't not finish the song and put it out in the world. But without any further ado, I'm going to play you the isolated guitar. Now this riff is in the pantheon of iconic riffs. By the way, there's another episode of the show. We're going to go take a deeper dive into the concept of a riff. But basically a riff is what you think it is. It's just a usually guitar part that you can kind of sing in your head later on. It's almost like its own melody. So here is the iconic Kurt Cobain guitar from Smells Like Teen Spirit. So just I want to give credit where it's to Butch Vig, a seminal figure in all of this producer who produced this record, went on to form Garbage as his own project. Yes, one of my favorite groups of all time. He as a sound shaper and also just as a producer part of your job is to get the best performances. Massive credit to him for changing the sound of radio overnight with the guitar sound, in my opinion, in this song. There's great documentaries and books out there. I urge you, if you're a fan, to look it up for his telling of the story. I think Butch Vig, he's the George Martin that you can't, you can't. I'm going to use an Atlanta term from the 90s. You know, there's a lot of lo-fi stuff that I love, but I think to take over radio in the 90s the way Nirvana did, you had to make it chunky. Chunky is a Atlanta term. Chunky. And I feel like even if you had your settings to what I, even if you had your car EQ to what I always call the gangster setting, which is bass all the way up, treble all the way up and mids all the way down. If you played a Nirvana song, that's that sound of chunky in your car. Shout out to Alcast. They were the first ones to ever, I heard use the word chunky. That's a great word. I'm going to start using that. But you know, but it sounds like what it means, right? It's like the bass is like, the drums are like, boom. It's got body to it. It's got body to it. Yeah, man. It's just, it's chunky and I can't even describe it. He's a crucial part of the story who maybe sometimes gets left out in the world because the perfect blend of band and producer, another producer who is more of an indie rock mindset might not have understood. He might have kept it shallow and high end. Yeah. And that might have pleased, you know, the crowd that liked bleach, but let's get this thing. This is a radio hit. Let's get it on the radio. So some of the songs that are kind of in this pantheon of big chunky, chunky, I should say, you're learning riff rock, bigness that were clearly in Kurt's eye line for what he was aiming for. Here are a couple of them. This is Boston's more than a feeling more than a feeling. Okay. I hear it. Wow. I would not have, I would not have drawn a connection. We are not the snitch police. We are not the music musical snitcher. We are not the snitch police, but I hear it. I hear it. Yeah, you hear that. And another one kind of in the same realm would be this one. This is blue oyster cult and their legendary riff monster aptly named Godzilla. Whoa. You know what? I don't think I've ever heard this song. Whoa. Okay. All right. That's incredible. And by the way, I've never heard that song before. Yeah. Did he ever, did he ever name check that song? I'm gonna be honest with you. I haven't heard him necessarily name check that I've heard a lot of speculation, like other people speculating. Well, it sounds a little like this. Sounds like this. That's kind of why I played it. What I do know to answer your question, he was very vocal because he did very frequently name his influences very publicly and he shared a lot of love with a lot of the bands that he came up like admiring. Yeah, no, he was gracious in that way. The band that Kurt Cobain really had his eye on and he's talked about many times was the pixies. Yes. God, I love music. What's the name of that song? It's called Gigantic. That is the pixies. That, I mean, I just had one of those music moments where it's like, I still feel the same way when I heard that song the first time. I love that. This band is one of my favorite bands, one of Kurt's favorite bands. One thing they pioneered or at least made kind of took as an idea and made kind of into their signature in a way was this quiet, loud thing. So there'd always be a quiet section that builds to a loud section. Such a simple concept, but that is the pixies formula as it were. I feel like various genres, various artists have played with quiet, loud, but I think that the success of Smells Like Teen Spirit easily made the quiet, loud thing just a signature of American grunge in the 90s. 100%. Yeah. I mean, it went from being, again, same idea. It went from being kind of a more, because the pixies are very well known in indie rock circles, if you will. But they never, they had that song maybe towards the end of their career. They had one sort of minor MTV hit, Here Comes Your Man, but they're mostly an indie superstar band, but they were never a big mainstream band, not nearly the way Nirvana ever was. Did they do Monkey's Gone to Heaven? You know what Monkey Gone to Heaven probably is their bigger one. I love that song. I know that one. And maybe because of Fight Club, maybe their most well known song is Where Is My Mind? Of course. So they didn't escape notice, I'm not trying to say, but they never got to Nirvana levels. Never, never. They were, they were that, they were that, I think they should have. They were almost like how the Smiths are. Like they're one of those groups that you only know if you get into the genre. Yeah. They never had a genre buster. That's so true. Yeah. To this day, I mean, a recent interview with Frank Black from the Pixies, he's still a little bit bitter that Nirvana got there and that they did with that same kind of core idea of the quiet loud thing. Yeah. There's a quote, right? There's, this quote is pretty delicious. So let's just go verbatim. Okay. So this is from a 2013 interview. Black Francis discussed the band's legacy. Asked what his contribution to Rock was. Francis replied sarcastically, being original, influencing Nirvana so they could rip a song. I'll admit it. If Kurt Cobain fests up to it, I'll agree with you. You ripped us off. There's nothing quite like musician ego. And when it gets bruised, I understand, man. You thought it was your idea and the world thinks it's Kurt's idea. Take us out with just a little bit more because the guitar riffs in the song are so epic. I always thought that it was cool that after singing two verses, Kurt basically plays a verse on his guitar as his solo. You're absolutely right. The guitar solo is literally the melody. Yes. So let's listen to that. So good. So good, right? You know, it's funny listening back to that. I'm thinking about how, so Weezer, there's like a funny internet meme that like Weezer kind of begins right when Nirvana ends. And so the meme and actually Rivers Guoma has participated in this is that Rivers is actually Kurt Cobain. He just like changed his glasses. He just added glasses. I mean, Clark Kent style and continues. It's a bit of a dark meme, but it's a funny one. But it's funny. I'm thinking about it. Listen to that solo because there's a bunch of Weezer. There's an entire record, the green album, where Weezer's every song does that same idea. Every guitar solo on the green album is just the melody from the song, which must have been a conscious choice just for one record to try it out. Because it's what you have to think of anything new. You just play the melody again. Exactly. I mentioned this a minute ago, but it's, you know, you can't imagine the world existing without this song being the way it is. And Nirvana, it's their iconic signature song. But when Kurt first brought that riff and he had a melody for the chorus, which we just heard in the guitar solo, that melody plus the riff, when he brought it to the band, they were like, dude, this is ridiculous. Like Kurt, bass player Kurt Novicell, literally said, this is ridiculous. So they were jamming on it. They jammed on it. Kurt's like, let's just try it out. Let's just try it out. This is a very frequent thing that happens in the rehearsal space. Like, let's just work on it, see where it goes. So they go in, the band starts rehearsing, and just the course of playing it over and over again, and to make their own rehearsal, which is going 20, 30 minutes of the same song, to kind of make it more interesting, they decide what happens if we slow it down, kind of make it a little more heavy. Maybe they're taking some like inspiration from that Godzilla riff. Sounds a little bit, and Chris Novicellich comes up with this bass line. And it should be noted that in the song, Chris Novicellich, his part is, it's very simple as a bass player. It's so simple. You've got to get, you get in the groove and you're like, this is not one of those songs where I'm going to get fancy and do like things that are like super interesting, that'll make other bass players jealous. I'm going to stick with the groove. I'm going to play these four notes. I think that this is just one of those iconic bass lines, just like Excursions, which opens up a Tribe Call Quest's Low In Theory album. I feel like that bass line just opens it up. And I feel like Hip Hop at this time is also really bass driven. Like, you know, if you look at DJ Mugs and the stuff that he does with Cypress Hill, House of Pain, all that stuff. And just bass lines in general were like just blowing up in this period. I truly love this bass line. And I feel like Chris is one of the, he's kind of the forgotten member of Nirvana. Like if you, you know, nobody, nobody forgets Kurt. Obviously Davis had an amazing career post. I feel like- It's made it hard to forget him. Yes. Uphiquitous. But by the way, I really like some Food Fighter stuff. I really like some Queen of the Stone Age stuff as well. After the break, we'll be getting deeper into Smells Like Teen Spirit. And we'll also let you know who Kurt Cobain said was the world's greatest on live TV. We'll be right back. You gotta come back for that one. All right. Welcome back to one song. Luxury. One interesting thing about Smells Like Teen Spirit is it, it belongs in that Pantheon of songs where the title is never sang. Like it's, the title's not in the lyrics. Right. Explain how it came to be called Smells Like Teen Spirit. It's so funny you say that because as I'm thinking about it, like half the shows we've taped are in that same category. We did Blue Monday. We did How Soon Is Now. We did How Soon Is Now. Smells Like Teen Spirit. So if you hadn't noticed, because when we were preparing for the show, I had not noticed to be honest, that it was not in the song. It's a, it's a funny phenomenon. So the story goes, at the time Kurt Cobain was dating the drummer for Bikini Kill, Toby Vale. Bikini Kill being a seminal, I think Olympia Washington punk band, feminist punk band, founded by and headed by Kathleen Hannah, one of my all-time icons, who's now in La Tigre. And Kathleen, one night, they were all hanging out at Kurt's apartment, which was, sounds pretty ramshackle, but mattress on the floor kind of situation. And so Toby Vale, the drummer from Bikini Kill was wearing a deodorant that was actually called Teen Spirit. So Kathleen Hannah spray paint, takes a spray paint bottle, bottle, what do you call it? Shakey, shaky thing. Can, thank you so much. Kathleen Hannah takes a spray paint can and spray paints on the wall of Kurt's apartment. Kurt smells like Teen Spirit. Just like, I've heard this story. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of a compliment. Kind of, I'm not sure about what to make of it. Kind of, kind of, sounds like a diss to me. Kind of a weird burn. Kind of if our producer sprays on the wall, Diallo smells like old spice. I'm not going to be like, hey, we're going to have to go to HR. It's also kind of sweet though. You smell like your girlfriend's like niceness. That is true. That's true. I guess we're lucky. They didn't smell like, you know, Kurt smells like, like secret because then they would have thought that there was like a scandal involved. There's a lot going on. Yeah. You're right. Well, smells like Teen Spirit just stuck out to Kurt. It smells like Jean Detay would have been really hilarious. Anyway, go. Cody Musk. Yeah. You don't want that. The cheap cologne from five and dime store. Dracar noir. Dracar noir. I kind of like that one at the time, but it's now many years later. Smells like Dracar noir is not a hit. It's not a hit. It does not work in the mix. We were just listening to the demo. We'll play some of that in a minute. And it's fun to listen to it as one is reminded that these lyrics are never sung. But I wonder if, because in the demo, they're kind of like rearranging all these mulatto albino, like here we are now entertain us. We're going to talk about that lyric in a second. We're going to talk about that in a second. But the lyrics themselves are more kind of sonic. Like when you listen to the song, you're like half the time as we're now famously parody later, you're not 100% what he's saying. It's not the kind of lyric where the meaning sinks in and you're like, this is a song about X. So I just wonder if they got to the end. They're like, what should we call the song guys? And it just was fresh in the top of his mind that she had just spray painted it on his wall. Maybe they were just like, Hey, as a joke, we can call it what Kathleen just spray painted. Why don't we talk about the drums? Yes. Yeah. Dave Grohl's iconic drum fill. And a lot of people, by the way, have been asking me. So as you may know, on Tik Tok, I do a bunch of videos where I talk about interpolation and influence and such. So I got a lot of DMs from strangers, which I love, by the way, please keep them coming with requests. Like they want to hear a breakdown of this song or this song or that song. And one of the most probably the most common request, and I have not had a chance to get to it. So I'm excited to get to it right now on one song is there's this Pharrell video interviewing Dave Grohl making the rounds where Dave Grohl tells Pharrell that one of his big inspirations for the drum break in smells like teen spirit was, as he puts it, some of the famous disco and funk drummers of the seventies. Like Gap Band, Gap Band, he named Checks Cameo. He named Checks. Tony Thompson from Sheik. So let's listen to it. Let's let's, uh, this will, here's the breakdown. Here's the, as requested on Tik Tok, if you will, here is the breakdown starting with Dave Grohl's incredibly iconic drum intro. Okay, so here is what he is talking about in particular. He's referring to that ba-oom, ba-ba-oom, ba-ba-oom, ba-ba-oom, that simple idea, which is something that iconically shows up in many, many, many seventies funk songs, not the least of which are the ones I'm about to play you. You say you're going to play me some Greenwood, Archer and Pine. I'm just going to wait for you to, starting with the Gap Band, which I only, thanks to this show and Diallo teaching me live with the camera running is, That Gap is actually an acronym for the streets in their neighborhood. Yeah. I love that. So here, here is one of two songs that the Gap Band have a very similar fill. I like that one. I like that one. And they like that fill so much, my friend. They used it in this song as well. Wait, you know what? Let's give it up to the Gap Band because they're like, they're like, we will not start our songs with music. We will start our songs with roosters. We will start our songs with motorcycles. Yeah. I think drop the bomb on me starts off with some bomb sounds. Like, they're like, look, y'all, music ain't going to do it on its own. So we got to start off with some other sound effects. We got to, we got to lure the listener in thinking they're watching a movie. What's also funny about that fill is that like when I was a young drummer, just starting out like in our circle of musical friends, we would refer to these fills as being kind of like, they're funny, cool because it's a simple, it's, it's every time, it's not every time it turns out, it's just these two Gap Band songs for that band. But the Gap Band always, it feels like they always do that fill. And then as a young rock drummer, mainly we would do them too. So when Dave says this, it's like, oh, I feel another connection to Dave as he's a much better, bigger drummer than me. But just like, I totally get it. I'm like, yeah, but it feels good and it rocks off. All I can say is that there was a sound effects company that was like, look, guys, the Gap Band broke up. They're like, I don't know where we're going to get our business. Our business model doesn't work unless the Gap Band comes in here 12 times a year. Name a song that used this as the sample, sample source and Dave Grohl inspiration. Okay. In one eight seconds on the fly, y'all. I should know that. I already hit the sample. The sample was that. What is that? You've heard it a million times. A better hand is Chuck D. Bring the noise. Yeah. I knew I knew that sample from somewhere. That's great. That's a great one. I'm just playing too black, too strong. I got numb. I didn't know what to do. My mind's more confession. You have to act out what the actual Derek is. All right. I got to give props to DJ Envy. Yes. We were recently on the breakfast club. And he reminded me of one that I'd forgotten and it's this. I kiss me and I'll kiss you back. That's the underground. Of course, this is me, myself, and I by Dayla and it all stems from something about the music. It always makes me dance. I can't believe how many, how many different ways that you could go with that drumming. And it's also interesting to me that when I mean literally its name is grunge, the genre's name is grunge and yet it's influenced by glossy disco. The much maligned, the president Carter of musical genres has actually influenced almost every genre that came after it. So shout out to disco and all the disco heads out there. Although in fairness, I would give, I would, I would have these at least are more funk. I mean, they're right on that line. Maybe you can funk. Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. You know what? Disco funk. It is, but, but, but disco and funk, you know, they're kind of, you know, shout out to, to Dazz, you know, disco jazz. We love being disco. Thanks for sharing those drums with us. It's funny because I just realized as we're talking about this, the Pharrell interviewing with Dave Grohl Pharrell himself starts every song famously with the ba, ba, ba, ba, right with it with a that four, that thing of a repetition. Bump, bump, bump, bump. That's a signature sound. Which is cool, but I also feel like Pharrell smartly, Pharrell and Chad would throw that into songs so that the DJ knew how to bring in the beat. Like, you know, there's nothing more. We've talked on previous episodes, Mo Money Mo Problems, that little glissando in, like that's hard for a DJ to mix in. Yeah. You know, I feel like a lot of early hip hop would just give you like a snare, like a pop and then it would come in on the beat, but Pharrell gives you the ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, and then it's really easy to bring in the beat. The last piece of the equation is, of course, Kurt Cobain's isolated vocal. So I'm excited to get into this because it's going to send chills down the spine of every listener of one song. I'm going to start with the verse melody so we can talk about that. And then I'll play you the chorus melody. And of course, we were talking about the quiet, loud dynamic in the pixies earlier. It's really clear when you hear the difference between how he sings these two parts, starting with the melody in the verse. So this part of the song is actually relatively singable, at least for me personally. Like, I can kind of make that happen. But once we get to the chorus on a mount, I can't, I can't, my vocal chords are a little too valuable to me. And of course, the most important part, the second most important part is, I mean, like you in his voice, you hear just, I mean, I, without overstating, you hear angst, you hear teen rebellion, you hear it all, you hear like the kid in the corner who feels like, you know, I could be one of the popular kids, but I'm not going to be, or you hear the kid who's like, I'd love to be those kids, but I'm, I can't be like you. I feel like there's so many different relatable sounds coming out of his voice. It's sort of no matter who you were. I think that is one of the reasons why the jocks started singing it because he's that part of our id that just, you know, feels rejected. And can I just, I want to talk a little bit about the elephant in the room as a black listener to the song. This could have gone way south. I mean, he says a word mulatto, which is highly offensive and it was actually offensive at the time. Don't let people say, Oh, it was 1991. People weren't so snowflakey. No, people weren't crazy about it there, but I think we, because we were already relating to him and his vulnerability, it wasn't like Axl Rose was singing the word mulatto. Like Axl Rose sings the word mulatto. You're like, yeah, I know who this guy is. But like when Kurtz comes across different, and can I just say from a personal point of view, like I immediately drew a connection between all four of these things. I was like, wait a mulatto and albino, mosquito, my libido. I was like, Oh my God, these are all things that have his blood. A mulatto has a white man's blood. He's a white man. It's a mosquito has your blood cause it bit you. An albino has your blood because despite what he looks like, he's, you know, one of us. And then a libido, well, that's just blood in a, you know, in a teen's awkward position. You know, I never, I never thought I thought that was a reference to boner. So all of it, it was just like it all made sense because I felt like I've learned recently that, you know, Kurt came up with these lyrics like very last minute. Yeah. So who knows what was going through his head. But it's some of these words are on the demo. So like these words had been in his mind before he went into the boot to record it. It's one of those unknowable things like not as an outsider. It's kind of one of the beautiful things, right? Like art and even lyrics can mean different things to me, the listener, than they're even intended to be by the person who wrote them. And at the time that Kurt was singing them, we will never know for sure, but he may not have himself intended. It was sonically a rhyme. It was just words coming to his head in the moment. And then the meaning was sort of ascribed later because that's a very frequent thing that happens in songwriting is there's one word or one idea and then the rest is sort of placeholder-y, but it starts to weirdly make sense. Listen. Because your subconscious is actually doing work for you. I feel like you and I are both artists and I always speak for myself, but I suspect this is true for you too. There are times when you think that you know the meaning of what you're creating and then you look back 10 years later and you know, I don't know if I was right about what the meaning was even to me back then. Maybe I wasn't honest enough to admit that the meaning was that. So sometimes the meaning can even change for the artist. I also want to point out like, cause you were talking about the like, I really loved what you were saying about sort of how even the jocks, the popular kids, cause it was a very simplistic viewpoint. You're either an insider, you're either an undergr- Or nerd, yeah. Alternative underground kid or your popular me. So that was a little simplified at the time, perhaps, but I loved what you were saying about how even the jocks and the like popular kids have a part of themselves, which is the insecure, needy, wanting to be heard, you know, little sad at home kind of person. I feel like, you know, Kurt had a fascination with the guys who he was growing up with in, you know, in, in Seattle and in the Pacific Northwest, because, you know, on another song, he talks about, he's the one who loves all our pretty songs. He loves to sing along. He likes to shoot his gun. It does. No, it's not what it means. There's a song on bleach called Mr. Mustache, which is based on a cartoon and the cartoon is very anti, their term, not mine, very anti redneck. That's, that's what, you know, you'll read online and stuff. And like Kurt agreed with the sort of take that like, you know, because in the, in the comic strip, like this guy who has a mustache, he's not all called Mr. Mustache, but he's like, my kid better come on. He better like football and he better not be no F word and S word and N word. And it's like all this stuff. And Kurt read that comic and he loved it. And he found ways to keep coming back to like, you know, these are the people that I grew up around. But I, but even though I could easily be one of them, I'm going to take a more, you know, open minded approach to it. One of my favorite Kurt Cobain lyrics of all time is everyone is gay. And I think that, you know, he was, that was pretty brave at the time to sing that. He was freaking brave to sing a line like that. At the time it was so brave. And we all were kind of grateful for it. You know, one thing that to connect the dots there, because especially in that moment, the idea of punk rockness was an ethos, you know, part of it is a sound when we think punk rock now, maybe you think the sex pistols or the Ramones, maybe you think Blink 182, like that's what punk rock has come to mean, kind of fast rock and rock music. But it really at that time, especially was an ethos of like, there was a sensitivity to as much as was possible to being like a good punk rock person at the time would have been kind of trying to be feminist, trying to be like not homophobic, trying to, trying to be a good person. Trying to be like, hey, we can all get down with this jam. Trying not to be racist. There's a lot of like punk against racist like concerts in the late seventies in England. And to connect it back to the vocals for a minute, I was when we were listening just now, I was hearing the punk rockness in that vocal, because you're talking about guns and roses, Axl Rose isn't isn't he's hitting the notes kind of almost like an opera singer. Like there's like a technical excellence in other genres and pop music, of course. But from punk rock, we get now suddenly in the mainstream, this vocal, which is rough and dirty and imperfect. And he's losing it. And he's like screaming his like nodules into oblivion. That was a new sound certainly on pop radio in 1991. Absolutely. And that's from punk rock. I mean, like even when he sings the last part, a denial. Yeah. That's insane. And I feel like, can we, can we hear a little bit of the denial clip from the end of the song? And this is where his voice gets absolutely obliterated. You hear it happening in real time. There's two vocals in there and you can hear one just give up. One is just like, I'm done. But I like when we were watching a video with Butch Vig, again, the producer of the track, and he was saying like, you know, he recorded it and I was able to place his vocals. He kind of hit the notes the same way. So I was kind of able to just place the vocals over it. I mean, like, this is just one of those great voices where even when you take all the music away from it and all but one layer, it still sounds great. Okay. So we've been through the song top to bottom. And of course it was massive. But what's interesting to me is that not everyone at the time knew was going to be massive. I used to work at a record label 100 years ago. And, you know, as a young person at the label, like the interns, the assistants, we would pass around demos and get excited about stuff. Apparently, like the people at Geffen were, you know, they were excited about this act. Obviously they had signed it, but like it was the assistants walking around there who were like, no, this thing is going to be huge. And apparently, they had ears on the ground. Yeah. Like one of the guys who worked on the iconic album cover was like, Oh, I need to knock this thing out of the park because I think this is going to be our next really big thing. So he's walking around with this demo and they're going around. And after Kurt decides that he wants this to be like a baby underwater, like he has to find somebody. That's his idea. I didn't know that. The band was talking about a lot of ideas. They actually, they brainstormed the most about what is the baby chasing. And they talked about everything from like a raw piece of me. They talked about a lot of things before they landed on, you know, money. Yeah. But this is literally the guy who had to go out and find a person who was good at photographing humans underwater. But apparently he found a good, especially this one guy was known for it. And apparently they dropped like a bunch of babies in the water. They were like four or five babies. They defined the right baby. They dropped into water. Yep. And there was one where he was like, I got the perfect image. And then all we did was we photoshopped out. It's not photoshopped. That baby is actually underwater with his arms like that. They had to photoshop out the bottom of the pool. So it looked like there was nothing but water underneath. But that's how we got that iconic baby on the album cover. And I know that the guy like sued because he was only paid like something like $200 to appear on this cover. He sued for like 250,000 and he lost. So shout out to, I forget the guy's name as Spencer, I want to say. I'm sorry you didn't get that money, man, but at least you are immortalized. He definitely is immortalized. So I'm going to flip the script. Okay. Right now, which is a phrase that nobody who doesn't vividly remember the nineties even uses anymore. But I want to turn the tables, if you will, and play some songs for you because there are certain songs anytime I think about smells like Teen Spirit, whether it's the artist's own admission or just my theory, I feel like they're heavily influenced. One person who admits I love that song. I wanted to make a song quite like it is Rafael Sadiq of Tony, Tony, Tony. Okay. And on this, on the album House of Music, he did his version of hello, hello. Can I just say it because everyone's waiting for me to say it? Interpolation. I mean, that's, that's what that is. That's textbook. It's fun. Anybody knows, anybody who listens to the show knows that I'm also a big blur fan blur admitted that they only did song two to sort of copy that quiet low thing that you were talking about earlier with the pixies and what smells like and that song, which you've heard, but now listen to the context of blur essentially trying to make a Nirvana song. Here is song two. It's fun, right? And then you notice the people who know that song, we can't play too much of it. After that loud party goes really quiet. And he's like, I got my head checked. I wonder if they were thinking pixies or if they were thinking Nirvana. No, he said specifically, I wanted to make a grunge song because you have to put this in the context. Everybody was like, who's going to win America? Will it be Blur or Wastes? Well, Wastes kind of won and blur on their follow-up album was kind of mad at America. And they're like, well, how based on what's on American radio, this should be a hit. And of course it ended up being Blur's biggest hit in America. And I'll bet you they were doing it in the room with big smiles on their faces of sarcasm because they knew that this was silly, right? They were having fun. It's one of those examples of like when you're having fun and just trying to make fun of, have fun with, however you want to phrase it, a style of music, you might accidentally end up with your biggest song. If you were to sit down and write a parody of a Nirvana song, or you might write that time, you'd end up writing song. That riff might come out of your body in 1994 or whatever that was. So here's one more song. This is just a theory. I want you to think about Smells Like Teen Spirit. And I want you to listen to this song by the offspring and then try and unhear it. There's nothing subtle about that. There are times when I'm singing Smells Like Teen Spirit in my head, but then eventually I go to the offspring song because they're so freaking similar. It's insane. So I wanted to, if I know, I don't know the offspring's catalog that well, but I sense in my mind they've got at least two other songs that kind of do the same thing. Yes. Is that right? Yes. It wouldn't even surprise me. Keep them separated. Is that, that's them too, right? That's a little different, but it's the same idea. There's a quiet, loud, quiet, loud, quiet thing that they do all the time. But I mean, at the end of the day, there's so many groups that were influenced by Nirvana. At this point, everyone was influenced by Nirvana. Absolutely. And by the way, can I just say right here while we're talking about Nirvana, I actually do like some whole songs, whole being the group with Courtney Love. Celebrity skin, that record is insane. Celebrity, I mean like celebrity skin, Malibu, doll parts. There are so many songs and you can kind of hear like, you know, whether it's Courtney's, whether Courtney influenced Kurt a little bit or Kurt influenced Courtney, you can kind of hear some similarities there. I think that people don't actually ever recognize how much Courtney might have influenced Kurt because she's there from the beginning. People forget the very first time that Smells Like Teen Spirit is performed live internationally is on the UK show, The Word. And Kurt famously opens his performance by saying, I just want to tell the people in this room that Courtney Love, the lead singer of whole, is the best in the world. And literally one year later, they were married. So like, she's there from the beginning guys, you guys can hate on her. I feel like there's a whole strain of people hate on Yoko. But like, listen, if I'm being honest, I think Courtney Love is the more talented Yoko Ono. We do not hate on the strong women on this show. I'm a big Yoko fan. I'm a big Courtney fan. We love you, Courtney. We love Kathleen Hanna. She's not generally putting those cameras. We're big fans of these like awesome music women. So at the top of this episode, we talked about how this was the song and Nirvana became the band. Everything was very different after this song. Nothing was the same. And that includes the culture. Like Grunge was not just a musical phenomenon. Don't forget there was like Mark Jacobs fashion lines, New York Times, all that fancy flannel I couldn't afford. Fancy flannel, New York Times. There was movie singles. Remember that movie singles came out an entire movie about Grunge in Seattle that was like kind of glorifying the music, the fashion that the, and actually I was about to say the speak, but that there's a funny story attached to Grunge speak, like the language of Grunge, which is a non-existent phenomenon, which was willed into existence by the, at the time outgoing secretary at sub pop, that record label. Yeah. Got a call from the New York Times during Grunge media, like everyone's blowing up on the charts. New York Times is like, we're gonna do an article about Grunge. Let's call like, let's call ground zero of Grunge, which is a sub pop HQ. And Megan Jasper is her name. And Megan Jasper answers the phone. She's actually leaving. She's fired and she hasn't left yet. And she picks up the phone and gets this call from this reporter saying, calling from the New York Times, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they talk and towards the end they're like, by the way, almost as a side note, we're curious about the language. Are there special words? Does this subculture have its own lingo? It's like own little lingo. And Megan Jasper, she, she is in a mood. And she's like, she starts off kind of like, kind of like nothing fancy. She's like making stuff up just to have fun. So she comes up with a few ideas. I'm going to, I'm going to look at my list right now. The first one, basically she's making this up on the spot. I think that's what's funny about it. Like she's, these words do not exist. The answer is no, there is no Grunge speak, except when Megan Jasper answers the phone and changes the game by saying, lame stain. She explains is an uncool person. Okay, we're off to kind of slow start here, kind of basics. Rock on is a happy goodbye. Plausible. I believe that one. But then she continues. And the next one, swing in on the flippity flop is what Grunge people say for hanging out. We're going to go swing on the flippity flop. And then she ends it with a loser in Grunge speak is a Cobb nobler. I think she was a, she should have become a comedy writer. She was brilliant. You know what she became? It reminds me of Dave Chappelle saying he makes up slang when he talks to his agent. So he'll be like, okay, well zip it up and zip it out. And then of course, they just like, uh, yeah, zip it up to you, Dave. You know, D'Ala has been front and swing on the flippity flop today. My favorite Cobb nobler. Why thank you, lame stain. Well, as sad as I am to do so, it is time to end this episode one song. Help me in this thing. All right, let's do it. Well, I am producer DJ and songwriter luxury and I'm actor, writer, director and sometimes DJ D'Ala Riddle. This is one song. We will see you next time.