It’s not an exaggeration to say that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is the biggest grunge song of all time. Did you know, though, that the origins of the 1991 song have a lot to do with deodorant?
According to Radio X, it all goes back to a wild night of partying between Kurt Cobain and Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna. Back in the early 90s, the pair would hang out in their home state of Washington. Hanna once reflected on a specific time when they pranked a “fake abortion clinic” by spray-painting things on the walls. One slogan she mentioned was “GOD IS GAY,” which was apparently Cobain’s doing.
“We got a little more drunk, and apparently I insulted just about everybody in my entire town,” Hanna went on to recall. “I threw up on someone’s legs… It was one of those nights that later on, whenever anybody mentioned it, you don’t wanna think about it.”
We have alcohol and graffiti to thank for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
“I ended up at Kurt’s apartment, and I smashed up a bunch of s***. I took out a Sharpie marker, and I wrote a bunch of s*** all over his bedroom wall,” she went on to remember. “Then I passed out with the marker in my hand. I woke up, and I had one of those hangovers where you think that if you walked in the next room, there could be a dead body in there.”
Something from that night lingered, though, and eventually morphed into one of the most recognizable rock songs ever written. “So I wasn’t that happy when six months later,” Hanna shared, “when Kurt called me up and said, ‘Hey, do you remember that night? There was this thing that you wrote on my wall, and it was actually kind of cool. I want to use it as a lyric in one of my songs.’
Hanna continued, “I was like, ‘As long as I can get out of this conversation, I’m totally cool. You can use whatever you want.’ I was like, How the f*** can he use ‘Kurt smells like teen spirit’ as a lyric?”
So here’s where the deodorant thing finally comes in, for those who don’t know, “Teen Spirit” is a brand of deodorant. It was marketed to teen girls in the early 90s, with a tagline that read: “The harder you play, the harder it works.”
Certainly, the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” has much deeper meaning, but overall, maybe it’s not a bad thing to smell like deodorant?
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