The lyrics take a cynical pot-shot at the new fans who’d begun following the band after the underground success of Bleach, who just wanted to sing along with ‘all our pretty songs’ – a message delivered, ironically, via one of Kurt’s most sing-along-able tunes, and with no idea how that cadre of fair-weather fans would swell following Nevermind’s breakthrough. The finished track delivered one of Nevermind’s most infectious pop moments.
Many takes later, Vig got what he wanted.” “He had trouble hitting those stratospheric notes,” wrote biographer Michael Azerrad, “But if he’d blow a take, he’d just take a drag on his cigarette and try again. Not that they necessarily came easily to the future Foo Fighters frontman. And not only did he bring a powerhouse drumming style light years ahead of Chad Channing’s grungy rumble, he was also capable of delivering harmonies to Kurt’s lead vocals, which he first tried out on In Bloom’s woozy, summery chorus, lending the song its high notes. The band had changed since the Smart Studios sessions, however, with the arrival of Dave on the drum stool. “I thought it would be good to start with a song where I was familiar with the arrangements.” “I was familiar with it because we’d worked on it for Sub Pop,” Butch told VH1’s Classic Albums. When they returned to the track for the sessions at California’s Sound City Studios, it was the first song they worked on for the album. The band had worked on In Bloom during the Smart Studios sessions with Butch for the mooted second Sub Pop album, which ended up serving as a dry-run for Nevermind. So I had him do multiple vocal takes, and he sang them so consistently I could run them at the same time as a double track, and it really made the song sound powerful.” “I said, ‘Kurt, I want you to double-track the guitars and vocals, to really make this jump out of the speakers.’ He thought it was ‘cheating’, especially with his vocals. To give Teen Spirit proper emphasis, Butch wanted to use some studio trickery, though Kurt was typically reluctant. I remember pacing around thinking, ‘Oh my God, this sounds crazy intense.’” “It was the first time I heard Dave Grohl play live, and it sounded so amazing. Just before the recording session, Nirvana played through their songs at a nearby rehearsal space.
And even though the recording was terrible, I was super excited.” But underneath the fuzz, I could hear ‘ Hello, hello’, melodies and chord structures. It was so fucking distorted, I could barely hear anything. “Kurt introduced it by saying, ‘Hey Butch, we got some new songs for you, and we also got Dave Grohl – he’s the best drummer in the world!’ Then they clicked into Teen Spirit, with the scratchy guitar at the start. “It was a boombox recording of a rehearsal,” Butch remembered to Kerrang!. It was one of the last songs written before Nirvana travelled to California to record Nevermind, Kurt sending producer Butch Vig a cassette of its demo a week ahead of the sessions. “Kurt called me up six months later,” Kathleen added, “and he said, ‘Hey, do you remember that night? There’s a thing you wrote on my wall… it’s actually quite cool, and I want to use it.’” Mission accomplished, they continued drinking, and ended up at Kurt’s apartment, where Kathleen scrawled lots of graffiti on his walls, including the words ‘Kurt smells like teen spirit ’. She wrote ‘Fake abortion clinic, everyone’ on the walls, while Kurt added, in six-foot-high red letters, ‘God is gay’. Kathleen later recalled that, in August of 1990, fuelled by a bottle of Canadian Club whisky, the “angry young feminists… decided we’d do a little public service” and graffitied the exterior of a ‘Teen Pregnancy Centre’ which had just opened in town, and was, in fact, “a front for a right-wing operation telling teenage girls they’d go to hell if they had abortions”. Kurt’s main influence had been The Pixies, telling Rolling Stone, “I connected with that band so heavily… We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.” Indeed, Krist Novoselic worried that the song was too Pixies-ish, telling Kurt, “People are really going to nail us for it.” Lyrically, Teen Spirit painted an ambivalent portrait of the indie-rock revolutionaries he’d lived alongside in Olympia, its title drawing upon memories of a night of uncivil disobedience with his friend Kathleen Hanna, who fronted Bikini Kill, her insurrectionary and brilliant riot grrl band with Tobi Vail. Kurt later said that when he sat down to pen the track that secured Nirvana their unexpected crossover into the mainstream, he was trying to write “the ultimate pop song”.
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