Vail, Bikini Kill’s drummer, was one of the protagonists of the “Riot Girl” scene, a rock reissue of American feminism in the mid-seventies. Michael Azerrad, Nirvana’s official biographer, claims that the bored, self-confident girl in the lyrics is Tobi Vail, who was at the time involved in a complicated relationship with Cobain. The opening ( “Load up on guns, bring your friends”), is lyrically powerful and evocative. The call to arms in the first verse alludes to the revolutionary urgency of a hypothetical youth movement. The result is a rabid outburst, a fist to the sky, so intense that anyone who listens to it, even without knowing what “Teen Spirit” means, has the clear sensation that the song wants to say something, something really intense. But it is still a good idea.” Cobain would eventually plunder his personal diaries to feed the lyrics.
The heart of the song is about making a mockery of the idea of putting a revolution in place. We still feel like teenagers because we don’t want to follow adults. When interviewed in other contexts, Cobain turned out to be intolerant to the idea of deepening the meaning of the song : “Basically it’s a song about friends, about peers. Kurt, who was either unaware of ignored the existence of the perfume, instead took the comment as a form of appreciation, as if he had not yet ben subjugated by adulthood, and he still embodied the adolescent spirit. I took it as a compliment.” The phrase comes from a perfume for teenagers that was very popular at the time, and Kathleen wanted to ridicule Kurt, insinuating that he was not a man yet. We started to smudge the walls with spray and Kathleen wrote “Kurt smells Like Teen Spirit”. An autobiographical event? Maybe… In an interview with Seattle Times, Cobain said, “We were having a great time talking about revolutionary things, and we ended up destroying my bedroom, the mirrors, the bed, everything that we found. The story narrated through the lyrics begins in the chaos of two twenty-years old’s bedroom. This was their stand: siding with the losers, flaunting indifference in front of catastrophe, and sympathising with failure. In response to the ethics of profit, to 80s fake optimism, they reacted with sarcasm and apathy. It was the ungraceful and spontaneous howl of anger, the moan of anguish. Their rebellion was not characterised by epic impulses or idealistic proclamations. The Cold War, cultural repression, divorce, loneliness, unemployment and alienation: that was their Vietnam. People like Kurt, born in the late sixties, had not lived through a World War or fought in Vietnam.
In a world obsessed with success, choosing defeat was a revolutionary act. The song became the anthem for Generation X’s apathetic youth.
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