hey, welcome to 12tone. one evening, in
August, 1990, Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of the foundational Riot Grrrl band Bikini Kill,
found herself incredibly drunk and hanging out with her friends Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain. after
vandalizing a predatory, fake abortion clinic that had recently opened in their neighborhood,
they made their way back to Cobain's place, where, after even more drinking, they decided
to smash a bunch of his stuff. at some point, Hanna found a sharpie and started writing on his
bedroom wall, including one cryptic sentence: "Kurt smells like teen spirit". then
she passed out, and woke up the next day thinking very little of it. but Cobain was
fascinated by the message. it was gibberish, but it was that special kind of gibberish that
feels like it carries a deeper, more profound meaning than its actual words could support.
months later, he asked Hanna for permission to use it in a song, one that captured that same ethos
of incoherent, yet somehow perfectly justified, rebellion. she agreed. she was a little confused
by his request, though, because here's the thing: Teen Spirit is a brand of deodorant. Hanna, along
with Bikini Kill drummer and Cobain's girlfriend at the time Tobi Vail, had seen it at the drug
store earlier that day. some sources claim that it was the deodorant Vail actually wore, and Hanna
was poking fun at Cobain's relationship with her, like she'd marked him with her scent or something,
but Hanna denies this. according to her, the two of them just found the name funny, and the jokes
they made were still on her mind later that night, as she was drunkenly sharpieing her friend's wall.
but she didn't tell him that. no one told him that until months after the song was released, but
by then, Smells Like Teen Spirit was a hit, one of the first true hits of the
grunge revolution. let's take it apart. (tick, tick, tick, tick, tock) the song starts like this: (bang) with a chord riff that's often compared
to Boston's More Than A Feeling. (bang) and, yeah. I mean, they're not identical.
they've got different chords, different tempos, and very different timbres. but
they do have the same rhythm, which we can also find in the
theme song for Futurama: (bang) so let's start with that rhythm. it reminds me
of a fairly common device called a push-chord pattern, where you have two chords per bar,
but instead of changing on beats 1 and 3, you push the second one an 8th note
early, like in Moondance. (bang) this draws your attention to the second chord,
because it lasts longer, and also because it appears on a more metrically exciting part of the
bar. our rhythm, which we might call a pull-chord pattern, is the opposite of that. here, the
second chord happens an 8th note late. (bang) you might think this has the opposite
effect, emphasizing the first chord by giving it more space, but that doesn't
sound right to me. I think, again, the emphasis falls on the second chord,
thanks to the power of syncopation. it's happening at a more exciting time, which
makes it a more exciting chord. this is especially true in the specific rhythm these
songs play, where they hit the 8th note, then immediately replay the chord on the next
beat, creating a satisfying rhythmic resolution. harmonically, the song is mostly just one
big chord loop, and regular viewers will know that I like to analyze loops by looking
at the motion between chords. these can take a lot of different shapes, but there does seem
to be one pretty hard rule in most modern loops: the first chord gets set up by
strong harmonic motion. but here, it's not. in fact, it's the weakest motion in
the loop: we've got a pair of perfect 4ths, connected in the middle by a whole-step, all
of which is pretty strong, but at the end it just falls down a minor 6th. what's that about?
actually, let's start with a different question: why isn't this normal? why do most songs use
strong motion to reset the loop? and the answer, I think, is to hide the fact that you're resetting.
resolutions have a sense of continuity to them, with the first chord leading logically into
the second. spreading that continuity over the transition helps stitch the different statements
of the loop together. removing that continuity, then, leaves a noticeable seam in the harmony,
and listening to Teen Spirit, I feel like the loop is a bit disjointed. instead of continuing
through, it feels like it keeps starting over. there's a lot of reasons for that, though, and
only a small portion of it is the harmony. but before we talk about the rest of it, we need
to consider dynamics. Smells Like Teen Spirit is one of the quintessential examples of
a songwriting approach called soft verse, loud chorus, which, uh… yeah. the name
kinda gives it away. this style is often credited to the Pixies, with songs
like Gigantic where the verse: (bang) and chorus: (bang) almost sound like two
completely different bands. this had a pretty direct influence on Cobain: when discussing
Teen Spirit with David Fricke in an interview for Rolling Stone, he said "I was trying to write the
ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies." and it shows: this song follows
a very similar dynamic pattern to Gigantic, with a soft, bass-driven verse, a weird, directionless
prechorus, and a explosive, distorted chorus. instead of building a dynamic arc, introducing new
parts and ramping things up in different sections, the song seems to exist in three distinct,
delineated tiers, with sudden, aggressive leaps between them. this dynamic approach ties in well
with the song's rebellious atmosphere, creating sudden eruptions of chaos that randomly subside
and then return later on, just as angry as before. ok, back to the riff. after the intro, Cobain
only plays it in the loud sections, and he doesn't just play these four chords. at the end of each
bar, he tosses in a decorative chordioid: (bang) which seems to be a result of continuing to
strum after lifting his fingers up to move to the next position, so we hear a bunch of open
strings. there's at least an A, D, and G in there, and possibly a low E as well sometimes. and
the thing about these notes is that all four of them are a half-step away from a note in an Ab
power chord, so it flows very naturally into it: (bang) especially with the G on top sliding up to
Ab. on the other hand, they don't really approach an F power chord all that well, so the chordioid
takes on two distinct functions. in the middle of the riff, it's a passing chord, guiding us
smoothly from Bb to Ab. but at the end of the riff it's a stop sign, a weird little musical detour
that disrupts the natural flow of the harmony. bassist Krist Novoselic, on the other
hand, plays the riff in every section, but he plays it slightly differently
depending on the dynamic. in the loud sections, he adds these slides
at the end of each bar: (bang) first sliding from Bb up to
Db, then once he's back to Db, he just slides off it down the string. this
creates two different kinds of momentum: the rising slide creates a sort of build-up,
delivering us into the next chord, whereas the falling slide just sort of drops off into
nothingness, so the return to F feels like a hard, obvious landing. in the quiet and medium
sections, he instead does this: (bang) replacing the slides with just, like, normal
notes. in the first case, he walks down to A, a chromatic passing tone between Bb and Ab. (bang) in the second, he lands on C, the perfect
5th, giving us a bit of resolution back to F: (bang) but by placing it so late in the bar,
you don't really have time to absorb that V-I sound. to my ears it has a similar effect to the
slide, falling off the intended note and then just sort of arbitrarily arriving at F, highlighting
the fact that the loop has started over. the last part of this comes
from Dave Grohl's drums. (bang) and, confession time: normally, when I'm making
these videos, I do my best to avoid reading anyone else's analysis, to make sure I'm not just
repeating their observations as if they were my own. but in this case, I'd actually already
seen Rick Beato's video on this song a couple years back. I'll put a link in the description
if you want to check that out. it's been a while, so I don't remember many specifics, and Rick and
I have different enough styles that I'm confident our videos will be complementary, not repetitive.
but one point he made that stuck with me is that, in the loud sections, Grohl's kick drum is always
a little bit behind the downbeat. every bar, he hits beat 1 late. not so late that it
becomes syncopated, but there's a slight, microrhythmic delay. check out the full
mix and see if you can hear it. (bang) it's subtle, so don't worry if you
can't, but even if you're not hearing it, you can still feel it, and it gives
the downbeat an extra punch. it has this staggering, lingering quality to it,
stretching out the beginning of the bar, and again it invites you to notice that
the loop just looped. it's a little tricky, because he does this on every bar, not just
the ones with the F chord, but combined with all the other factors, it still feels like
it's contributing to the overall effect. that leaves us with one last question to answer:
why? we've gone through and described in great detail exactly how they create this staggering
effect, breaking the cohesion of the loop by overemphasizing and under-resolving the first
chord, but what's the point? is he just playing what sounded good, or is there a deeper meaning
here? both! that's what's fun about analysis: artists can do whatever they like, and we
get to figure out what impact those choices have on our experience of the song. and here,
I think the impact is pretty straightforward: Smells Like Teen Spirit is about creating
meaning out of meaninglessness, painting a picture of revolution with words chosen more
for their aesthetics than their definitions. it's disjointed parts coming together to create a
profound whole. the chopped-up loop helps to silo out those various fragments so you can see every
component, and then see how they all fit together. but Smells Like Teen Spirit is more than just a
riff, so let's look at how the actual song works. the intro starts with Cobain introducing the riff
on a clean-ish electric guitar, and then Grohl comes in with this. (bang) in an episode of his
2021 show, From Cradle to Stage, Grohl explained to a shocked Pharrell Williams that, despite being
a rock guy, most of his drumming vocabulary was borrowed directly from disco. he even went
so far as to admit that this fill: (bang) was copied from a song by The Gap Band called Burn
Rubber On Me. (bang) and yeah. it's not identical, Grohl adds some 16th-note syncopation in
the kick, but in spirit, it's the same fill, with that same massive disco flam on the snare.
and this seems to be a recurring theme in this video. they took the riff from More Than
A Feeling, the dynamics from Gigantic, and now the drum fill from Burn Rubber On Me…
what part of this song did Nirvana actually make? all of it. that's how art works.
all invention is reinvention. when we say that Smells Like Teen Spirit sounds
like all these other songs, that doesn't mean Nirvana were a bunch of lazy plagiarists. it
means they had a diverse set of influences. they listened broadly and found ways to take the things
they loved and bring them together in unexpected ways in order to create something new. in what
other context would you expect to hear Boston, the Pixies, and the Gap Band all at the same
time? this is what great artists do. it's what all artists do. they learn from the music
they love, and then find ways to put those ideas in their own voice. the only difference
is how thoroughly Nirvana owned it. they would often play More Than A Feeling to set up this
song at live shows. Cobain repeatedly said in interviews that he loved Gigantic and was
explicitly trying to write a Pixies song. and no one was talking about the Burn Rubber On
Me connection until Grohl himself pointed it out. and this speaks to a much larger point: often,
when people like me try to analyze this sort of art, we're met with the criticism that the
artists didn't actually know any of this stuff. they just played what sounded good. and
Cobain is often used as a poster child for this: he never went to music school, was largely
self-taught, and yet he made incredible music and helped change the face of rock forever. and
all of that is true, I suppose, but while Cobain may never have had a formal music education, this
broad range of influences speaks to one hell of an informal one. Cobain grew up in a family of
musicians, and he spent most of his time listening to and playing music. of course he absorbed
the techniques used by his favorite artists, even if he never learned the fancy academic words
that people like me made up to describe them. we often talk about grunge as a complete revolution,
but every artistic movement has its roots in the past. Cobain and his bandmates not only loved
and understood the music that came before them, they cited their sources so that you
could connect with that music too. anyway, back to the song. I'm gonna
skip the first loud section 'cause it's basically just a preview of the chorus,
and jump straight into the verse. here, Cobain drops the riff, instead
hanging on an F power chord: (bang) while Novoselic outlines the changes underneath
him. this chord comes in on beat 2, and he arpeggiates it a little, so you get this sense of
the chord slowly materializing and then lingering in the air as the harmony moves on. that lingering
sound is amplified further by a chorus effect, giving it this warm, oscillating tone. (bang)
the chord seems to float above the loop, muting the momentum of the bass part
in order to keep the energy level low. on top of that, Cobain sings this: (bang) and
the main thing I want to focus on here is how he uses low notes. in the first half, he's
mostly playing around in the space between the high root and the 5th beneath it. the
line starts on C, walks up to F: (bang) and then back down. (bang) and that's it. nice,
simple, scalar motion. nothing else happens here. oh, except for this. (bang) right when he gets to
that F, the highest note in the whole verse, he suddenly drops down a major 6th to Ab, the lowest
note in this part of the phrase. large melodic leaps draw your attention, but lower notes tend
to sound softer and quieter, so the overall effect is one of intimacy. it sounds like he's saying
something important, but you have to lean in close to hear what it is. it's practically an engraved
invitation to read too deeply into the lyrics. from there, he jumps back up to the high F,
then starts walking down the scale: (bang) slowly working his way back down to that same
Ab again, almost entirely in steps, before ultimately overshooting it, ending the phrase
on G. and that, again, feels very meaningful, not because of what this note is, but because
of what it's not: a low F. we're pretty clearly walking down the scale, with an obvious trajectory
taking us from the high root down to the low one, but right before he gets there, he just… stops.
and it's not like this can be explained away by the harmony, either: depending how you want to
count it, he's singing this over the Db or the F, neither of which have G as a chord tone. but
you know what's a chord tone in both of them? F. all musical signs point to that
note as the target of this walk-down, but Cobain stops one step early, leaving the
line feeling incomplete. this highlights the incoherence of the lyrics, but I think it
also hints at some deeper meaning that's been left unsaid, and it invites
you to fill in that final blank. the prechorus takes that unresolved ambiguity
and ramps it up to 11. instead of holding a power chord, Cobain switches to a
constant, droning arpeggio. (bang) the loop is still there, or at least Novoselic's
still playing it, but the progression becomes much harder to pick out in this ambient barrage
of Fs and Cs. melodically, he takes the end of the last line of the verse, where it steps
down from Ab to G, and just loops that over and over: (bang) before finally resolving it down to
F at the end of each phrase. stretching out that one moment over the course of a whole section
makes the prechorus feel incredibly unstable, especially with the harmonic battle going on
between the guitar and bass. and while the F at the end does provide a little closure,
he immediately bounces off it and returns to the unresolved version, so it feels more like a
development than a conclusion. he's acknowledging that he knows where you want him to go, but
he pretty clearly doesn't want to be there. and that brings us to the chorus. here, Cobain's
guitar finally joins Novoselic in playing the loop, and his vocals take the motif from the
prechorus and develop it even further. he starts by singing the same walk down from
Ab to F, but up an octave. (bang) then he takes the line even higher: (bang) before
suddenly dropping down almost an octave: (bang) and jumping back up. (bang) this reminds
me of that drop down to Ab in the verse: placing one much lower fragment in between two
lines at the very top of the song's range gives that line a particular emphasis. I'm not sure
I'd call this one intimate, though. it's more… vicious? it sounds like he's snarling at you,
like "here we are now" is some sort of threat. and there's one more thing going on in
the chorus. maybe. when I listened to the stems for this song, I found a second
guitar track: (bang) and I'll be honest, I'm really struggling to hear this part in the
full mix. like, if I listen really closely: (bang) I can convince myself it's there, but it's
possible that's just confirmation bias. it's in the stems, so I'm gonna analyze it, but I might
be chasing ghosts. if it's real, though, then it's buried pretty deep in the mix, and if we listen
to it alongside the main guitar part: (bang) it's not hard to see why. they're playing
completely different chords, and with this much distortion, they clash really hard. cranking the
volume on this second guitar turns the chorus into an inharmonic mess. but that's the beauty of it.
by layering this line so far in the background, it's stops performing a harmonic role, and
instead becomes timbral. it's adding a bunch of extra frequencies that are inharmonic with the
played notes in the main part, which is exactly what distortion does. or, ok, distortion's more
complicated than that, but that's the gist of it. if we play both lines together again, but
this time make the second one quiet: (bang) you can hear how, instead of feeling
like a competing set of chords, it just kinda makes the main guitar sound even
more distorted. the two parts blend just fine, as long as you make it extremely
clear which one's in charge. at the end of the chorus, they break
from the loop to play this. (bang) it's a pretty common style of punk riff, with two
halves that start the same way before going off in different directions. the shared portion: (bang)
is mostly an F power chord, with another one of those decorative, open-string chordioids thrown in
for a bit of inharmonic noise. in the first half, that's followed by this. (bang) up to now, the
song has stayed entirely within the confines of F minor. the verse melody even gave us a full
walk down that scale, so the sudden appearance of the bII breaks down our sense of tonality.
then he switches from the power chord-based riff we've been hearing to a single-note bend from
Bb up to what, out of respect for Adam Neely, I'm gonna call Cb. (bang) again, this isn't
in the key, but it's clearly important, a fact that Grohl highlights by laying out for
a beat to avoid pulling any attention away from it: (bang) and Cobain also sings along. (bang)
this sudden change to the texture, the tonality, and the riff vocabulary all at the same time
creates the impression of a screeching halt, like the song is slamming on the
brakes to avoid crashing and burning. the second half, on the other
hand, is much simpler. (bang) this is just a walkdown, re-establishing both the
key and the momentum. there's an A natural there, as a slightly spicy passing tone, but mostly
this part's just a palette cleanser so the bend doesn't become too predictable. or, actually,
there is one cool thing to highlight here: under the F chord in the first half,
Novoselic plays the expected F: (bang) but in the second half, he instead
plays the 5th of the chord, C: (bang) giving the walkdown a bit more of a consistent
directionality, which pays off at the end of the chorus when Cobain suddenly drops out and we're
left with just Novoselic on the loop again. (bang) eventually, they wind up in a guitar solo
where Cobain basically just plays the vocal melody. (bang) this is, again, a pretty punk move:
it lets the section perform the structural role of a solo without trying to be flashy like a hair
metal guitarist might. he plays the verse and prechorus, but where we'd expect to hear the
chorus, the vocals come back in with another verse. instead of the arpeggio, though, the guitar
hangs on the F from the end of the solo: (bang) creating a different, slightly more bleak
texture as the root note slowly dissolves into pure feedback. and then there's one last
chorus that ends with them looping the riff while Cobain screams the same line over and
over until it all comes crashing down. (bang) and that's pretty much it. of course, while
the song is extremely important historically, Nirvana didn't invent this sound on their
own: there were a lot of great artists in the Seattle scene at the time, and many of
them deserve more credit than they get for the grunge revolution. Kurt Cobain would be the
first person to tell you that. but I also don't want to understate Nirvana's importance, either.
if they hadn't been there, maybe someone else would've taken their place, but they were. three
angry 20-somethings managed to take this harsh, abrasive song that no one really thought would
have any crossover appeal and turn it into one of the most important anthems in rock history.
it's a pile of words that don't mean anything, and yet its message couldn't be clearer.
that's some pretty incredible songwriting. ok, confession time: this video was supposed to
come out last week. that's when it was scheduled for, and I started working on it with plenty
of time, but the song put up more of a fight than I expected. progress on the script was
moving slowly, so I had to make a decision. I could rush things, put out a sloppy video,
and keep my production schedule intact, or I could push it back a week to give myself the
time I needed to make something that was actually good. obviously I chose the latter, because I
care about the quality of my work, but YouTube… doesn't. YouTube only cares if they can run ads
on it, and if there's no video, there's no ads, and I don't get paid. but 12tone is my full-time
job: despite how it looks, these videos take a really long time to make, especially when I'm
trying to tackle difficult subjects with a lot of nuance. so I'm asking for your help. if
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they also help me pick the songs I analyze, so if you want to get in on that, there's a link to
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