One Of The Most Beloved Grunge Songs Started As A Misunderstanding

If you were around in the early '90s, you may have been aware of a deodorant marketed to girls called "Teen Spirit," but Kurt Cobain, not surprisingly, was rightfully oblivious to the product. So when his friend, Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna, wrote "Kurt smells like teen spirit" on his bedroom wall with a Sharpie, he didn't get the reference. "I took it as a compliment," he said, according to Michael Azerrad's "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana." That misunderstanding of those words inspired what became arguably the most popular song of the grunge era. 

The unlikely success of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which catapulted a new music genre to the forefront of rock from seemingly nowhere, all started with a day of friends hanging out. As Hanna told Double J in 2016, she and her friend Tobi Vail, who was dating Cobain at the time, were in a grocery store and noticed a deodorant called "Teen Spirit." Hanna said, "We were laughing, saying 'Your arm smells like Teen Spirit' or whatever. We were both joking around because the name looked so funny. I mean, who names a deodorant Teen Spirit? What does teen spirit smell like?"

That evening, Hanna and Vail were drinking and hanging out with Cobain and Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, and at some point, they all ended up in Cobain's room. She started writing things on his wall, including the line about Kurt smelling like teen spirit, but he wasn't in on the joke. 

Over the course of the night, the little group had discussed topics like feminism and a teen revolution. So, when Kathleen Hanna wrote the line about Kurt Cobain smelling like teen spirit, he thought it was inspired by those talks rather than the deodorant she and Tobi Vail were laughing about earlier in the day. He's quoted in "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana" as saying, "I thought that was a reaction to the conversation we were having but it really meant that I smelled like the deodorant. I didn't know that the deodorant spray existed until months after the single came out." 

Hanna said that Cobain had called her to tell her he was using the line as a song title, telling Double J, "I felt like a bit of an a****** that I didn't tell him, but I kinda thought it was funny. He just liked the ring of it."

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" is the first track on Nirvana's second album, "Nevermind," and was released as a single on September, 10, 1991, while the video premiered on September 29. The song and its video became a much bigger phenomenon than the band, or likely anyone else, imagined, rising to the No. 6 spot on the Billboard Hot 100. So much happened so fast that Cobain eventually resented his mainstream success, and by 1994, he didn't like playing the song live, telling Rolling Stone, "'Teen Spirit' was such a clichéd riff," followed by, "... it's almost an embarrassment to play it." Today, the song that was unwittingly inspired by a deodorant brand will always be synonymous with the brief reign of grunge music, and it's still Nirvana's most-streamed song on Spotify, with more than 3 billion streams.