Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit (Official Music Video)
Why Music Fans Stack Exchange recommends it
Music Fans Stack Exchange users link it as the primary reference for the song and its visuals, whether discussing the video's imagery, identifying the song, or citing it as an example of grunge vocals.
Recommended by 0 people across 0 different months, 2015 to 2021.
What it is
The official music video for Nirvana's 1991 single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from the album Nevermind, uploaded to the band's VEVO channel. It shows the band performing in a high school gym with cheerleaders, anarchic fans, and a janitor sweeping the floor.
Cited in 1 Wikipedia article, including Smells Like Teen Spirit.
What people said
Cites Chris Sunami · 2015-12 · Music Fans Stack Exchange · on “What is Pop Music?”
Wikipedia (currently) describes the core genre elements of pop music as follows: Identifying factors include generally short to medium-length songs written in a basic format (often the verse-chorus structure) as well as the common employment of repeated choruses, melodic tunes, and hooks. - [LINK] It's usually distinguished by a certain direct simplicity [LINK] , structurally speaking. It can be quite ornate and ornamented [LINK] , but the underlying focus is squarely on hitting those audio pleasure centers. It generally doesn't make its audience "work" as hard, or be as musically educated as more challenging genres --it's a mass-market product [LINK] , designed for wide appeal. It's probabl
Cites Pablo · 2018-09 · Music Fans Stack Exchange · on “Is the old man cleaning in Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit music video supposed to mean something?”
In the music video [this video] from Nirvana [LINK] 's Smells Like Teen Spirit , there is a scene that's repeated again and again of an old man with (what I believe is) a cleaning broom doing some strange move repeatedly. Is this supposed to mean something? Why do they show this several times across the video?
Cites Bebs · 2019-01 · Music Fans Stack Exchange · on “Identify song played on piano in "Under the Lake"”
This is a piano cover of Nirvana 's Smell Like Teen Spirit [this video] . It is confirmed by this review [LINK] in Variety: Sam is led to the home of The Songwriter (Jeremy Bobb), who turns out to be…the secret mastermind behind all pop music since the dawn of the counterculture. He wrote “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the piano !
Cites Chris Sunami · 2021-04 · Music Fans Stack Exchange · on “Famously out-of-tune vocals”
More than anything else, this is about changing conceptions and definitions of "in tune." The current conception of being "in tune" comes from the ubiquity of auto-tuning software that mechanically corrects a singer's note to exact correspondence with an expected pitch. Traditionally, however, only highly trained classical singers [LINK] would have been expected to stick to the pure, European-scale tones we now think of as "in tune." A more relaxed definition was stylistically appropriate for genres like rock [LINK] , punk [LINK] , folk [LINK] or grunge [this video] -- the inexactness of the pitch was a sign of authenticity. Conversely, the skilled singers of other genres, like soul pioneer Ray C