For such an enduring anthem that continues to define wild, wild youth to this day, Nirvana‘s breakthrough 1991 hit “Smell Like Teen Spirit” is inscrutable at best. “A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido?” Not exactly
According to late Nirvana singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain‘s widow, former Hole front woman Courtney Love, the lyrics Cobain didn’t use were somehow more byzantine. Love broke down some of the song’s scrapped lines during an appearance on Rob Harvilla’s The Ringer podcast 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s, an excellent series that has gone way beyond its title’s promise to tackle the tales behind such classics as the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby,” Los Del Rio’s “Macarena” and many, many more.
Love noted that some of the cutting room floor lines ended up in Cobain’s published journals, while others have never seen the light of day. When Harvilla asked if she would mind singing a few of them a cappella, Love obliged, first asking the host if he had a guitar while explaining that some were sketches in which Cobain was trying to work out the rhyme scheme for the song.
Love then sang the lines, “Come out and play/ Make up the rules/ I know I hope to buy the truth/ Who will be the king and queen of all the outcasted teens?” While those lyrics don’t resemble anything in the final, another couplet she sang was somewhat closer to the final chorus: “We’re so lazy and so stupid/ Blame our parents and the cupids/ A deposit for a bottle/ Stick it inside, no role model.”
She then went into another verse that went, “Come out and play/ Make up the rules/ Have lots of fun, we know we’ll lose/ Out little group has always been and always will until the end.” In a fascinating peek into at the subtle lyrical tweaks that can take a good song into all-time-classic, Love sang another couplet that was close, but not quite final. “Something I bought and don’t deserve/ To know, oh no, a dirty word/ Load up on guns and bring your friends/ I know, I know it’s wrong to offend/ Take off your clothes/ I’ll see you in court.”
She then ran through a verse that, again, provided a window into the germ that became an anthem of several generations. “We merge ahead, this special day/ This day giving amnesty to sacrilege/ A denial, and from strangers/ A revival, and from favors/ Here we are now, we’re so famous/ Here we are now, entertain us.”
Believe it or not, there was even more. “Come out and play and make up the rules/ I know I hope to buy the truth/ Who will be the king and queen of all the outcasted teens… We’re so lazy, and so stupid/ And from Vegas, here we are now, entertain us.” The final bit of lyrical leftovers included the lines, “I’ll take a slide, I’ll be over here/ Sustain a pride from a boring stare/ Just humor them, a relaxing dose/ To have a child is a selfish roast.”
Love said the unused lyrics reveal a alternate universe, what with the lines about the outcasted teens and the one about being famous at a time when the world hardly knew the group, not to mention the bit about Las Vegas, a city she said Cobain had never been to at that point. “The only consistencies it retains are ‘load up on guns’ and ‘our little group has always been until the end,’” she said. “There is no more. There is no other lyrics from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” she added, admitting she tends not to listen to Nirvana’s music.
The lengthy chat also included digressions into her buying Cobain a Leonard Cohen lyric book, the beginnings of Cobain’s private feud with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, which allegedly included Kurt saying Love “wasn’t allowed” to listen to PJ’s “Jeremy” while pregnant with the couple’s daughter, as well as talk about their heroin use and Kurt’s favorite band, The Melvins.
Listen to the episode below (“Teen Spirit” talk begins around the two-hour mark).
