Kurt Cobain was never exactly shy about the influences behind Smells Like Teen Spirit. “I was trying to rip off the Pixies,” the Nirvana frontman told Rolling Stone in 1994. “We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard. Teen Spirit is such a clichéd riff. When I first came up with it, Krist [Novoselic] looked at me and said: ‘That is so ridiculous.’”
This, combined with a phrase scrawled on his wall by Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and a lyric steeped in youthful ennui and Gen X disillusion, were the main ingredients that conspired to make a 90s grunge classic.
