Putting Nirvana’s hit song Smells Like Teen Spirit in a major key makes it sound more like an upbeat pop song than anything else and it’s kind of sickening really. Some people might actually like this but I think that if a Nirvana fan, hand raised, caught wind of this they’d be more likely to say “what the hell is this??!”. As it goes I’m doing my best to be more subjective since it is a positive sound that’s given to the song and aside from feeling strained somehow it still gives a much more socially-acceptable mien to the track than was originally felt. But therein lies the problem. Nirvana wasn’t on the same level as the boy bands and feelgood kind of music that people tend to think of as acceptable and fully supportive when it comes to the feelings of others.
They were raw, down to the point, and hit the nerves of the teenage populace in a way that finally expressed what they were feeling in a generation that seemed bound and determined to find a voice but couldn’t make previous generations understand this. They weren’t in the habit of making songs that were thought of as ‘oh isn’t that just special’, they wanted to make music that scraped your nerves raw and created a feeling deep down that something wasn’t right and that it needed to be brought to light finally.
Seriously, they were not the kind of band that allowed their music to swing towards anything that sounded positive. They thrilled the audience, they excited them, but the smiles they put on their faces were more from the realization that someone was finally tapping into the teenage psyche and pulling out the dark matter that no one wanted to talk about and expressing it to the world. If you ever get the chance to take a look at any notes or writings that Kurt Cobain left behind then do so because you’ll see that the man was not entirely well in the head. The writings and cartoons that he produced were something straight of a nightmarish wonderland that had to have inspired at least a few tracks from the albums that Nirvana put out.
That’s why playing this song in this manner is kind of a slap in the face to a lot of Nirvana fans. Some people might disagree with me and that’s okay, that’s what it takes to make a good debate after all. But really and honestly this version of the song is something that made me think I might be hearing “mm-bop” after a few seconds into it. That would have been a little better because the parody would have been more acceptable and it would have added a definite twist to the song that might have made it kind of funny. Even Weird Al Yankovic parodying this song was better than this. He at least kept the feel of it by sticking to the original tune. I do believe I’ll have to go listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit just to get this version out of my head.
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