Smells Like Teen Spirit

Today in Music History: August 17, 1991

The late 80s and early 90s pay witness to the age of alternative rock. The term 'alternative' implies there is more than one possibility. With so many different rock genres, this gave music lovers more choice. With the different rock groups came their own kind of music, style and showmanship to the stage. Grunge music, which combines rock, punk and metal sounds, was popularized in the 90s by groups such as Pearl Jam and Nirvana. It is the latter that is in the spotlight today.

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Nirvana Prior to Nirvana, alternative music had its own inconspicuous place in record stores. Most major record labels viewed it at most as simply a tax write-off. Nirvana brought punk, post-punk, and indie rock into the limelight popularizing the music like no other to date. The band was never quite the same, for better or for worse. Nirvana produced sounds that were both fiery and melodic. As for listening pleasure, this was (still is) dependent upon the age of those listening and the interpretation of what one calls music.

While Nirvana's ideology was indie rock and their melodies were pop, the sonic rush of their records and live shows merged post-industrial white noise with heavy metal grind. And that's what made the group an unprecedented multi-platinum sensation. The band was formed by singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic. After going through a succession of drummers, the longest-lasting was Dave Grohl, who joined the band in 1990. [Source: AllMusic]

On this day...

1991 Nirvana shot the video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' at GMT Studios in Culver City, California, costing less than $50,000 to make, the shoot features real Nirvana fans as the audience. The video won Nirvana the Best New Artist and Best Alternative Group awards at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, and in 2000 the Guinness World Records named 'Teen Spirit' the Most Played Video on MTV Europe.

The unexpected success of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in late 1991 propelled the band's second album, Nevermind, to the top of the charts at the start of 1992, an event often marked as the point where alternative rock entered the mainstream. Nirvana's brief run, seven-year career, ended following the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994, but various posthumous releases have been issued since, overseen by Novoselic, Grohl, and Cobain's widow Courtney Love. Since its debut, the band has sold over 25 million records in the United States alone, and over 75 million records worldwide. Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its first year of eligibility, in 2014. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

And the music goes on beating to the rhythm of the changing times...