Nirvana-Smells Like Teen Spirit (1991)


 

Artist: Nirvana

Title: Smells Like Teen Spirit

Label: DGC/Sub Pop

Format: CD Maxi Single

Cat: DGCDS 21673

Year of Release: 1991

Country and Year of Edition: US 1991 Digipak

Sell Price: $3.20 VG+/VG 6/7/24

Discogs Last Sold: 6/11/24 M/M $9.00

Low: $0.99

Median: $3.60

Average: $5.51

High: $30.00

Current low price: $0.91

Current Number on Sale at Discogs: 76

Have/Want: 2222/203

Where Sold: Tampa, FL

Time it took to sell:  12 years

Where and When Purchased: new Newbury Comics Boston summer it came out

Gwiz-gau Letter Grade: A

Sad To See It Go: No

I dutifully bought this right when it came out before the release of Nevermind in the summer of 1991.  The hit that made them megastars was a disappointment to me and it is probably the song I never want to hear by the band.  I didn't find the quiet/loud thing that great and never did.  I liked the band for Bleach, not for their pop sensibilities.  This song seems a bit too "Frankenstein" for me.  The masses thought differently and by January 1992 it peaked on Billboard at #6 while the album went all the way to number 1 and moving 10 million in US sales alone through 1999.  The single alone became Platinum in April 1992.  Interestingly, there hasn't been another million or few added to that album tally since despite 673 charting weeks to date.  MTV Unplugged In New York has seemed to be more active with 3 million added in 2020  to it's 5 million certification  in 1997.

Although a steady companion in the world as a whole (yet decidedly less so in the past decade), "Teen Spirit" has taken it's place as the song that changed the commercial Rock  landscape for at least a decade until the Stone Temple Pilots and Green Day took over.  Now even those bands seem quaint for their approaches to a commercially altered landscape.  While Nirvana made Green Day commercially logical in 1994, the mainstream world that is nostalgic now are the pop-punk bands that Green Day inspired.  You do however see more Nirvana shirts than ever on the street in NYC, for all that's worth.

As for the other two tracks that didn't make Nevermind, they are both classics and easily included in their setlists of 1991-2.  "Aneurysm" was a live standard and "Even In His Youth" was a holdover from the 1989 Bleach era.

Classic is as classic does.


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