A Week Under the Covers: Smells Like Teen Spirit
As the week winds down, I’m just going to go for all out kitsch value. It’s impossible to beat Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. It’s too seminal a song. It’s emblematic of so much: the 90s, the grunge genre, and the song Nirvana and Kurt Cobain will always be remembered for despite having an entire catalog of fantastic music (I almost want to upload their covers of “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam,” “The Man Who Sold the World,” and “Lake of Fire” from their Unplugged in New York album but I only have so much online file storage space and I already have another week-long music series planned for February and that’s in addition to just one-off days where I’ll keep trying to prove that I’m not completely tone-deaf when it comes to music).
It’s a song that has many interpretations and I wonder if any of them are right. It’s a great abstract painting of music and God-bless Paul Anka for covering it with his lounge-singer voice and making it swing. It’s totally kitsch value and border-line parody but it’s not a complete cover of the song and he leaves it be before he wears out his welcome. Still, after trying to give grand words to this week of covers, I thought we would have our last one-to-one comparison be fun and breezy, and Anka’s cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is exactly that.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Paul Anka
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