Kurt Cobain crowd surfing in Frankfurt, Germany on November 1, 1991. Cobain then reached out to Hanna, who was perplexed but happy to give permission for her drunken scrawling to be used for a song title. Somewhere amid the ideas swirling in his mind was the desire, he told Rolling Stone in 1994, to write "the ultimate pop song."Īs noted in Nirvana: The True Story, the frontman supposedly wanted to call this creation "Anthem," though Vail pushed back since Bikini Kill already had a song of the same name. There were references to the woman still on his mind, someone "over-bored and self-assured," but also more within the unusually juxtaposed imagery, a call to "load up on guns" and "entertain us." I didn't know that the deodorant spray existed until months after the single came out." Cobain wrote the song after breaking up with his girlfriendĪfter Cobain and Vail broke up late in the year, Cobain channeled his frustrations into penning new songs, including one that would become the band’s breakout hit. "I thought that was a reaction to the conversation we were having but it really meant that I smelled like the deodorant. "I took that as a compliment," he said in Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana.
That night, after a few too many drinks, Hanna was gleefully trashing Cobain's apartment when she found a Sharpie marker and wrote the magic words on the wall:Ĭobain later noted that he thought the phrase referred to their earlier discussion about teen revolution and was suggesting, however ironically, that he was an inspirational figure. "I mean, who names a deodorant Teen Spirit? What does teen spirit smell like? Like a locker room? Like pot mixed with sweat? Like the smell when you throw up in your hair at a party?" "We were both joking around because the name looked so funny," Hanna told Double J in 2016. While pacing the aisles, Kurt Cobain's musician girlfriend Tobi Vail and her Bikini Kill bandmate Kathleen Hanna came upon a can of deodorant named Teen Spirit. The song that launched 1,000 grunge bands and changed the course of popular music found its conceptual spark in a grocery store in Olympia, Washington, in August 1990.
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