The story of the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video clips of the Nirvana

AND One of the most iconic video clips in the history of rock. And now he has crossed a huge milestone on YouTube. We are talking about the clip of “Smells like Teen Spirit“, The hit of the Nirvana of Kurt Cobain a worldwide phenomenon. The song and the relative video clip are from 1991, but the clip directed by Samuel Bayer was loaded on YouTube only in 2009. Sixteen years after its upload on the platform, now The video has cut the finish of 2 billion viewsafter reaching the billion of views in 2019.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” paved the way for the success of “Snowmind“, The album that consecrated the Nirvana. The disc conquered the top of the world charts, selling over 30 million copies. The video clip, Filmed on August 17, 1991 in a pose of Culver City, Californiahe showed the band while playing for the students of an American college, complete with a performance of a cheerleader group. The content of the clip was the subject of clashes between Sam Bayer and Kurt Cobain. In an interview with New York Magazine in 2011 Courtney Love revealed: «Kurt hated Sam Bayer. For ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ Kurt wanted fat cheerleader, black boys, he meant the collage to the world how much he sucks, but Sam put sexy girls in the video. The absurd thing is that it still worked».

Bayer said he was chosen by Geffen, the label for which the Nirvana engraved, because his auditions were so poor that the band believed that his direction would be characterized by an “punk” attitudeinstead of glossy. For the subject, Bayer was inspired by the 1979 film “Young warriors” by Jonathan Kaplan and the Ramones film “Rock’n’roll High School”. In the final scenes of the video clip, the students who were witnessing the performance of the group staged a revolt, demolishing the set, while Cobain disappeared his Fender Mustang.

The destruction of the set was the result of a discontent of the extras, which according to legend They were recruited directly by the members of the group by distributing flyers in Los Angeles in the two days before the shooting. The guys who presented themselves on the set were forced to sit all afternoon and in the end Cobain was convinced the director to allow the extras to rest on the set, creating the chaos: “Once the boys began to dance, they simply said “Fuck you!” because they were so tired of this shit after all dayCobain said. The female extras they interpreted The cheerleaders instead came from a strip club in the city.

The post-correspondence was very troubled. Yes, why The Nirvana frontman disapproved the version proposed by Bayer and the director personally reassembled the video. With additions. Like the penultimate shot: a close -up of the face of the Nirvana leader after it had been obscured for most of the video. From the final version the scenes of two teachers were also excluded, one with a pointed hat and a long wooden wand and the other stunned by the band’s music.

The video clip of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” It cost Geffen a figure between 30 thousand and 50 thousand dollars. Some curiosities: Rudy Larosa, the appearance that played the janitor, the following year, in 1992, appeared in the video clip of “You Don’t Love Me Anymore” by “Weird al” Yankovic, who also published a parody of the clip, “Smells Like Nirvana”; The word “chaka” written on the battery grill played by Dave Grohl is an allusion to the name of a street artist (Daniel Ramos), while the word “screen” printed on the drummer’s shirt refers to the hardocre punk group of which Grohl was part before entering the Nirvana. In 2000 the Guinness Book of Records crossed the video of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” such as the one several times aired by MTV in Europe.