Chapter 4

I THINK, BOTTLE, IT MIGHT BE HELPFUL TO HEAR YOU DO IT OUT LOUD. 

Ok, i can try. Track 1, Smells Like Teen Spirit. What or who smells like Teen Spirit? Is teen spirit a thing or an abstract idea? Or maybe that juxtaposition is the important idea. Teen Spirit was a brand of deoderant marketed to girls. Do you know what that deoderant smelled like? Maybe it just smelled like baby powder, or maybe the scent image in your mind also involves the scent of sweat or masking the sweat, or the self consciousness of your armpit odor, or the implicit assumptions of gender. Can you substitute Old Spice or Axe Body Spray? Does your brain have a clear distinction between boy smells and girl smells? Is that a good or bad thing? Maybe this deluge of ideas and associations is exactly the kind of muddled awkward confusion he's trying to express? Maybe we should press play. 

A sort of trashy catchy pop chord progression (reminiscent of early punk), then stomp on the distortion pedal and everybody plays it while headbanging and flailing around, then pull way back to a sparse cleanish texture for the first verse. That's a musical gesture: do a thing, do it again super exaggerated, everybody quiet, i'm about to say something. That's what the opening 20 seconds mean to me, it's an introduction, the "ahem" before a statement. 

"Load up on guns and bring your friends, it's fun to lose and to pretend." 

Kay, that means nothing. 

"She's over bored (overboard) and self assured, oh no i know a dirty word hello (how low)." 

Well that's certainly a verse and a pre-chorus. Wowee, that's a lot of grammar to parse: puns, obscured punctuation, 4 seemingly unrelated ideas, and don't forget all that stuff about deodorant and gender roles that encapsulates the whole thing. 

Is "hello" the dirty word, or am i supposed to supply my own? If she's part of the group of losers with guns, maybe his saying hello to her is a serious cultural transgression. Is she excessively bored, or is she "in too deep/out of her element/etc."? It's a pun, so keeping both meanings of the homophone open is the intention. 

Are they a militia? A gang? Police? Guys on a hunting trip? Just a bunch of macho jerks? Either way it's clear that he thinks they are losers. They probably also think he is a loser. That's an unresolvable binary opposition (two sides of the same coin). 

So, we have a group of people, a girl who may or may not be part of that group, and an unspecified narrator, all under the umbrella of teenage experience/deoderant for girls. I'm certain everyone has some memory or at least understanding of participating in a scenario like that, some similar experience. That experience shapes your interpretation and gives the first verse meaning. The analysis shows us where all those gaps are, which parts are being stated and which parts you yourself fill in. Interpretation is about playing around with all those puzzle pieces, not to find the best interpretation but to understand all the possible ways someone might interpret it compared to the way you yourself interpret it. I tend to think it raises the question of who does or doesn't belong to a group, how those groupings are antagonistic to each other, and how there is no resolution for that antagonism. Kurt didn't put that stuff there, he assembled a complex network of relationships without closing off all of those potential connections. The rest of the song may or may not clarify any of those relationships, we're still inside the world building stage, about to plunge into the chorus. 

Calling it a chorus actually requires a lot of presumptions about pop music or music in general, so maybe we should just label them as sections. The first section was music, the second section was 4 lines of text and a build up to the 3rd section we're about to hear. 

"With the lights out it's less dangerous,

Here we are now, entertain us.

I feel stupid and contagious,

Here we are now, entertain us.

A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido, hey!" 

Is this "us" the same as the earlier group with guns, or is it a different group? Why is it less dangerous if you can't see each other? What do those descriptions actually say about the people in the group? Is the exclamation at the end intended to be humorous? Sarcastic? Accusatory? Angry? Is he saying it with jazz hands? There isn't any clarification beyond the relative aggression/calm of the musical textures so far. This section belongs to the more aggressive, loud, crazy, etc. side of that dichotomy, and that will influence your interpretation in some way. 

I could keep going like that forever, but it's tedious to write. Instead, i think it might be helpful to do a kind of thought bubble analysis of the connoted themes. I mentioned some of them: antagonism, self consciousness, aggression, confusion. Try to imagine how and in what way a particular line or image points to one or more of those themes. For example, a group of people with an arsenal of weapons can certainly point toward aggression and antagonism, but it also has an effect on how we categorize inclusion or exclusion. We saw a split in the potential meaning of "over bored" and "overboard." It might seem silly, but the smell of deoderant might signal her self assurance and signal her inclusion in the group. Or perhaps it is masking her fear or desperation to belong. Remember, the song isn't telling you, you have to either build that meaning for yourself or tear down assumptions you've already made. The process is the purpose, not whatever result you happen to get.

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