Right now the world is in the hair metal phase. It’s cool to be a sleazy, classless, superficial asshole. We need something to come along to shift the global culture towards insightful, thoughtful behaviour where people take responsibility and are self aware and it’s uncool to be ignorant. Not that Smells Like Teen Spirit was all these things, but without a doubt it was the catalyst for change at the time
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The next one would technically be, “Smells Like Adult Spirit.”
Nirvana is overrated
No one is stopping you from doing so.
Or funding it
> Right now the world is in the hair metal phase. It’s cool to be a sleazy, classless, superficial asshole.
Say more on this. What leads you to this conclusion?
“Brains on the ceiling”
No we don’t. Nirvana wasn’t good at the time and they aren’t good now.
How could this be unpopular
Smells Like Teen Spirit was Cobain’s attempt to write a pop song. About nothing in particular. Which was released 34 years ago. I think you might’ve looked too deeply into it and not deeply enough into the hours and hours of music that’s been released since. Luckily for you, in the year of our lord 2025, it’s easier than every to find new music. Go forth and discover.
Rock music has been dead for years. There’s plenty of revolutionary artists within Hip Hop, Jazz and RnB. Looks like you’re in a bubble wanting another Kurt, when there’s better artist around these days…
Hair metal was fucking awesome. But yeah, something to mark a change in pop music trends would be cool. There hasn’t been anything like that in a long time
r/im14andthisisdeep
I think you put too much value on music.
Could you be more specific? To me it seems like there has already been a shift in pop music over the last few years. Ten years ago it was solidly hip hop, now the current trend is country. There will never be a new “smells like teen spirit”. There is basically no such thing as popular bands anymore, and the trends aren’t organic enough for something to make an impact in that way anymore
Are you saying that at one time that opinion would have been unpopular? Maybe 86-87. But by 90-91 an opinion like that was so popular.
That’s impossible now.
I was having this conversation with friends last week. The state of the world is turning people off the lifestyles of the rich and also the government. My thoughts were punk would make a resurgence. More anti-government rhetoric, more criticism about the rich. We’ll probably hear less music about people flaunting wealth, like driving nice cars and flying around the world. More about how war sucks, how people leech off the working class. There will be a shift.
i kinda agree but youre totally skipping a whole decade of good music.
That would require Gen Z to appreciate guitarists 🤷🏻♂️
The world is in a hair metal phase?
Go check out IDLES.
Yesss I love nirvana they’re my favorite band if we could find the next nirvana I’d be so happy
The record labels are not in the music game anymore so you’ll never get it
its never going to happen the industry has changed too much. we dont even have A&R ppl anymore.
Smells like Axe
Smells like Native
Smells like Old Spice
Which deodorant would you prefer a song about?
the powers that be dont want rock music around anymore. its too expensive to produce, too polarizing, they dont want anything new like Nirvana was. Or Nine Inch Nails.
the idea that “we need change” and you’re waiting around for some musician to make an anthem to motivate you and others to effect change speaks to how weak and afraid most people are to actually effect any change or have a significant impact.
it also shows how desperate people are to find “someone to follow” rather than just doing things on their own.
anyone who can effect change is already doing it or will soon. If you’re waiting around for someone else to initiate this, it is unlikely you will ever effect any change at all.
do it yourself, stop waiting for it.
Does IDLES and Turnstile being major festival acts not scratch your itch?
No we absolutely don’t
Without the radio, without MTV, without content that is consumed by teenagers that is consumed in longer than 30 seconds chunks?
I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Ah, did Smells like Teen Spirit make sense?
Nirvana sucked
Monopoly Money by Moon Walker is pretty good
rock is dead. it’s been dead. but it’s been dead dead since 2012 or so
There’s a fuck ton of bands already doing the things you’re talking about, listen closer
People by the 1975 is my version of this
My counter-unpopular opinion was we kind of already did with Royals by Lorde circa 2013 as an outsider with a darker, more personal sound and image that killed off a more corporate era of popular music (hair metal in Nirvana’s case and Electropop in Lorde’s). Both similarly were also ‘right place at the right time’ rather than being completely novel and are both arguably not the artists’ best songs.
Also, such a paradigm shift in music could probably never happen again because music is much less of a monoculture in the streaming era.
We need a monoculture, not infinite variety. Impossible to get movements started with everyone going a different direction.
lol Kirt would prob slap you for this take. He basically hated that song.
Imagine being so disconnected that you think the world is in “the hair metal phase” 😂😂😂🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
Best I can do is WAP II: Electric Boogaloo (feat. Kanye)
Turnstile!
Pretty sure it’s Chappell Roan, might not be what you were looking for but same could be said for SLTS when it came out lol
Nirvana was popular but all that stuff about Nevermind revolutionizing music really got retroactively applied after Kurt died. I love them but they were just one of many great bands at the time. I don’t recall anyone talking about them as being behind a cultural shift until after 1994.
We are in a post genre world now.
I dont know what hair metal era youre living in.
It was not he catalyst. It was the sound track to depression and the dying of rock as mainstream. After that rock never sounded the same. It’s not that no one can play like Hendrick or sing like Cobain. It’s just the world has moved on.
Global culture? Mate, you’ve got a highly inflated idea of how impactful Smells Like Teen Spirit was if you think it a was a catalyst for a Global cultural change.
Smells Like Axe Spray
Since streaming, we have very little if any musical monoculture to spring a song on listeners which could make a cultural shift.
Alls I know is one day I was listening to Elvis, Motown and Wolfman Jack and the next day I saw those four guys perform on the Ed Sullivan show and my whole changed.
How did a song with random words that sounded cool together caused a cultural shift that, based on your words, would raise anti-norm incentive?
Buddy, you are looking way too deep into it.
It’s a great song, but it didn’t shift us into something much much better, culturally. That’s the rose-tint in full effect, as most younger people has some really good memories connected to the 90’s and 00’s, me included, hence why we tend to see it as that amazing.
Nirvana and the grunge movement, was also infact sleazy and pretty classless. My brother in christ, that was the point, it was basically punk comming back, and that’s about as far away from something classy, as it can be. We had more thought behjnd it than the classical “Anarchy and anti-establishment”, but I think that was about it. Every new movement think they are the enlightened ones, but that can very, very, very rarely, be attributed to a movement, or something kickstarted by a song.
If we look aside from some social media, even today, people are more thoughtful as a whole. We have more people caring about the enviroment, we have more people caring about their personal health and longevity, in quite a few places, young people drink less, smoke less and do less drugs (allegedly according to statistics, I have yet to really see it) – we are infinitly more enlightened as a whole now, than 10 or 20 years ago.
Plus last time we had a new “Smells like teen spirit”, as in something that vast amounts of people can get behind, well that would be corona
We’re in our ‘Joe dirt’ era as a society and I’m all for it.
Nirvana was and still is brilliant but there’s a reason it resonates so well with GenX and teenagers, it’s the official anthem of whining about little things from a position of privilege.
That was the 90’s were more in a ‘party at the end of the world’ type situation. Society needs hellcats and big booties, not depressed guys in sweaters singing about pennyroyal tea.
We need the collapse first.
I got a feeling Sleep Token is poised to be the band that breaks through and changes things. I thought Ghost was going to do it, but I think they’ve peaked. They’re going to be a massive ROCK band for the foresseable future, but I don’t see them becoming a pop sensation. Sleep Token though hits so many boxes that can push them to that level. First of all, they have a unique aesthetic, especially Vessel’s descent into whatever wraith like being he is now. Second, they appeal to lore geeks with the whole mythology around Sleep and the other gods. Third, from what I’ve seen they can tear the house down live. Fourth, Vessel has a truly distinct voice. No one else sings like that. Fifth, the lyrics are both really good songs specifically about Vessel and Sleep’s fraught relationship as prophet and deity, but also just great relationship songs in general. You don’t need to know the lore understand a song like Euclid, DYWTYLM, or Damocles. It just adds an extra layer if you do. Sixth, they really understand what they’re doing with the pop/r&b side of their sound. And lastly, their metal side is heavy as fuck…but not unapproachable. They’re a great gateway metal band doing something unique for the genre
I’m not totally sure if people are ready to think about stuff, because they really seem to need to do that.