Nirvana ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ Just Hit a Milestone We’ve Never Seen in Grunge Music—and May Never See Again

A little over 15 years after it was first uploaded, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” has hit a major milestone on YouTube. The video has become the first music video in the grunge genre to reach 2 million views on the platform.

What is maybe more fascinating, however, is that Blabbermouth noted the video hit the one billion view mark back in 2019, which means it got another billion views in about half the time. Don’t ever let people tell you that Nirvana’s legacy is waning.

The big milestone for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” comes months after the album it was featured on, Nevermind, was reaveld to still be charting. Back in December, NME reported that, more than 30 years after its release, the iconic 1991 grunge album scored a big achievement by spending 700 weeks on the Billboard 200 Chart.

This means that Nevermind spent 13.4 years non-consecutively on the chart, where it was sitting at Number 120. NME noted that the album is the fourth studio LP to accomplish this — if you don’t count greatest hits compilations — in which case it would be the ninth album overall.

Dave Grohl Opens Up on ‘Nevermind’s Impact

Previously, in 2021, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl spoke with NME about the album — in honor of its 30th anniversary — and offered some insight into how the band wrote their hit song “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

“I liked the riff that Kurt came up with because it’s percussive. Those muted, stabbing strums in-between the chords really leant to the pattern of the drum riff,” Grohl said. “To be honest, at that point, we were listening to a lot of Pixies – it was ‘Bossanova’ [era]. And we were just having fun, really. We were just coming up with new song after new song every day. Krist Novoselic, I believe, has boom box recordings of all of these – riff ideas that were never used, songs that were shaped into songs for ‘Nevermind’ (some of them).

“Of course, no one had any psychic foresight to imagine that the song would go on to do what it did,” Grohl added. “We just fuckin’ rocked it in a little rehearsal space that was like a barn. I didn’t know what the lyrics were; Kurt’s melody pattern changed every other time we played it and it wasn’t really until we got into the studio to record it that I realized the power of the song.”

“And not just lyrically or musically, but the groove of the song – it was really powerful,” he continued. “I think everyone was more focused on songs like ‘In Bloom’ or ‘Lithium’ or ‘Breed’; nobody really paid too much attention to ‘Teen Spirit’ while we were recording it. We just thought it was another cool song for the record.”