“Here we are now, entertain us.” You asked for it and Nirvana provided. The iconic grunge trio’s beloved video for breakthrough 1991 hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” has just crossed the two billion views mark on YouTube. The Samuel Bayer-directed clip in which late singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain and company rock a high school gym into a frenzy debuted on MTV in the fall of 1991, quickly catapulting the group to global superstardom.
While the majority of the YouTube music videos with two billion or more views are from pop, Latin, country and hip-hop artists including Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Maroon 5, Katy Perry, Enrique Iglesias, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, Adele, Ed Sheeran, Shakira and Alan Walker, there are a handful of other rock videos that have reached that storied height.
Among the other rock acts to hit two billie are: Twenty One Pilots (“Stressed Out,” “Heathens”), Imagine Dragons (“Believer,” “Thunder”), Guns N’ Roses (“November Rain”) and Linkin Park (“Numb”). “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was first uploaded to YouTube at 2009 and hit the one billion mark in 2019.
Two months after its release, the song that defined a generation topped Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart on Nov. 23, 1991 and peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100. The unlikely long-for-pop-radio five minute hit featuring such obtuse lyrics as “A mulatto, an albino a mosquito, my libido” and a visual in which band members Cobain, drummer Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic thrash about as anarchist cheerleaders whip teens into a frenzy in a smoke-shrouded gymnasium was the unlikeliest hits at a time when Bryan Adams, Michael Bolton, Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men ruled the charts.
But the song helped the band’s second studio album, Nevermind, climb the charts and end then chart king Michael Jackson’s run at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart on Jan. 11, 1992 when it pushed his Dangerous album from the to of the heap.
Check out “Smells Like Teen Spirit” below.
