On April 17 of that year, Nirvana played "Teen Spirit" live for the first time at the O.K. Hotel in Seattle. It received a positive response, though Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic joked that it was a Pixies rip-off.

The title of the song had roots in heartbreak, according to the sterling, disturbing Charles Cross biography "Heavier Than Heaven." Before Courtney Love, Cobain had dated Tobi Vail, who played in Bikini Kill. Apparently, he had it bad for her, though she was less interested and eventually dumped him. One night, while hanging out at Cobain's apartment, Vail's Bikini Kill bandmate, Kathleen Hanna, took a can of spray paint and scrawled on the wall, "Kurt smells like Teen Spirit."

See, Vail wore Teen Spirit, the deodorant. According to Hanna, Vail had marked Cobain with her scent.

Part of Cobain's genius was that he was able to use this material objectively. The phrase is not found in the song itself. But as the song's wry title, it hints at something primal: To the casual observer, whatever "it" he's referring to doesn't sound or look like teen spirit, something found at a high school football game. It smells like it. The reference is sexual, but it's also a nod to a product that's marketed and sold to young people like songs on the radio. It smells like something fake. And the singer wants, above all, something real.

The song was recorded with producer Butch Vig during Nirvana's Los Angeles sessions in May and June of 1991. Though Cobain deserves most of the credit, "Teen Spirit" would not have been the same song without Dave Grohl on drums and Novoselic energetically bouncing along on bass. Grohl -- like Ringo Starr, the late addition to the band, but one you can't imagine missing -- hit the skins so hard they had to change them every couple of songs during those recording sessions. His pounding in "Teen Spirit," as much as Cobain's overwhelming guitar, shove the song down the listener's throat. But it's Cobain's lyrics and delivery that elevate it.

"Teen Spirit" wasn't even close to being the first alternative or punk song to make it to Top 40. And he didn't really say anything new; everything has already been written, after all, and most of it was covered by Shakespeare.

But "Teen Spirit" is something like Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." Old folksters will tell you that what Dylan said in that song wasn't revolutionary to those in the know in 1963; he just managed to capture the right words and feelings floating around Greenwich Village and present it in a package the whole world could buy. "Teen Spirit," too, was one of those rare moments when a song was pulled from the air of a scene -- Seattle and its spreading ethos of youthful malaise and artistic meanderings -- and became greater than the sum of its parts.

It's a picture of modern youth, including those who have just entered adulthood but are unsure they actually want to stay there. It's a group of friends sitting around on a couch in some apartment, overbored, not wanting to be bothered as they zone out to the Discovery Channel. They are completely detached from any political considerations; no politics engage them and no candidate moves them. And most of all, in this environment, it's about the human need for something more -- love, inspiration -- and the realization that it might exist.

"Here we are now, entertain us," a throwaway line used by Cobain, as the legend goes, when he entered a party, was the central force in the song's chorus. Taking a first-person point of view, it reveals the song as an acerbic rant against those who follow the herd, those who buy records simply because they're at the top of a chart or because MTV tells them to. Cobain, playing the role of the dupe, says he feels "stupid and contagious/ Here we are now, entertain us." It's a direct challenge to young consumers to find their own music, their own life.

Even the guitar solo is purposefully self-conscious and sarcastic: Cobain hated those hair-metal riffs so popular in the late '80s, but the song needed something as a bridge, so he laid down a lazy, direct rip-off of the verse, and it ends up sounding like the voice of an adult in Charlie Brown's world: "Wah-wah, wah-wah, wah-wah, wah-wah."

At the moment Cobain should wrap up his point in poignant reflection, he does the entirely accurate thing. He sings, in a tired, cracked voice: "I find it's hard, it's hard to find/ Oh well, whatever, never mind."

The line, perhaps more than any other pop lyric of the 1980s and '90s, sums up the collective post-boomer generation and their apathetic reputations, without actually saying anything. It's as if it's the middle of a lazy day on that couch, and Cobain is trying to make a point about this strange world. But then he loses his train of thought, and since he doesn't matter much anyway, and since there's something halfway worth watching on TV, he'll just let it go.

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