"Smells Like Teen Spirit"

I was just the type of fan that Cobain would've hated -- the redneck who doesn't know Bikini Kill from the Go-Gos, who had spent his teen life listening to Tom Petty and Bryan Adams before coming across Dylan's greatest-hits album.

But Cobain's music and lyrics confronted and changed me. They forced me to see a world I had previously avoided, mainly because my friends and I never walked that direction. Cobain was the first writer from my own age group to capture my attention.

When you want to write for a living, this is a seductive and powerful thing. You see that it's possible to communicate ideas to a large audience, and you feel envy that someone else in your generation is getting the glory. Most of all, it empowers you to chase your own thoughts.

It helps that the artist in question is eccentric. Cobain served a necessary role for any wannabe. He was like Brad Pitt in "Fight Club"; he was the artist in your mind, the rebellious alter ego bubbling up inside everyone who lives a conformist cubicle existence.

I fell hard into the pop-culture swoon of the early '90s. I moved to Atlanta, imagining it to be a Southern version of Seattle. I took on odd jobs (greens keeper, waiter, telemarketer) while scribbling my thoughts on life. Looking back on my journals, I can see that my stuff was poorly written, goateed posing, none of which I'll share here, thanks. But I had invented a new person, one completely different from the one I had been before Kurt Cobain.

But pop culture fantasies never last, and, though it wasn't apparent at the time, "Teen Spirit" and its revolution were finished the moment the song hit No. 1.

I went to see Nirvana for the first and only time in Atlanta in November of 1993. Their new album, "In Utero," was out, and since it didn't have another "Teen Spirit" on it, it was earning less radio play and fewer sales.

I didn't really know about Cobain's worsening heroin addiction, which in five months would lead him, directly or indirectly, to suicide. But I remember that he broke a string on his guitar and then pissed and moaned about how long it took the stagehands to get him a new one.

"What are they tuning," he asked into the microphone, "a fucking harp?"

The audience laughed -- surly Kurt was as surly as ever! Months later, when MTV aired Nirvana's "Unplugged in New York" broadcast following Cobain's suicide, I watched him say the same thing in the same situation. It was an act, after all, no more genuine than a singer inserting a city's name into a song, just to get the crowd to cry out that it has been acknowledged.

Nirvana played "Teen Spirit" that night in Atlanta, and it pretty much sucked. Cobain sprinted and screeched his way through, and the mosh pit below moshed as they should, not unlike Pavlov's dogs drooling at the sound of a bell. "Teen Spirit" had run the full course of rock. It was stale, two years after it had changed everything.

So was Cobain. Life was stale for him and he'd end it soon.

I was back home in Tampa again when he killed himself. I was working as a writer for local television news, where I had the honor of writing the 25-second voice-over on his death for the evening newscast. I stretched it to 35 seconds.

A few weeks later, I went with a group of people to this "alternative" bar in Tampa's Ybor City district. The place was lit by black lights, with odd dance mixes and people with multiple piercings moving in interpretive styles. When I was in college, I used to go there to make fun of people; but on this night, we were there to have fun.

Then the D.J. put on "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and the dance floor was packed. I stood and watched. It was an odd thing: It looked like an energetic mourning, because the song was no longer an angry release, a spear in the ground. It was just a reminder that the guy who wrote it and sang it was dead.

People moshed with peculiar intensity. But it didn't look like they were having fun. They just looked like they felt the need to do this as a sort of private salute -- or maybe they did it just because everyone else was doing it.

After five minutes and two seconds, the music growled to an end. Some people filtered off the dance floor as another song came on. But others stayed to dance to the new song, whatever it was.

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