How Similar Are “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “More Than a Feeling”?

[00:00:00]Nirvana was about halfway through its headlining set, on the final night of the 1992 Reading Music Festival in England.

[00:00:06]As with every Nirvana show during this period, there was a lot of anticipation in the crowd to hear Nirvana's breakthrough hit, Smells Like Teen Spirit.

[00:00:15]But as Kurt Cobain launched into a familiar-sounding guitar riff, the excitement that you felt in the crowd uh seemed to be tempered uh by a little confusion.

[00:00:26]Because the riff that Cobain was playing was not the one from Teen Spirit, but from More Than a Feeling, the 1976 classic rock staple by Boston.

[00:00:36]Now, this was Cobain's way of poking fun at what had become a recurring narrative over the previous year among music critics, musicians, and some listeners, that Teen Spirit, for all its zeitgeist-shifting hipness, was really just a recycled riff from a 1970s AOR warhorse.

[00:00:57]Cobain himself acknowledged the similarities between the two songs, calling the Teen Spirit riff cliche and saying it was so like a Boston riff.

[00:01:04]Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan in recent years has talked multiple times about hearing the song for the first time when its producer Butch Vig played him the song uh a couple of months before it came out. And he said his first thought when he heard it was, "Wait, that's More Than a Feeling by Boston."

[00:01:21]All this begs the question, how similar really are More Than a Feeling and Smells Like Teen Spirit?

[00:01:27]When we talk about the similarities, we're really talking about the fact that both songs have a four-chord pattern in the chorus that keeps repeating. And we're going to look at the those two uh in a minute, but first I wanted to look a little more broadly at the structures of the songs and see how they compare.

[00:01:44]Um in the case of More Than a Feeling, it's got a pretty complex structure. You got the gentle verse at the beginning.

[00:01:53]>> Woke up this morning and the sun [singing and music] was gone.

[00:01:57]Woke up to the music to start my day.

[00:02:01]The world >> [music] [singing] >> I used to know.

[00:02:09]And it goes to the instrumental pre-chorus.

[00:02:12]>> [music] >> And the big riff.

[00:02:18]>> [music] >> What a >> [singing] >> feeling when I hear that [music] old song they used to play.

[00:02:28]I begin dreaming >> [music] >> when >> [singing] >> I see Maryanne walk away.

[00:02:35]That's the surprise chord, the D sharp.

[00:02:38]>> [music] >> See Maryanne [singing] walking away.

[00:02:45]>> [music] >> Goes back to the verse.

[00:02:48]By comparison, Teen Spirit has a very simple structure. It's really just four chords that keep repeating for the entire song.

[00:02:54]With the exception of this very brief sort of transition out of the choruses into the next uh verse where it goes Um the entire rest of the song is just a four-chord pattern. And the first chord in that is really fascinating because just as a listener for years I always assumed it was a minor chord.

[00:03:16]Uh it it felt like a minor chord. But what Kurt Cobain is actually doing there is he's playing uh he's playing a power chord. He's playing an F power chord, an F5.

[00:03:26]So, in other words, he's just doing the the first and the fifth note in that chord.

[00:03:30]The uh the F and the C. He's not doing the third which would really be the one that would determine whether uh it's a major or minor. So, this chord is really undefined. It's neither a major nor a minor.

[00:03:42]But I think it carries the sort of dark sort of moody quality of a minor chord.

[00:03:47]And I think you can see that it the minor chord is kind of implied whenever he plays that.

[00:03:52]Um think about the pre-chorus of the song where he sings Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

[00:04:00]Put Put a minor chord against that. An F An F minor chord and it works.

[00:04:04]Hello. [singing and music] Hello. Hello.

[00:04:06]Now, if you put a major chord against that, cuz you've got that minor note in there, the G sharp, you put a major chord against it, Hello. Hello. [singing and music] It doesn't work.

[00:04:16]So, a footnote to this is the fact that a few months after Nirvana's version of the song came out, singer-songwriter Tori Amos put out a piano and voice version.

[00:04:26]And when she played the song, she did that chord as an F minor.

[00:04:30]So, the song is really just built around the structure and Cobain is able to keep the song interesting through a couple of um means. One is he uses dynamics. The song gets very loud, you know, in the chorus and then it gets kind of he brings it down again for the for the verses. And so, he he's kind of maintaining interest by doing that. But, I think the main way he does it is just with his melodic gift, which if you think about um he has really three different melodies that he introduces in the song over the chord changes. Um the first one which we get in the verse is um Load up on guns, bring your friends and come to >> [singing] >> pretend.

[00:05:21]You got that one.

[00:05:23]Then the pre-chorus, we already talked about. Hello. [singing] Hello. Hello.

[00:05:27]Hello.

[00:05:29]And then in the chorus, Hello. How are you doing? It's so dangerous. Here we are now. [singing] Entertainers.

[00:05:39]So, he's able to find different melodies over what's really just a repeating chord pattern.

[00:05:46]So, now when we look at at that chord pattern and how it compares with the one from More Than a Feeling. I'm going to transpose Teen Spirit up from F to G, which is where the uh the the chorus of More Than a Feeling is, so you can kind of hear the similarities and the differences. Now, More Than a Feeling has that kind of sunny sort of >> [music] >> major chord feel.

[00:06:13]G major.

[00:06:16]>> [music] >> Teen Spirit is >> [music] >> So, where is where is Boston is >> [music] >> Teen Spirit is It's >> [music] >> So, it's a very I've heard people say, you know, that they're the same chords.

[00:06:44]They're not. They're different keys, but they're not the same chords, even if they were in the same key.

[00:06:49]Ultimately, what is similar about those two riffs and what makes us connect them in our minds is the rhythm is similar. You know, Boston's Teen Spirit is The rhythms are similar.

[00:07:08]But, if we think about it, Tom Petty has talked about the fact that American Girl is essentially borrowed the rhythm that was kind of Bo Diddley's signature rhythm. And that was it was it was a his He's using a Bo Diddley rhythm in that song. Yet, when we hear American Girl, we don't think of Bo Diddley at all because nothing about the song melodically, harmonically, or sonically really conjures up Bo Diddley.

[00:07:32]And I think you could make somewhat of the same point when we talk about Teen Spirit versus More Than a Feeling.

[00:07:38]There is that similar rhythm to that to the four chord patterns in the choruses.

[00:07:43]But when we think about the melodies, certainly the lyrics, and the sonics of the two songs, I think they're just very different. But I'm curious to hear what you think.

[00:07:53]Thanks for watching.