Nirvana Music Video Research

Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit. This song is in the “Grunge” genre, we can tell this by the distortion in guitars, and relatively large contrast in dynamics and the “dirty” sounding vocals, that almost sound unsung and/or “shouty”.

 

 

The beginning of the music video we see the band, in a Smokey hall, with cheer-leaders at the front doing a routine in front of a teenaged audience in a school/ college style concert- already making a link with the song to the visual. “Teen Spirit” is generally regarded to be a teen revolution – not following examples set by adults as they should. This song expresses the anger and confusion within a society. This video clearly shows this in a few ways, one mainly is at the beginning we see teens sitting at a concert performed by Nivana and as the song progresses the teens become more and more riotous as they begin to break and destroy things and become increasingly uncivilised. We also see a caretaker start to “dance” and / or revolt as if he still remember times when he would rebel against the system as the teens do now, which portrays Cobain’s interpretation of the song as him and his friends still rather do things their own way. Throughout the video it cuts to the band focussing more on Cobain - the singer. 

As well as this live performance video portraying the Grunge genre, it portrays feelings that the song holds for viewers / listeners to understand.  But the dirtiness of the dark yellow colouration of the video give a “grungy / dirty feel” feel but with the cheer leaders in the background portrays a typical American almost “happiness” – everything is fine, which is contrasted with the fact they are wearing all black and an Anarchy sign which is symbolising the message of the song about teenaged rebellion.

The video changes and cuts very quickly as this song is a fast tempo keeping that sense of excitement and/or panic and often cutting in time with the music and as the song progresses and as the teenagers become more and more rebellious the video cuts more and more and closer and closer together.
At the end of the music video we see the caretaker sweeping upafter the teenaged revolt, with a teacher tied up to a pole looking s if the teens have had their way and succeded in their revolt as the song come to a close.