It’s our 50th episode and to celebrate that we’re having a special treat: One of the most important, influential and decade-defining videos of the 1990’s.

One night in the winter of 1990 Kathleen Hanna, singer of Bikini Kill, and Kurt Cobain were out spraying graffiti in the streets of Seattle and got hideously plastered before hanging out at his room, where the intoxicated Hanna took out a sharpie and began to write on the walls. As Cobain had been recently dumped by her bandmate Tobi Vail she thought it important to let her readers now that he reeked of Vail’s deodorant, “Teen Spirit”. Alas, the meaning was lost on Cobain, who read “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” as a compliment of his rebellious essence and asked Hanna for permission to use the phrase for the title of a song he had been working on. He intended it to be “the ultimate pop song – ripping off The Pixies”. The manufacturer of the deodorant certainly welcomed the free publicity…

The song became a huge hit and as a result Cobain was often considered a spokesman for Generation X – for whom “Here we are now, entertain us” became somewhat of a credo – , which he despised just as much as the term “Grunge” that was assigned to their music.

The audience in the video was recruited at a Nirvana concert a few days earlier, where director Samuel Bayer handed out flyers looking for kids between 18 and 25, attending as a typical high-school persona: punk, nerd, jock (Well, most of them were. The cheerleaders came from a local strip club). They had expected to be there for an hour or so, but were ordered to sit in the stands and look bored for more than 11 hours, while the band was acting out a prep rally. As a result there was quite some pent up aggression when they finally requested to destroy the set – and when permitted so they did. The mosh pit and destruction is quite real.

Up to this point it was the norm for people on MTV to be pretty and trendy and initially the network refused to play the video. However, they finally gave in and due to the video the practice actually changed, paving the way for artists with “radio faces” – and by the year 2000 it had become the most played video on MTV Europe.

Note from the editor: So we made it to 50 videos. Yay! Unfortunately the two visitors we get on a good day don’t really justify the time required to keep up the pace, which is why starting next week we’re cutting down to two episodes per week. Thank you for your understanding!