Watch: You simply can’t un-hear Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ auto-tuned to a major key
Prepare to rethink your entire life. (Or maybe it’s not that big a deal.)
Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit was the anthem for the rebellious, confused and angsty youth of 1990s’ Generation X. It embodied their struggle with identity, and became an emblem for grunge and rock music.
But what if the song were composed in a major chord, instead of its original key of F-minor? (And why should that matter?)
We could have gone our entire lives without ever knowing it, but thanks to Sleep Good, a musician and Vimeo user from Austin, Texas, we now have a song titled Teen Sprite, by a “pop punk band from La Jolla, California”, very appropriately called “Nirvirna”.
Essentially, it’s the original Smells Like Teen Spirit, but auto-tuned to a major scale. The result? A sunny pop track that sounds like it was written in the garage of an amateur high-school boy band. Or, as social media users have suggested, like a Weezer cover band or an early 2000s teen movie soundtrack.
If you find it confusing, messing with your head or disorienting, that’s too bad, because you can’t un-hear it. But hearing the original (below) just might help.