3/31

j. robert lennon
on
weird al yankovic, “smells like nirvana”

(march plaidness)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

This essay, our last of the month, we present unaccompanied by an introduction. Thanks for (re)reading these beauties with us all month. —The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

j. robert lennon on “smells like nirvana”

In order to prove to you that the greatest achievement of the grunge era was a parody of the grunge era, I must first explain that there were no grunge bands, and there was no grunge. Just ask the bands. They existed—some of them still do—but they will disavow the association. The term itself was a joke that metastasized into a marketing ploy; its first known use in reference to Seattle music was as a fake denunciation of a nonexistent group. Grunge’s sound—muddled, monotonous, indistinct—was defined by what it wasn’t: not punk, not metal, not indie, not alternative. The way you danced to it was by flinging yourself randomly around. Its uniform was what you were already wearing; its haircut was not getting one. The genre’s entire lexicon—harsh realm, cob nobbler, lamestain—was a hoax, and its standard bearer died because too many people paid attention to him.
The one definitive trait that you could reasonably apply to grunge culture was self-mockery. And so its pinnacle, its unimpeachable masterpiece, could only have been a mockery—both of the things grunge was mocking, and of the mockery itself. Weird Al Yankovic’s “Smells Like Nirvana” is that masterpiece. It is the most grunge thing possible.
Here I guess I am supposed to do a riff on Weird Al. It is hard to imagine a task more pointless, or futile: the man is unsummarizable, yet universally recognized and understood. His baseline shtick could not be more simple: he records song parodies that are sonically indistinguishable from their antecedents, then copies their videos shot by shot, with comical alterations. Often, for several measures, you don’t know which one you’re watching or listening to; the penny doesn’t drop until you hear Al’s surprisingly versatile nasal bleat, or catch the first of many sight gags: a farm animal, a goofy pair of shoes, somebody’s head popping off.
(The Weird Al fan community—Close Personal Friends of Al is their actual, perfect name—will cancel me if I don’t mention his original tunes, which are not the subject of this essay. But they constitute more than half of his discography and, taken together, are perhaps the greatest novelty songbook in American musical history. That they are overshadowed by his brilliance as a parodist is perhaps tragic, but serves as a convenient way to distinguish the casual listener from the true fan; e.g., if you can’t sing “One More Minute” from memory, I’ve got nothing to say to you.)
“Smells Like Nirvana” is now almost thirty years old, yet I think of it as “late” Yankovic, because it came after the Weird Al hits of my youth: “My Bologna,” “Another One Rides the Bus,” “I Love Rocky Road,” “Like A Surgeon,” “Stop Dragging My Car Around.” These, anyway, are the songs that inspired my friends’ fifth-grade lunch table imitations, which we truly believed to be as funny as Al’s, and were confident would be equally beloved if only we could get the news to Dr. Demento. (In retrospect, I don’t think “99 dead baboons float by” was quite as hilarious a punch line as we thought, nor its zoo-mismanagement back story as compelling.)
Of course there have been dozens of stellar Yankovic jams since then, songs everybody knows, that in some cases are remembered more fondly than their originals. That’s because Weird Al never sounds dated: styles may come and go, but making fun of things is forever. As each earnest hit song fades away into quaintness, Weird Al’s parodies sharpen, seem prescient in their identification of the vanities of the moment. In 1996 we watched “Amish Paradise” and laughed at the beards, the hats, the black suits. 25 years later, it’s Coolio’s posturing that feels silly, and Al whose aim was true.
That isn’t to say that Weird Al’s parodies aren’t acts of love. You can’t copy anything so precisely without appreciating how it’s made; you can’t roast a thing you don’t adore. Most of Yankovic’s marks regard his work as flattery: Pharrell declared himself honored, Chamillionaire credited Al with his Grammy, and Madonna, starstruck, preemptively requested the creation of “Like A Surgeon.” The Yankovic aura is so powerful that Prince’s refusal to give permission now feels like self-parody in itself, a better joke than the resulting track might have been. (Although I could be wrong; in 2016 Yankovic told Billboard he was prepared to record a version of “Let’s Go Crazy” that was about The Beverly Hillbillies. Alas.)
Yankovic’s manager had a hard time reaching Nirvana to get permission to rework “Teen Spirit.” Knowing the band was about to appear on Saturday Night Live, Yankovic called 30 Rock and asked to talk to Kurt directly. “Is it going to be about food?” Cobain wanted to know. “No,” Al told him, “it’s going to be about how no one can understand your lyrics.” He ended up taking the idea a step further: Al’s Kurt, let’s call him Yancobain, doesn’t know what he’s saying either.

What is this song all about?
Can't figure any lyrics out
How do the words to it go
I wish you'd tell me, I don't know

Now I'm mumbling, and I'm screaming
And I don't know what I’m singing
Crank the volume, ears are bleeding
I still don't know what I’m singing

Self-referentiality is a reliable Weird Al bit; this tune reads to me like an extension and refinement of 1988’s “(This Song's Just) Six Words Long.” But the real poignance of “Sounds Like Nirvana” derives from Al’s understanding that the original video is already a send-up of youth culture and the marketing of youth culture. It features a smoky, claustrophobic high school gymnasium populated by depressed cheerleaders, self-destructive revelers, and a creepy janitor, who indulge in a sort of louche bacchanalia with the band.
I don’t think it’s been adequately acknowledged that “Teen Spirit”—the song, the video—is funny. It’s typically assumed to be self-serious in some way, as though it were punk; “defiant call to arms” and “buzzing with authenticity” are typical descriptors in the press. This is nonsense—“Teen Spirit” is goofy, ironic, and borderline meaningless; its lyrics are a mixture of scrambled teenage platitudes (“Our little group has always been / And always will until the end”) and vaguely suggestive doggerel (“A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido”). The video is little more than a thrilling pop eyeroll.
Weird Al’s video is an astoundingly accurate recreation of the original. It was filmed on the same soundstage and features some of the same actors, most notably the janitor. Sight gags include a sheep, a rubber guitar, girl scouts, and Dick Van Patten. The best joke in the video, and in the song, is also its most knowing tribute to the band’s style: Al approximates Cobain’s signature distortion-through-chorus guitar solo by gargling a glass of water, nailing the sound almost perfectly. (The gargle solo is a staple of Yankovic’s live shows to this day.) 

It's unintelligible
I just can't get it through my skull
It's hard to bargle nawdle zouss
With all these marbles in my mouth

The gargling is only one bit of grossout body humor in the video—there’s belching on the downbeat, sweaty tufts of underarm hair on the cheerleaders. The janitor draws a donut from his mop bucket and bites into it. A couple of man-sized rag dolls flop through the air above the mosh pit. Dick Van Patten’s hamburger is knocked from his fist, a cow moos, a basketball team runs by, and some dude in the background catches fire.
In other words, “Smells Like Nirvana” is grungier than “Teen Spirit.” And if “Teen Spirit” is the iconic grunge song, Nirvana the iconic grunge act, well, this song and video must be more iconic still. You don’t smell anything watching Nirvana’s video, as the title would seem to promise, but you can’t help but curl your nose up at Al’s.
I could rest there, with the pungent scent of armpit and barnyard still tickling at your orbitofrontal cortex; I think I’ve more than made my case. But given that the essay series prompting this thought experiment is itself a parody of competition—one whose subjects are determined by an arbitrary and capricious limiting exercise and whose writers are chosen at random—this perfect artifact must not merely be declared winner of this year’s bracket. It can only the champion of all brackets, the ultimate Xness, a parody of a mockery nested inside a jest within a lampoon. Vote for this, the ultimate musical ouroboros. Make it the king.

J. Robert Lennon is the author of two story collections, Pieces For The Left Hand and See You in Paradise, and eight novels, including Mailman, Familiar, and Broken River. A new novel and story collection are due out from Graywolf in April.