The Comedy of Errors: “Weird Al” Yankovic - Smells Like Nirvana (13 June 1992)

Buy this on Discogs

If Instant Hippie owes its place here to how I feel at this exact point in life/history, then Smells Like Nirvana gets on the metaphorical mix-tape as it’s something I would have lapped up when I was 16.

I first became aware of “Weird Al” Yankovic when the video to Eat It turned up on Saturday Superstore in 1984/85.  Precocious brat that I was, I thought it was shit.  Lazy, stupid, needless shit that was piggybacking on a classic original. I watched the video again, yesterday, and my opinion remains unchanged 36 years later.  Even as a parody, I thought it was no better than the playground rewrites of chart hits that I used to hear at junior school:

Uptown girl
She’s been living in her uptown world.
Sitting in the A-Team van
Snogging with an Action Man
(Lyrics copyright of Billy Joel and some kid at All Saints Junior School, Falmouth)

Having written Yankovic off in 1984, I started to reassess him four years later.  This wasn’t done in a particularly scientific manner, but I was walking around the records/books section of a French hypermarket when I saw a copy of the new “Weird Al” album, Even Worse, a twist on Michael Jackson’s Bad album.  Written down, Even Worse comes across as an even lamer pun than Beat It/Eat  It, but maybe because I was on holiday, it tickled me.  And although I suspected that Yankovic had a vendetta against Jackson, he looked the dogs bollocks on the sleeve.  If I’d been really impressed, I could have bought it if only to tease my mate, Kevin, who was on holiday with me and who was a massive Jackson fan at the time.  He’d even gone up to London the previous month to see one of Jackson’s Wembley concerts, which had so wowed Peel in The Olivetti Chronicles.

I was wrong about Yankovic’s “vendetta” against Jackson.  The King of Pop had happily waved through Yankovic’s parodies and the two of them had a good relationship, but flash forward three years to 1991 and it was a different story.  Yankovic approached Jackson for his consent to commercially release a parody of Black or White called Snack All Night.  However, Jackson asked Yankovic not to release the track as he felt the message of his song was too important to be diluted by a parody.  Yankovic respected his wishes but with one of 1991’s most momentous pop songs declared off-limits for his satire, where else was he going to find a track of equal significance to lampoon?
The answer was to be found in Seattle.

Kurt Cobain was happy to allow Yankovic to do the parody, aware of the universally acknowledged truth within American popular music that an act hadn’t truly made it until they were parodied by “Weird Al”.  However, he had a caveat, “Um....It’s not going to be about food, is it?”  Yankovic reassured him, “No, it’ll be about how no one can understand your lyrics.”  And that together with lack of rehearsal and thematic impenetrability forms the basis of Yankovic’s parody.  I particularly like the “Sayonara...sayonara” refrain and it serves to remind me that if you held a gun to my head and asked me to sing Smells Like Teen Spirit, I’d end up coming out with vocalised rhubarb like “Weird Al” or I’d sing the opening to their infamous, live Top of the Pops performance.

At another level, and without wishing to psychoanalyse Kurt Cobain, Smells Like Nirvana is another link in a chain which shows how things were being taken out of his and Nirvana’s control.  It’s possible that Nirvana in mid-1992 never felt more like The Beatles in mid-1964 with audiences hanging on their words and waiting feverishly for their next release.  By the same token, their contemporaries were poring over their catalogue and wondering whether a Nirvana cover could boost their own profiles.  Just a week before playing Smells Like Nirvana, Peel had played a barely bootleg, soundcheck quality cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit by The Honeymoon Killers.  Earlier in the year, he had treated listeners to various selections from the Sub Pop Singles Club compilation album, Smells Like Cooked Sausages.  A little piece of Cobain being appropriated by others for their own needs and creating a monster in the process.  Something that he and Nirvana would always be defined against.
In the case of Smells Like Nirvana, Cobain and company loved what Yankovic had done.  It chimed with record buyers as well and gave Yankovic his highest US chart hit since Eat It.  The record also accounted for an upsurge in sales for Nevermind as well.  So everyone was a winner though it doubtless played a part in seeing this seminal youth anthem become absorbed by the mainstream and eventually covered by the likes of Paul Anka on a swing album or retched up as part of the head-battering confectionery in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge.

Video courtesy of alyankovic