Stupid and Contagious

This week I will be comparing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana and the cover done by Tori Amos.

 

Musicality

Nirvana is a grunge band so their version sounds much more loud and intense almost making their lyrics incomprehensible. They use guitars and drums that drive the intensity of the song making it more about the instrumentals and less about the lyrics. Whereas Tori Amos is more of a classical and alternative rock singer who sounds more calming and soothing. She only uses a piano in hers but even her lyrics are hard to understand because her voice ranges from really low to really loud at different moments. The way she sings it makes it sound much creepier than the original while the original is just really strange.

 

Lyrics

There's not really a whole lot of differences between the lyrics in the original and the cover. However Tori Amos didn't include all of the original lyrics and placed the lyrics in different places within her version. One example of that is the stanza: "I'm worse at what I do best/ And for this gift I feel blessed/ Our little group has always been/ And always will until the end." In the original that stanza shows up after a few stanzas and in the cover it is the second stanza in the song.

It's not really clear what the song is really supposed to be about. However the song seems to be talking mainly about teens. The music video seems to show a bunch of teens at what looks like a gym class banging their heads and rocking out to the song. The band plays in the middle of the room with a bunch of cheerleaders in the front. The words are all jumbled but I believe it is talking about how teens tend to follow what everyone else is doing and being unoriginal. There's a stanza that even sounds like they may be talking about drugs and going to parties or raves. That stanza is: "With the lights out, it's less dangerous/ Here we are now, entertain us/ I feel stupid and contagious/ Here we are now, entertain us." The words "stupid" and "contagious" are both very different from each other and the "contagious" part sounds like it could be a drug that it is similar to a disease. In contrast the "entertain us" part sounds like either a party or a bunch of teens trying to pass the time. That and I find the chorus a bit strange which is: "Hello, Hello, Hello, How low" repeated throughout the song. I'm not why that's the chorus, it's like they're trying to say hello to their audience in the music video. However when they wrote the song I highly doubt they were writing it as a form of greeting.

The only stanza that Amos didn't include in her version is: "And I forgot just why I taste/ Oh, yeah, it makes me smile/ I found it hard, it's hard to find/ Oh well, whatever, nevermind." I find it interesting that in that particular stanza he goes from saying "found" the past tense to saying "find" the present tense as if they are still trying to find a specific meaning to something only to form the last lyric of the stanza to say that they have given up. The original song is longer than Amos' version. Overall I believe that both versions are good, except I prefer the original because I'm not a big classic music fan.