The Nirvana paradox

Nirvana didn't sound like anyone else to our 16-year-old ears when it came out. It was so angry and so snarling, but still somehow so full of the joy of life. 

My mate Anthony heard them first, late at night on the rock station beaming in from Christchurch, and none of us knew what he was talking about with his raves about the 'entertain us!' song, and then we all heard it, and we were all on board. 

Not everybody was a Radiohead fan, and Pearl Jam wasn't for everyone, but if you didn't like Nirvana in the early 90s, there was definitely something wrong with you. 

Even now, decades after Kurt Cobain died by his own hand, the music is still as raucous and relevant as ever. One of those rock stations just did a survey of the greatest songs of the 90s and Smells Like Teen spirit came in at number one, and who is going to argue about that? 

It's a testament to its power that I still don't know all the lyrics to their biggest song, even though I've heard it a million times. I've never felt the urge to look them up - it would literally take 10 seconds to google it - and even though it does contain incredible lines like the one about feeling 'stupid and contagious', which I've often had running through my head when I've felt particularly embarrassed by my own foolishness. But I know the lyrics to the Weird Al piss-take better than the original.

And even though Nirvana even did a song about how people know all the words to their songs and sing along, (but they don't know what they mean), I'm happy to stay in some ignorance, and warble out whatever sounds right. 

So I can still sing along with all these marbles in my mouth, and don't need to now exactly what it is saying to know what it is really saying, about that rush of andolesdent need and that yearning for something bigger and better, and all that straight-up anger that still burns, all these years later.