Kurt-a-oke

It turns out Kurt Cobain had the idea for a lounge version of Smells Like Teen Spirit a long time before anybody else did. And he sang it on Top of the Pops while the rest of Nirvana goofed around not-pretending-to-play. (Granted it’s lounge music via Ian Curtis, but it’s still a very lounge/Elvis-in-Vegas kind of vocal.)

(Later: A little further on this. Cobain’s ability to pisstake spontaneously on the song is suggestive that the reason SLTS attracts so much of this remake energy, and there’s way more than I linked above, incl. most recently T.opiate’s beloved Laura Barrett’s kalimba cover of the Weird Al version, is that the multigeneric identity is actually coded into its creation, that the sarcasm of its vision of rebellion was always directed at the rock myth of which it has been claimed as final messianic avatar and that the swinging melody is in some ways key to its implicit critique, which is more traditionalist than Cobain’s ever presumed to be, with his junkie lifetime membership in the boho nihilist club, which is always gonna be counted for more than his decisions, for example, to marry and have a child, despite the addict-logic compulsion of the former and the voluntary choice represented by the latter. And yeah, I know it’s tiresome to be still retro-interpreting Cobain, but.)