Smells Like Nirvana - Background

Background

Prior to writing "Smells Like Nirvana", Yankovic's music career had suffered from the poor financial performance of his 1989 feature film, UHF and the associated soundtrack. Yankovic called that "the beginning of three years where it was kind of hard for me to recover". He started work on a new studio album around 1990. To revitalize his career, he considered creating a parody of a Michael Jackson song, which had proven successful twice before with "Eat It" and "Fat". He had composed a parody of Jackson's "Black or White", entitled "Snack All Night", but Jackson said he was uncomfortable with the parody, given that the original song was intended to be a political statement. Yankovic would later believe that Jackson's refusal was, in the long run, a blessing; he felt that "Snack All Night" was not one of his better works. While he had compiled other original songs for a new album, he feared the lack of a good parody song would doom the album to failure, and held off from releasing anything until an idea presented itself.

At that time, the band Nirvana started to become a name in the music scene, creating "big, seismic shifts in pop culture" according to Yankovic. Yankovic considered that the band's 1991 album Nevermind, which featured "Smells Like Teen Spirit", was "really great", but feared that at its release, the band wasn't popular enough to make a parody. By early 1992, Nevermind had reached platinum certification and led the Billboard charts. With Nirvana's success, Yankovic began to seek permission to create a parody, but his manager claimed he was unable to get through to the group numerous times. When Yankovic learned that Nirvana would be performing on the January 11, 1992 show of Saturday Night Live, he called his UHF co-star, Victoria Jackson, at the time a regular cast member of the show. Jackson got Cobain on the phone so that Yankovic could make his request. Cobain agreed, though initially he inquired if the song would be about food, one of Yankovic's trademark themes at the time. Yankovic instead explained that the song would be about Cobain's incomprehensible lyrics, to which Cobain replied, according to Yankovic, "Oh, sure, of course, that's funny".