As tempting as it would be to leave Smells Like Teen Spirit out, owing to its overfamiliarity, it would also be duplicitous, given the impact it had. The single turned the music world upside down: alternative rock became mainstream, for a while at least. It was a hand grenade tossed into the charts at the end of summer 1991, and its detonation took out a swath of hair-metallers in one devastating blast, making groups such as Geffen labelmates Guns N’ Roses – who’d been so vital and anarchic not long before – seem anachronistic. Time magazine said Nevermind “fibrillated the psyche of a generation”. A song that mentioned “a mullato, an albino, a mosquito” and “my libido” suddenly spoke to the disenfranchised, and the fact that it was gibberish was almost entirely the point. “I’m a spokesman for myself,” said a spooked Cobain. “It just so happens that there are a bunch of people that are concerned with what I say. I find that frightening at times because I’m just as confused as most people.” Teen Spirit was the pre-internet equivalent of a viral hit, on heavy rotation on MTV and radio, and you’d hear it wherever you went. You sense in hindsight that its ubiquity was everything Cobain had ever wanted, but that when it arrived it couldn’t have been any more horrific for him.