Watch YouTuber Seth Everman Cover Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in 12 Quirky Musical Styles
If you’ve always wondered what Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” would sound like as background music for a video game’s water level, you’ve come to the right place.
That’s one of a dozen niche musical styles that Swedish YouTuber Seth Everman transformed the song into for the video below. As The A.V. Club points out, you have to think very far outside the box if you want to give the grunge rock classic—which one study deemed the most iconic song of all time—a new spin these days. It’s already been parodied by “Weird Al” Yankovic, featured in 2001’s Moulin Rouge! (a movie Courtney Love actually auditioned for), and even sung in Classical Latin.
Everman manages to cut through all that noise by choosing genres that mostly range from “obscure” to “not really a genre.” A couple more mainstream selections include hard rock and minimalist jazz, but there’s also “Polish mazurka,” “flute destruction metal,” and one bit in the style of one-hit wonder Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” Ever danced to a remix of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in a Bulgarian nightclub? Probably not, but you can now hear what that would sound like.
Everman culminates the performance by smashing a few instruments, of which avid smasher Kurt Cobain no doubt would have approved. As for how Cobain would’ve felt about all these quirky takes on his song, we can only guess—but he did want muzak versions of Nirvana tracks, so he wasn’t exactly a purist about his work.
[h/t The A.V. Club]