The Myth of Originality

Borrowing, bending, breaking — and becoming

When the opening riff of Smells Like Teen Spirit hit MTV in 1991, it felt like a cultural rupture — the last gasp of glam metal and the birth of grunge — distorted guitars, punk aggression, and melodic hooks colliding in perfect tension. Yet much of what Nirvana brought to the table wasn’t entirely new. It was a chorus of old ideas, voiced through a new generation.

That riff that defined an era?

It didn’t materialize out of nowhere. The chord progression echoes “More Than a Feeling,” one of Boston’s biggest hits from 1976. Nirvana never pretended otherwise — at some shows, they even used Boston’s song as an intro.

And Boston wasn’t the only influence.

Cobain openly said that Smells Like Teen Spirit was his attempt to “rip off the Pixies.” He borrowed their quiet-loud-quiet structure — that swing from whisper to scream — and built the track around it. You can hear the same tension in the Pixies’ Gigantic, where restraint and release feed each other.

Even the song’s name was borrowed from somewhere else.

Kathleen Hanna, singer of Bikini Kill and a close friend of Cobain’s, once spray-painted his wall with a joke after a night of hanging out:

“Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.”

She meant it literally — referencing the Teen Spirit deodorant worn by Tobi Vail, who Cobain was briefly dating at the time. Cobain didn’t know the brand existed. He thought Hanna had written something rebellious and poetic — and asked to use it as the song’s title.

Cobain’s influences also extended into the studio. When producer Butch Vig suggested double-tracking his vocals for a fuller sound, Cobain initially refused — it felt too artificial, he said. But when Vig reminded him that John Lennon did it, he relented: “If it’s good enough for John Lennon, it’s good enough for me.”

So when Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the Billboard charts, it wasn’t because Nirvana discovered a new musical formula or invented a genre from scratch.

What made Nirvana sound new wasn’t their ingredients — it was how Cobain recombined them. He fused punk’s defiance with pop’s structure, rage with vulnerability, noise with melody. His voice carried contradiction — sneering and pleading in the same breath — and his lyrics were both cryptic and painfully sincere.

That clash didn’t just sound new; it felt new, because it mirrored the emotional landscape of a generation: disillusioned, self-aware, and desperate to feel something real.

The Performance Trap

Every creator, writer, and thinker feels the pressure to be original — to be different, unprecedented, unmistakably new. Everyone is trying to stand out, and yet, most of what you see in our culture today seems to struggle to survive the test of time.

I often encounter that impulse myself when I sit to write. The urge to prove that I’m different, to look for counter-intuitive angles instead of staying honest on the page.

The danger of chasing originality for its own sake is that it can easily turn creation into performance.

You stop listening to your curiosity and instead begin manufacturing uniqueness for an imagined audience. What starts as exploration turns into strategy. The fear that your honest voice might not be enough hides behind the performance of originality, and the work starts to feel strained — clever instead of true.

Nirvana wasn’t original because they set out to be different. They were original because they took what’s been done before, metabolized it, and expressed it through their own lens.

Cobain channeled his alienation — pulled between rejecting mainstream culture and the pressure to stay “pure” in the underground — into sound, filtering it through the influences that shaped him.

The myth of originality is that it requires novelty. That you have to deny what came before, and that you have to create something completely new, never seen before. But what’s impossible to escape is that every new work is judged by the standards of the past — and if it does its job well, it brings a new perspective to it.

Originality isn’t the absence of influence. It’s about having the courage to be fully yourself — especially when that self doesn’t fit cleanly inside whatever the culture is celebrating at the moment.

David Foster Wallace once wrote that the new rebels would be the artists willing to risk looking uncool — willing to face yawns, rolled eyes, and accusations of sentimentality in order to treat ordinary human feeling with seriousness again.

What I take from that is simple: authenticity comes before originality.

You can’t create something truly your own if you’re unwilling to reveal where you come from — your influences, your fears, your obsessions, your way of seeing.

The Key Ingredient

What I’m about to say might shock you. But please bear with me.

Some of the best musicians…

Love to listen to music.

And some of the best writers…

Love to read.

Yeah, I know. Groundbreaking insight, right?

But these artists don’t just consume passively. They pay close attention. Cobain didn’t listen to the Pixies and think, “cool vibe.” He dissected their work — studying how they built tension, how they moved from quiet to explosive, how structure could carry emotion. And then he tested those ideas inside his own songs.

And it wasn’t just depth — it was breadth too. Nirvana didn’t only dig into the artists who moved them; they ranged widely. Cobain openly said he wanted to “combine the heaviness of Black Sabbath with the pop sensibility of The Beatles” when defining the band’s identity.

Even the explosive opening drums from Dave Grohl on Smells Like Teen Spirit had surprising roots.

In an interview with Pharrell Williams, he revealed they were inspired by disco and funk tracks like The Gap Band’s “Burn Rubber on Me.” The anthem of anti-establishment grunge began with a beat born on the disco floor.

And it wasn’t just music that influenced their work.

Cobain was famously obsessed with the novel Perfume. He carried it with him on tour, reread it constantly, almost like a talisman. What drew Cobain in weren’t just the plot mechanics, but the themes beneath it — alienation, obsession, identity, the grotesque pursuit of purity. All currents he felt in himself, and in the culture around him.

That obsession directly inspired Nirvana’s song “Scentless Apprentice” on their 1993 album In Utero.

That curiosity to go beyond their genre, to take ideas from other arts, and to combined these ideas to run their own experiments, is what helped them develop the richness and freshness of their sound.

I used to think the way to find my original voice was to stay inside my lane — to read what writers read, study what writers study, and build within familiar walls. But the more I paid attention to the artists I admired, the more I noticed a different pattern: they wandered. They followed curiosity into strange corners.

The things that move me most don’t always come from essays or books about writing. Sometimes it’s a line in a movie, a poem I don’t fully understand, a painting I can’t stop staring at.

I’ve learned to let that in. To allow myself to experiment, to get lost in something that has nothing to do with what I’m “supposed” to be doing. To trust that if I keep following the thread of what fascinates me — the work will take a shape that is mine.

The Price Tag

There’s a line from T. S. Eliot that has stayed with me:

“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

I don’t read that as a rejection of individuality. What he meant, I think, is that true originality appears only when the ego stops trying to claim the work. When the creation matters more than the performance of the self behind it.

In that sense, the writer’s mind becomes a kind of laboratory — a vessel where emotion, memory, influence, and instinct melt together and emerge as something new.

This is harder than it sounds. The ego aches for recognition, and the world finds comfort in what it already knows. Sincerity rarely gets the first round of applause.

Cobain understood this in his bones.

When he wrote Rape Me, he wasn’t glorifying violence. It was a protest song, a mirror held to both the media machine and the culture’s appetite for exploitation. To him, it was an anti-rape anthem, a refusal to be stripped of agency by an industry — or by anyone who tried to consume his pain as spectacle.

But the public — and much of the press — heard only the blunt title. They didn’t stay long enough to understand the metaphor, or the plea beneath it. They accused him of provocation, shock-value nihilism, or tasteless rebellion. What almost no one acknowledged was the sincerity inside the confrontation — the way Cobain was using ugliness to condemn ugliness.

He learned what every serious artist eventually discovers: when you dissolve into the work, you surrender the illusion of control over how it will be understood. To create honestly is to accept the risk of being misread.

That is the real cost of originality. It feels like stepping off solid ground — trusting something fragile inside you more than the loud certainties outside.

Because what stands the test of time is what dares to be true — long before the world knows what to do with it.

I’m still learning to choose truth over polish — to trust that my strangeness is not a flaw to be edited out, but a signal to follow. The ego tries to resist, always. Yet, the moments when I let truth move unfiltered to the page, the writing stops posing and begins to feel more alive.

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