“’Holy crap! What is this?’ was pretty much my initial thought,” Jeremy Hart, 43, reflects when asked about his initial reaction to hearing the single that launched a million bands, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” “I’d spent most of high school listening to either hip-hop or metal, attempting—and failing miserably—to emulate people like Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai on guitar, and then along came this song, which didn’t give a shit about any of the guitar-god stuff.”

“It made me want to go apeshit,” Michelle Yue, 26, remarks. “I’m pretty sure I started a band within a month after hearing it.”

Not everyone responded viscerally and positively to the track. “I don’t remember thinking it was particularly special at the time,” Ross Pollack, 44, comments. Pollack is not alone in his sentiments. They did not do anything brand new. Punk luminaries like Sex Pistols/P.I.L.’s John Lydon thought of the band as a “record company’s ploy to rephrase punk in a manufacturable way.” Even Cobain’s daughter, Frances Bean, told Rolling Stone that she did not like her father’s music. Between Pollack, Lydon, and Cobain’s daughter exists a generational divide. Lydon helped to establish the music Cobain revered whereas Frances Bean, a Millennial, possesses affection for Mercury Rev and Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Undeniably, Nevermind’s lead single’s asteroid-like impact continues today. “I know I liked it a lot after the first time I listened to it,” Miguel Carrasco, 20, recounts. “I kept listening to it every day. When I was listening to it, I had no idea it was Nirvana’s ‘masterpiece’ or ‘breakout record.’ I loved how melodious it was. I knew it was beautiful.”

“I didn’t understand how this song, which repeated randomly strung together words, without Michael Stipe’s enigmatic delivery, and with production that seemed sanded down into a typical rock song was one of the greatest songs ever,” Maxwell Metyko, 19, wonders. “He was just screaming ‘mullato, albino’ at one point. Now, I look at it as [something often imitated], a sort of proto-‘Cannonball’ by the Breeders, with all [of] its hooks.”

Where “Smells Like Teen Spirit” enthralled some, leaving others bewildered or indifferent, for others, Nevermind embodied more than just their initiatory offering. The twelve other prokaryotic lifeforms that followed, including the silent prelude of “Something in the Way” to “Endless, Nameless,” meant more to the masses who embraced them.