How the Muppets Ended Up Singing Nirvana
At the risk of dating myself, “Smells Like Teen Spirit" is one of the great songs ever. If I owned the rights to it, I’d consider it closer to the irreplaceable end of the asset spectrum and not cheapen it by letting anyone else use it for anything other than rocking out.
And yet here on the internet are the The Muppets doing a pretty horrendous barbershop quartet version of it…
And here’s another (not as bad but not as good as the original) version at the opening of Disney + Marvel’s Black Widow film…
What happened was that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s estate sold some of its voting rights in matters like these for a tidy sum of money to an entity that’s more than happy to license rights for cash flow and the other original members of Nirvana voted along with that because they had diminished economic rights anyway (don’t fact check me, I read it on the internet). But at the end of the day, the asset was commercialized in a way that impaired the underlying value of the asset…maybe…
Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (he of Waiting for Godot fame) catches flack in some quarters for being notoriously strict from beyond the grave in his demands for how his plays are produced:
But I’m good with it even while acknowledging that other interpretations might also be valuable:
And yet ownership matters:
If you own something of incredible, irreplaceable value, commercializing it to be marginalized in a Muppets movie (and I love the Muppets) seems shortsighted. So, too, however, does thinking that your way will always be the right way and that something you created can never be improved upon.
There’s a world where “Smells Like Teen Spirit” should have never been sold to be sung by The Muppets. But there’s another where a new take on Waiting for Godot is a global blockbuster that enhances the value of the original.
– By Tim Hanson
