The rock genre has brought us countless great songs, and it’s really difficult to determine the No. 1 greatest rock song of all time. Plus, rock has so many different layers. The genre has plenty of little genres within it, so determining the best rock song ever is very difficult. Everyone will have their own favorite rock song, but some do rise about the others.
Historians have come up with different timelines for the origin of rock music, anywhere from the 1920s to 1950s. But, Billboard calls the first real rock-n-roll star to be Chuck Berry in 1953. “Chuck Berry did in fact invent rock ‘n’ roll,” the outlet states. “Of course, similar musics would have sprung up without him. Elvis was Elvis before he’d ever heard of Chuck Berry. Charles’ proto-soul vocals and Brown’s everything-is-a-drum were innovations as profound as Berry’s.”
According to Britannia, rock ‘n’ roll is a “style of popular music that originated in the United States in the mid-1950s and that evolved by the mid-1960s into the more encompassing international style known as rock music, though the latter also continued to be known as rock and roll.”
So, what’s the greatest rock song of all time? Audio Ink Radio is naming our No. 1 pick.
The Rock Song That Changed the World
Nirvana truly changed the world with 1991’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The song, which came off their sophomore “Nevermind” album, changed music in the 1990s. Before “Nevermind” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” popular music was all about hair metal and glam rock. That genre ruled the 1980s and seemed like it would continue to be popular for years to come. But, Nirvana ended that with “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
“The song that launched 1,000 grunge bands and changed the course of popular music found its conceptual spark in a grocery store in Olympia, Washington, in August 1990,” notes Biography. “While pacing the aisles, Kurt Cobain’s musician girlfriend Tobi Vail and her Bikini Kill bandmate Kathleen Hanna came upon a can of deodorant named Teen Spirit.”
“We were both joking around because the name looked so funny,” Hanna told Double J in 2016. Biography adds that later that night, after drinking, “Hanna was gleefully trashing Cobain’s apartment when she found a Sharpie marker and wrote the magic words on the wall: Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.” So, that’s kind of the origin for the song’s name.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” is our No. 1 best rock song of all time because it’s not just a great song, but it changed pop culture. Nirvana took the world into the flannel craze with the track and changed so much about the decade.
It’s worth noting that Rolling Stone names the No. 1 greatest song of all time as Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” While that’s a fantastic song, it’s not rock, so we wouldn’t have picked it for this tally. “There is no mistaking the passion inside the discipline of Franklin’s delivery; she was surely drawing on her own tumultuous marriage at the time for inspiration,” Rolling Stone notes.
Check out Audio Ink Radio’s pick for the best classic rock songs of all time in this feature.
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