2/26/2024 0 Comments Mtv kurt cobain unpluggedHe’d ordered the stage to be decorated with black candles and stargazer lilies, a funereal scheme routinely invoked as a premonition of his suicide, when in actuality it had more to do with his penchant for twisting conventional beauty into something grotesque. At the very least, he hadn’t clawed his way out of Aberdeen, Washington to let Nirvana become Mr. The day before Nirvana filmed their set, the show’s guest was Duran Duran.Īs with all creative endeavors, Cobain seemed eager to strip the charade of its artifice and do something he perceived to be real. A few hair metal bands came through in an attempt to be taken seriously, as though the lust of teenage girls was not serious enough. Between 19, guests of the show included middlebrow alternative acts like Elvis Costello and R.E.M., legacy artists like Eric Clapton and Paul Simon, and contemporary pop stars like Mariah Carey. (The name alone-“Unplugged”-conjured an imagined utopia where music was nothing more than the spontaneous expression of people in a room.) You’d come in, strip down, show your fans the heart bleeding under the armor. ![]() MTV had started hosting “Unplugged” in 1989 as a way to package famous artists in comparatively approachable contexts. “Kurt,” she said, “they think you are Jesus Christ.” Afterward, Cobain reportedly complained to Unplugged programmer Amy Finnerty that the audience must not have liked it because they were so quiet. For musicians whose sound was so essentially electric, the idea of playing acoustic-or, as it came to pass, in a subdued, semi-amplified state-wasn’t just like going on stage naked, but amputated. “We play so hard that we can’t tune our guitars fast enough.” As few as 24 hours before Unplugged, he was considering having Dave Grohl sit out because he thought Grohl’s drumming would overpower the rest of the band. ![]() “We’re just musically and rhythmically retarded,” he’d told Guitar World in the wake of 1991’s Nevermind. “This is from our first record,” he mutters before “About a Girl.” “Most people don’t own it.” Never mind the five million people who had bought the one that came next.Ĭobain was reportedly miserable before the taping, worried the band didn’t have the grace to pull off something so subtle. A month or so after Unplugged was taped, he bought a black Lexus, but was so mortified by it-and mocked so thoroughly by his friends-that he returned it within a day. Not everyone's cup of Pennyroyal tea of course, to me this excellent show sums up a musical era and I still watch/listen to it regularly.Of course, that was the point of Unplugged, and, in a way, of Nirvana: Even after Cobain got famous, he tried, often painfully, to seem normal. I wonder how Smells Like Teen Spirit would've sounded? Drummer Grohl moved on afterwards and surprised us all with the consistent success of the Foo Fighters, while bassist Novoselic went into rather desultory but well meaning politics. It was a very relaxed professional set and showed an unknown side of the band to the world highlights include About A Girl, Come As You Are, the sublime On A Plain, and of course the gravely enigmatic All Apologies which became their unwitting epitaph. What of course made it so poignant was Cobain's apparent suicide 5 months later at 27 years old MTV (when it used to play music) reflecting the trauma for a generation of kids ran the video every day for months years! That generation has moved on and succeeding generations are as little moved by Nirvana as by the Beatles, so fast is fashion. It was just an acoustic concert showcasing some of singer Kurt Cobain's finest downbeat songs and a couple of downbeat covers. ![]() On 18th November 1993 they recorded an Unplugged video for MTV which became, to my ears anyway, their best - and last album in 1994. ![]() In grunge Pearl Jam had 10, the Stone Temple Pilots had Core, Soundgarden had Superunknown and Nirvana had the classic Nevermind.
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