Because we all know that acoustic = authentic and electronic = artificial, right? We’ve known it at least since Dylan went electric. Which would, crucially, render their music more authentic. The implicit idea behind the Unplugged setup was that, by converting their songs to an acoustic format, acts would not only uncover those songs’ true qualities – Behold! Here they stand, unadorned and naked! Judge them now, without gaudy fripperies to conceal or enhance! – but somehow strip themselves down to their core, reveal their essence. Not only would MTV Unplugged In New York prove entirely different to any other Nirvana album, it was intended to be entirely different to any other Unplugged recording – and tellingly, no other entry in the series has attained its classic status, or anything close to it. This was a collection of deep cuts and covers, the latter (six) outnumbering the original songs from any one Nirvana album ( Nevermind supplied most, with four). You might not be able to invoke MTV Unplugged In New York to explain why Nirvana were popular, but today it is exhibit A in the case for their greatness.Īt the time it was recorded – November 1993, a year before its eventual release - Nirvana had issued five singles that could be described as hits (and only two earlier ones that couldn’t.) Just one of these, ‘Come As You Are’, made the setlist for the MTV session. It was the first album released by Nirvana after the death of Kurt Cobain, and it was a huge commercial and critical success (although one suspects almost anything bearing the band’s name would have been at that juncture.) It’s also – and while this would certainly have been a provocative claim at the time, the passage of those 25 years seems to bear it out – the best thing they ever did. Nirvana stand alongside other, more cultish figures, such as thunderous, doomy backwoods neo-pysch group Screaming Trees (more of them anon), soul-by-other-means rockers Afghan Whigs, and sinister liquid-metal act Alice In Chains, as a grunge band who weren’t who had far more intriguing and expansive and exotic ideas.Īnd the artefact, the document, that shows this most clearly is also a quarter of a century old. With Britpop, the queerer and artier acts that snuck through the door it kicked open, the likes of Suede and Pulp (granted, nobody’s forgotten Oasis, but that meteorite of a first album aside, they were instant dinosaurs – functionally extinct, but still stomping around, too big to avoid.) With grunge, curiously, it’s the band that did the door-kicking in the first place who didn’t quite fit in the standard-bearers who never belonged to the actual army. What lives on of these movements? What from that time has lasted and, it appears, will last in the collective memory? In both cases, for the most part, the things that didn’t quite fit in. While grunge, for all its out-with-the-old posturing, harked back to the kind of trad rock whose year zero is 1968, and whose definitive constituents are the singer as howling priest of hypermasculinity and the guitarist as an axe-wielding demigod or maybe, by that point, a hemidemisemigod, this being the twilight of such deities. In the case of Britpop, this manifested in the fetishisation of the mid-1960s less as a glorious and effervescent creative swirl always grasping at the new (which they were, for a while), and more as a Swinging London theme park in which make-believe came true through faith and fanboy mimicry. Each was, depending on how you prefer to see it, a last hurrah or a dead cat bounce for the musical form it represented – as a force of invention, if not a commercial one. In a further lack of coincidence, it’s a quarter of a century since the peak of seemingly disparate movements in those places – Britpop and grunge, respectively – which had a great deal more in common than was apparent at the time.īoth were fundamentally retrogressive. Not coincidentally, it’s a quarter of a century since straight white guys from Britain and America did the same. It’s a quarter of a century since rock last held unquestioned sway over mainstream popular music.
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