In 1992, I was sitting on the edge of my bed watching MTV. Smells Like Teen Spirit came into the bedroom at 200 km/h. I didn’t know Nirvana yet, but that was over for good now. Wonderful! The MTV Unplugged LP is one of my favourite albums and of course it’s not missing from De Platenbar.
In 1994, Nirvana came to an end due to Kurt Cobain’s suicide...
Nirvana
Nirvana was an American grunge band founded in 1987 in Aberdeen, Washington by singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic. The band had a series of different drummers, of whom Dave Grohl, who joined the band in 1990, was the longest-serving.
The band established itself within the Seattle music scene by releasing the debut album Bleach in 1989 on the indie label Sub Pop. After signing with the major label DGC Records, it unexpectedly succeeded with the single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from the second album Nevermind (1991). With this, Nirvana entered the mainstream and brought the 'grunge' genre with it. Frontman Kurt Cobain was labelled by the media as the "voice of a generation", while Nirvana was seen as the standard-bearer for Generation X. Cobain felt uncomfortable with all the attention and focused on the music, believing that the message and artistic vision of the band were misinterpreted by the general public, whom he challenged with their third album In Utero (1993).
With Cobain’s death in April 1994, the relatively short existence of Nirvana came to an end. However, the band’s influence and popularity remained undiminished in the years that followed. The song "You Know You're Right", a previously unreleased demo, was high on radio playlists worldwide in 2002. The band sold more than fifty million records worldwide, of which more than 25 million in the United States.
After a failed suicide attempt in Rome and a hospitalisation, Cobain was found dead on the morning of 8 April 1994 by an electrician in the garage of his mansion in Seattle. He had shot himself in the head with a shotgun three days earlier. There is still controversy surrounding Cobain’s cause of death; according to some, several things point more to murder than suicide. The concentration of heroin found in Cobain’s body was so high that he could not even stand or fire a bullet, and the last part of his suicide note was written in a different handwriting. However, these theories are questioned by other researchers. Nirvana was disbanded immediately after Cobain’s death. In 2002, on the occasion of the release of the compilation album, a final single was released: "You Know You're Right".
https://www.nirvana.com/
Top 2000
In the 24th edition of the Top 2000, Nirvana is listed as follows:
Sunday Morning Classic
On Sunday 29 January 2023, the Sunday Morning Classic Nirvana MTV Unplugged from 1994 finally played on our turntable.
Then MTV came with the unplugged series. MTV Unplugged is a television programme whose first series was broadcast between 1989 and 1999 on the music channel MTV. Between 2000 and 2009, performances were less frequent, after which the format has regularly returned in the form of specials. In MTV Unplugged, the most famous singers or bands of the moment are asked to perform in an acoustic setting, with minimal use of electrically amplified instruments.
Nirvana’s acoustic performance for MTV Unplugged was a milestone for the band. True, there were tensions between the band members and the producers were not very happy with the setlist. It consisted of songs from the first album, covers and a guest appearance by the Meat Puppets. No hits or well-known names, then. And Kurt Cobain insisted on using an amplifier. A bit contradictory to the principle of the programme, in which artists can perform their art without amplification. MTV Unplugged is Nirvana, and thus inextricably linked to Kurt Cobain, at their most vulnerable. MTV Unplugged is one of those albums you can put on almost any time of day. Kurt sometimes strains his voice, but that’s what makes it so beautiful and fragile!
The Bowie cover The Man Who Sold The World is magnificent and many times better than the original (in my opinion) and the final outburst in Where Did You Sleep goes right through you...
What the footage also captures is the prickly relationship between Cobain and drummer Dave Grohl. Legendary is the moment when Grohl compliments the singer after All Apologies: “that was beautiful.” “Shut up” is Cobain’s response. It sounds funny when you hear it. The audience also laughs. Cobain’s facial expression says something very different: shut up, asshole. You feel the friction, that it’s not quite right. Exactly what remains unclear, it lingers throughout the performance. Cobain’s awkward attempt to forge his own path also comes across better through the footage. When he asks if there are any requests, it comes across more as a formality. The fans beg for hits, Krist Novoselic and Grohl are happy to play them, but their bandleader stubbornly goes his own way.
The pressure of stardom, a persistent drug addiction, guilt and insecurities... as perfectly as the circumstances came together in 1991, when Nirvana’s Nevermind became a hit, they fell tragically together in 1994, when Kurt saw no other way out than to end his life.
Source: Wikipedia and NPO Photo: album cover
