More than a third of a century has passed since Nirvana first appeared, on Sept. 9, 1992, at the MTV Video Music Awards. Now the band is set to return to accept this year’s Video Vanguard Award, the VMAs’ lifetime-achievement prize.
The band’s creative leader will not participate, of course, in Sunday’s ceremony: singer, songwriter and guitarist Kurt Cobain took his own life on April 5, 1994, at the age of 27. But surviving members Dave Grohl (drums), Krist Novoselic (bass) and Pat Smear (guitar) have occasionally reunited over the years, and they will likely gather again to accept their latest honor. No word yet on whether they will perform.
For anyone old enough to remember 1992 — or curious enough to revisit it — Nirvana’s cameo at this year’s VMAs will underscore just how much pop culture has changed over the last three decades.
Wracked by pain, addiction and depression, Cobain was famously conflicted about his own stardom — a stardom supercharged by MTV itself.
Nirvana’s breakout single, 1991’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” would not have been as massive without its iconic, anarchist-pep-rally video, which sped to the top of MTV’s heavy-rotation list. In turn, the “Teen Spirit” clip — flannel, moshing, cheerleaders with unshaven armpits — “changed the entire look of MTV” by giving the channel “a whole new generation to sell to,” as Amy Finnerty, MTV’s former vice president of music programming and talent relations, once put it.
The video premiered almost exactly 35 years ago, on Sept. 29, 1991.
Over the next two years, Nirvana dropped one striking video after another: the murky, aqueous “Come as You Are,” with Cobain’s hair dyed red; the swirling “Lithium,” collaged from live concert footage; the black-and-white, Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan spoof of “In Bloom”; the surreal, technicolor swan song of “Heart-Shaped Box.”
Nirvana eventually won five VMAs, including three for Best Alternative Video and one each for Best New Artist in a Video and Best Art Direction in a Video. In late 1993, they capped their MTV streak with the definitive “Unplugged” session — a show that Cobain (mohair cardigan, Frightwig T-shirt) initially dismissed as a disaster because the crowd was so quiet. “Kurt, they think you’re Jesus Christ,” Finnerty reassured him. Some fans still rank “Unplugged” as the best thing Nirvana ever did.
What was unconventional then, however — and what seems positively alien today — is that Cobain seemed to resist and even resent his own success. It was a struggle that played out on MTV.
On the one hand, Cobain was keen to shape his band’s image for mainstream consumption. “Kurt’s ideas came fully formed, along with the song. Kurt was so incredibly detailed in his ideas, and they were so good, that of course I went with those, “Heart-Shaped Box” director Anton Corbijn told this reporter in 2013. “The whole concept is Kurt’s. … For somebody to write a song and have a detailed vision for the video, or anything connected to it, that’s really rare. I have not encountered it to that level elsewhere.”
But Cobain was also constantly subverting expectations, until subversion itself became a part of Nirvana’s brand. The “Unplugged” setlist featured almost as many covers as originals — deep, record-nerd cuts by David Bowie, Lead Belly, The Vaselines and the Meat Puppets. The band’s 1992 VMAs debut kicked off with the opening bars of “Rape Me” — which the network had prohibited Cobain & Co. from playing — and ended with Grohl taunting Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose, who was soon to become a relic of an earlier music-video epoch. And so on.
That push-and-pull was the whole premise of so-called alternative rock. But for Cobain, it wasn’t a pose. At a time when “selling out” isn’t even a thing anymore — when optimizing for TikTok is almost as important as, you know, making music — it’s nice to be reminded that Nirvana briefly forced pop culture to be a little more punk.
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