MTV invites you to close your eyes, listen to Nirvana's Unplugged, and pretend it's 1993 again
Aux Features TV
For reasons that are fairly explicable—if not outright “fucking easy to comprehend”—there’s been an uptick in useful distractions in the pop culture ecosystem of late. Often, that takes the form of nostalgia, one of the most potent distracting forces on this planet, right up there with “horny” and “food.” And it’s to cater to that first great force, presumably, that MTV’s been maintaining a nostalgia bombardment throughout the day today. As anyone who tuned into the network this afternoon already knows, it’s self-declared “Flashback Friday” in the House That Beavis Built, with the channel offering up a steady slate of oldies-but-goodies, with the shared theme being that they were all produced in New York City.
Tragically, the lateness of the present hour means that we’ve already missed three full hours of music videos—which is fine, since we’re not sure our brains could handle the whiplash from the network’s normal slate anyway. And it’s obviously unfortunate that we won’t be able to indulge in our once-thriving Real World obsession by slipping into three and a half hours of the show’s first season. But you can still catch the 2000 VMAs, at least—that’s the one where Britney Spears kickstarted god knows how many puberties with her performance of “Oops!…I Did It Again!”, and Rage Against The Machine’s Tim Commerford refused to come down from the scaffolding after his group lost to Limp Bizkit. (Both formative moments, in their own ways.) You can follow that up with both the Nirvana and the Pearl Jam Unplugged sessions, and then finish the day out by blissing out to two hours of The State. Sure, the world outside will still be, uh, “challenging” when you’re done. But that was going to be the case anyway, and at least you might be able to see two guys dancing around $240 worth of pudding if you do it like this.
45 Comments
This is one of the first CDs I ever owned; I got it after catching a rerun of MTV Unplugged. I signed up for one of those 1-cent Columbia House CD Club membership things. I remember getting my courage up to tell my mom that I forgot to cancel the trial and owed them $60. She told me they weren’t going to go after a 9-year-old and to forget about it. I still got grounded, though.
Nirvana’s Youtube page put the whole concert up last Fall, uncensored, including rehearsals, so hey you can continue to not watch MTV if you want.
You don’t seem to want your MTV.
Honestly I forgot MTV was still a thing
Does MTV even play videos anymore?
I stumbled upon the MTV classic channel, which seems to play nothing but videos in hour long themed blocks (rock block, 90’s nation, Yo MTv raps and even had 120 minutes on late night.
I had tickets to see Knopfler recently, but couldn’t make it. It’s a shame…
That song has one of the most outstanding intros
Same with Pearl Jam—-if you don’t watch any other songs, watch the Porch and State of Love and Trust unplugged ones.Dave A is in fine form. My favorite PJ drummer.Edit: Dammit, you can’t watch it embedded, but you can click on the link.Stupid copyright laws.
“ Rage Against The Machine’s Tim Commerford refused to come down from the scaffolding after his group lost to Limp Bizkit.”I mean, can you blame him?
I wonder what else William Hughes thinks is scaffolding.
I remember MTV music videos and music content as a youngster in the “before times”, and I said that 15 years ago.
So what are your favorite Unplugged albums?Mine are 10,000 Maniacs and Eric Clapton.
Don’t believe it ever was released as an album but Björk’s session will always be my favourite – the whole rearrangement of her music, with a tuba, glass harp and friggin’ gamelan, is the stuff of legends.
She looks goddamn gorgeous at the show, too. Wow.
She does indeed. Even my lil’ queer heart skips a beat, but much as I love her look (old and new) I truly love her sense of experiment and adventure and not just for the sake of it but really to push boundaries and create stunning music. This concert very much was a taste of what’s to come.
Debut and Post are two of my desert island discs, with the latter being one of my favorite records ever. The perfect mix of her weird experimentation and just plain good pop music.
i remember this!
Wow, thanks, I didn’t know she had done one.
Really? Stop whatever you’re doing and watch it and watch it again. Honestly. Then forget about its existence and watch it once more with renewed amazement and enthusiasm.
I mean, no doubt… she is extraordinary.
I’ve been fortunate enough to see her live twice, in completely different settings. First Vespertine tour, in a concert hall with full orchestra (and Matmos, Tanya Tagaq, full choir and Zeena Parkins who’s also in the unplugged). Then Volta tour, which was outside with an Icelandic brass band, ReacTable and Tenori-On (yeah. Google it). From Haeckel drawings to laser show.Both completely different, utterly amazing.
alanis morissette was another of my favorites.
Fiona Apple was also good, I recall really liking her Jimi Hendrix cover. Yup still do.
When they first started Unplugged, they had SRV and Satriani split an episode and it was weird and perfect. Aside from bootlegs, and maybe youtube, doubt it’s an album.
Old enough to remember when The Real World actually had some merit and entertainment value to it. The fourth season set in London is genuinely enjoyable, and not just a bunch of dumb, drunk 20-year-olds yelling at each other for a summer like it was in later seasons. It also took place right after the drama-filled San Francisco season, in which Pedro Zamora and Puck Rainey battled it out in nearly every episode. It was lighter, a lot more fun, and only featured seven housemates. They actually took time to get to know and befriend one another over the months they were there, and it shows in the final product. I have no idea where you might find it these days, but if it’s streaming anywhere, definitely give it a watch.Probably-not-so-fun fact: Australian housemate Jacinda Barrett was once engaged to serial engager Chris Hardwick.
Pluto shows real world marathons on the mtv reality channel there.
I just heard about that and signed up for Pluto, but I can’t find it on the service. Is there an ‘MTV Reality’ channel/category that I’m not seeing?
Channel 111. They just showed the first five seasons a few weeks ago. Lately they have been showing garbage so you may have to wait for it to come back around.
I really wish they’d put a search box or a notification system on that thing.
Yea the guide is a mess. Go through and tag channels you like as favorites. It will bump them to the top.
Good to know! Thanks.
That’s the season that review sites always like to say is the most boring. I watched most of the first several seasons in real time (am old) and don’t remember it as being any more boring or exciting than any other, to be honest.
That’s because no one fought needlessly or felt the need to start shit or be the diva of the house. It was just some fairly normal young people hanging out and living their lives. Living their lives on television, of course, but still. I appreciated that fact, and I always found it far more interesting than all the manufactured drama.
Julie and Eric forever! I have no idea what happened to her, he became like Dan Cortez esque famous I recall and probably does something Hollywoodish still. I could probably very easily look it up, but I also don’t care that much.
I remember those two. They weren’t very much more than pretty, were they?I was friends on Facebook with Dan Renzi for a while until he got needlessly offended by something I said and unfriended me. Nice enough guy, but just as touchy and defensive as I remembered him being on the show.
He was model esque she was southern I think and cute, but they were just normal kinda boring. I remember them playing up the will they won’t they angle a lot.
Ah, the salad days of people fucking on TV. We were so young then.I had a monster crush on Kat from the London season (I like the girl next door type), and Amaya from the Hawaii season was nice to look at even though being almost wholly unlikable.
That was the first one they decided was broken. Several of the housemates sat around and did nothing because MTV never thought about labor laws that meant that Americans couldn’t get jobs in England and the unemployed housemates didn’t have the money to do anything in London. It was a very predictable screw up. The next season they started giving the housemates tasks to do, so you weren’t watching pasty dudes just sit on the couch in their underwear.(because of that you could say this was the last “Real” World or you could say it was the first “unReal” world because of the artifice of having these people live 5 months in a foreign country.) That season also had a romance that the producers REALLY wanted to happen but went nowhere. That was before people decided they were willing to have sex on camera just to improve their screentime.
You should look up what became of “Puck”… even by the standards of a former reality TV figure, it’s pretty dire.
Oh, it’s been my Wiki hole this morning. He’s just as much of a piece of shit as he’s always been. I can’t imagine what would’ve happened to him in the public eye had those episodes in SF aired now.
My Mtv only plays reruns of Ridiculousness. 🙁
The poor man’s tosh.0
I have actually come to appreciate that show’s ubiquity because I have to go into guests’ rooms at my job and 50% of the time they are watching Fox News (middle aged or older white people), 20% of the time they are watching Impractical Jokers (30-something white people), and 20% of the time they are watching Ridiculousness (non-white people under 40 and 20-something white people), so its the least objectionable of the three for me to deal with for the 5-15 minutes I am in there (the other 10% are usually half-watching a movie they have seen before on cable, let’s talk about how awesome John Wick is!).
MTV is still a thing? wow