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Audience: "MTV SUUUUCKS!"
Cobain: "Then why are u here?" (with a heavily sarcastic tone and expression).
Cobain had said it: Nirvana had essentially completed their journey with the release of "In Utero" (of which I got the splendid super deluxe edition of the twentieth anniversary released last week, thankfully I had a coupon from the record store) and they would do one last acoustic album (which I like to think they did and that it is "Unplugged In New York"). The first time I saw this live show indeed (found somewhere on the net, even if the version circulating was incomplete) the thing that struck me the most was the fabulous impact of the sound: the two guitars (Pat Smear, former Germs, had to choose whether to join the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Nirvana; his choice was obvious and natural) allowing Kurt to focus more on the vocals (by his statement) brought the band to the highest and thus concluding point of its evolution.
This is the splendid concert that documents that unrepeatable moment in their history ("Unplugged In New York" will document it in an acoustic version with the same lineup; it makes sense to somehow pair them), where great space is obviously dedicated to the (then) new tracks from "In Utero" without forgetting "Nevermind" and "Bleach" from which a lot of material is still extracted (from "Incesticide" only "Sliver" will be proposed). There is only one cover in the setlist: that "The Man Who Sold The World" (Bowie) which while in the Unplugged will shine, acoustically, with its own light, here it explodes electrically.
It is the long self-destructive jam "Endless, Nameless" that closes, and at this point, the show takes on a decidedly hallucinatory drift: the wild destruction of the instruments, the captivating atmosphere of the stage created by the two transparent and winged women from the cover of "In Utero" and by part of the set of that masterpiece of the video for "Heart-shaped Box", the spits on the cameras, Novoselic kneeling attacking the jam with a riff, slamming the bass repeatedly on the ground only to embed it in the amplifiers and Cobain first breaking the guitar and jumping on it, then wandering the stage playing the destroyed instrument and knocking down some speakers, then kneeling in front of the audience and explicitly, theatrically inviting the guys to come on stage (pulling one up, for that matter) and finally decapitating one of the mannequins with the guitar. It's a kind of anti-celebration. You might say: "That seems like enough," true. But that applause that Cobain, after definitively abandoning the guitar (or what was left of it), gives to the crowd that was enthusiastically cheering him at the end of the concert, with that grotesque grimace on his face, full of sarcasm, anger, and who knows what else (Novoselic declared that Kurt didn't want the audience to sing in chorus with them at concerts because he saw it as a sort of submission of the spectators' individualism), is hard to forget; because it's further demonstration and symbol of the profound unease towards all those people who, out there, exalted him and hung on his every word.
"He wasn't a hero or a guru, but simply one of them" Chris Mundy
"Cobain tore apart the image of the rockstar: rockstars are fake and posturing, he had unruly behavior and rarely combed his hair" Lorraine Ali
"There's a bunch of people paying attention to what I say and it's terrifying... Terrifying... Because I'm as confused as they are" Kurt Donald Cobain
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