From a music standpoint, every decade can be split into two very diverse parts. Most of the time this split occurs at the midpoint of the decade. For instance, the’70′s: the first half containing prog rock, concept albums, and a new lionization of the songwriter; the second half containing punk, disco, and the early roots of rap. The same thing happened with the ’60′s too: 1964 saw the debut albums by The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, and The Animals, as well as being the year in which The Beatles got high for the first time—these things drastically altered the rest of the decade and pretty much eradicated the bubble gum pop and symphony-backed music of the early ’60′s.
The ’90′s split occurred either in 1994 (the death of Kurt Cobain, which abruptly stunted the directions that radio and MTV were going in w/r/t “alternative” music) or in 1996 (the deregulation of radio, which caused the proliferation of vanilla rock like Matchbox 20 and Sheryll Crow and The Wallflowers and their progeny to explode for years to come),[1] depending on how you choose to look at it. To some, saying that the death of Kurt Cobain was a defining moment of the decade is a hard pill to swallow because it suggests—however subconsciously—that Cobain is on par with Hendrix, Lennon, or Joplin in terms of significant cultural deaths of musicians, and this makes some people irritable.
Whatever your thoughts are about Cobain as a musician (or Nirvana as a band) the live version of “All Apologies” from Nirvana‘s Unplugged performance is on the short list of the most defining songs of the ’90′s.
The early ’90′s was extraordinarily fertile in terms of music. From 1991-1994 you had a debut album (Ten) that ranks right up there with Are You Experienced? in terms of most polished debuts, you had an album that single-handedly killed entire genres of music (Nevermind), and you had a set of diverse albums from a range of established artists that were jaw-dropping in their execution (Automatic For The People, Achtung Baby, Loveless, The Downward Spiral, and Eric Clapton’s and 10,000 Maniacs’ Unplugged albums), to say nothing of all of the wonderful debuts and sophomore efforts by a wide range of indie and rap artists.
On November 18, 1993 Nirvana recorded their Unplugged performance[2] and the show aired less than a month later on December 14. Their performance ran counter to almost every other show before it: rather than perform a set of greatest hits and familiar songs (or familiar covers), Nirvana performed six rarely heard covers, three songs in collaboration with (and covers of) The Meat Puppets, and two songs from their own catalog that could best be described as “Oh yeah, I forgot about those songs.”[3]
But for all of the unexpected treasures Nirvana brought to its live and delayed audience, “All Apologies” is not only the most emblematic song of that set but it is also in many ways emblematic of the generation that watched that performance, that bought Nirvana’s albums, that believed that the new school of music would blossom into our own Beatles and Stones and Hendrix. Was it naive? Absolutely. But as Cobain sat in his chair that night, wearing his woolly and tattered-looking sweater jacket, sitting next to the awkwardly tall Krist Novoselic and the unusually calm Dave Grohl and Lori Goldston with her perfectly gloomy cello, surrounded by black candles and flowers, you were able to catch a glimpse of a band that was—albeit temporarily—shunning its bread and butter. Nirvana was supposed to be about raw power and yelling and simple chords, a new, better hybridized version of The Stooges, Cheap Trick, and Sonic Youth.
Instead, we were treated to a cover of “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam” complete with Novoselic playing accordion. And it fucking worked.
But the legacy of that live performance and of the band in general will always be the Unplugged version of “All Apologies.” Within two years, the band had gone from the high decibel cryptic angst of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to a gentle, haunting show-stopper performance of a song that most people probably did not care too much about when they first heard it on In Utero.
Would Nirvana have made great albums if Cobain had not killed himself? Who knows and who cares. This version of “All Apologies” showed that the band had a much bigger musical soul than we previously knew. It is a fitting recessional not only for the band but also for the fertility of early ’90′s music as a whole.
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[1] The deregulation of radio was also a tipping point for the emergence of boy bands and bands like Limp Bizkit and Blink 182, which I will affectionately refer to as corporate frat rock.
[2] In one take.
[3] “About A Girl” and “On A Plain.”
