Revisiting Nirvana's Unplugged in New York album is not like going back and listening to any ordinary old mp3 playlist on iTunes. It's like reviewing a super sad suicide note on iTunes. And this suicide note gets an F... mostly because of the deplorable and shameful way Mr. Cobain conducted his everyday life (he told MTV on multiple occasions that he "hated to feel" and that all grown-ups "should probably die"). This also sucks because the sound(s) to be found on this collection of mp3s are truly horrible and seem to be ripped at an inferior bit-rate.
But it is not without its discreet charm…
Cobain often used production technology to his advantage. Unplugged in New York is the perfect display of how to use the perfect microphone perfectly, for the motive of perfection. His face is neither too close to the microphone or too far away. What's ironic, however, (and I think you'll agree with me on this) is that that same face would be blown off, like, a month later by Courtney Love. Oh yeah, also, me and my girlfriend (who knows very little about music OR politics, sadly enough) agree that the production on this is really good.
On Nirvana's previous effort, Steve Albini made sure that all the negative songs stayed really negative and that most of the songs with sucky parts had at least one part that sounds like a cool Aerosmith song… yeah, this "good Aerosmith part" usually manifests itself at the end of the mp3 so you kinda have to suffer through the incredibly slow-witted and insulting ramblings of Kurt "Look At Me Ya'll" Cobain first. I usually text old friends from Purdue University during these shitty parts because I lost the remote to my iPod dock so I can't fast forward that fucking shit, plus I'm just sort of lethargic in general (I'm still kinda dealing with 9/11, for what it's worth).
I wonder if a lot of people got bored and started texting each other hilarious one-liners at the taping of Unplugged in New York. I wonder if any of the people that went to the show are still alive? I wonder if Nirvana bummed out the audience so much, everyone went straight home to their loved ones to tell them cryptic and grim stuff like, "Sorry dude. I just wasn't made for these times"??
On the flipside of that unsavory thought is the more positive prospect that maybe a cool bro with a Dinosaur Jr shirt met a cool babe with green hair and they did music but never made it big (because they don't give a fuck) but maybe their sound(s) influenced Kimya Dawson and the Juno soundtrack makers, so their sonic fingerprint kinda lives on (as sonic fingerprints are wont to do). Do you think everyone in the audience did drugs with Courtney Love on top of the Empire State Building after the show? Think Love ever felt "the presence of God" when she was high? Why or why not?
So what else is good? I think he covers a couple songs that are probably done by Wire or the Afghan Whigs or the Jayhawks or some shit. That's cool. Oh, and he does an old slavery song, presumably because this was recorded before Vice magazine and horrible Internet humor blogs made it "uncool" to have white guilt.
And those are the "soaring highs" of this vile and disreputable coiled loaf of audio turd. What else happened on this CD? Oh… I dunno. He does a song about how being happy is stupid and it's better to be a degenerate snob that dedicates 75% of his time in the spotlight championing worthless metal bands with diabetic lumberjacks like Tad ("Dumb"). He rips off the general idea of 'Sex Type Thing' by Stone Temple Pilots and makes it a complete snooze-fest ("Polly"). He makes fun of Tonya Harding and the Challenger explosion ("Pennyroyal Tea"). He does a pro-death penalty song ("Lake of Fire"). And he does a song that the worst, most creatively bankrupt and cliche people you could ever imagine would declare as "Kurt Cobain's final goodbye to a stupid world that don't mean shit" ("All Apologies"). That's about it. Bring a book!
There's a reason that groundbreaking and envelope-pushing chillwave artists like Neon Indian don't make retarded unplugged mp3 collections. In fact, if people stopped spazzing out about the burgeoning chillwave/beachslut movement and got back into grunge, I would be seriously bummed… I'd probably get a really short temper and treat my friends with the sort of smug disdain that can only come with the feeling that pop culture has betrayed you (somehow). And you should be similarly appalled, too. Hypothetically. -Willwave
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