Before, you could either pay attention to the lyrics or not here, phrases such as “distill the life that’s inside of me” or “I’m so tired I can’t sleep” seem to fix into your brain and haunt you long after the song is over. “Pennyroyal Tea” again is all about that bleak dread and self-hatred – a dimension that was always there in the original but that is now made explicit. The song no longer rocks, but instead enters a singer-songwriter territory, where a feeling of desperation is felt through every note and word. Here, the latter two take center stage – each word is sung as if on the point of breaking down, with Kurt stretching his voice throughout. Take a song like “Come as You Are” – in the original version the main focus was the “underwater” guitar tone, the chorus explosion and the general unsettling vibe, with the words and vocals only adding to that atmosphere. MTV Unplugged in New York answers all of these with a big, confident yes. But then came the natural question: is Kurt Cobain an actual good songwriter behind all the hype? Do these songs still hold up after you take away the wall of distortion and strip them to their essentials? Both Nevermindand In Utero shook the rock scene with a sense of heaviness and threat that had been missing for quite some time, with the popular bands playing it too safe and underground ones’ voice not being heard. After all, they were in the forefront of the whole grunge movement – a genre that is credited with bringing electric guitar-driven music back into the mainstream. Although now an indispensable part of the band’s legacy, the idea of Nirvana doing an acoustic live album must’ve sounded weird back in 1993.

Nirvana mtv unplugged songs