More than a third of a century after Nirvana first appeared at the VMAs, the band’s surviving members — Dave Grohl (drums), Krist Novoselic (bass) and Pat Smear (guitar) — just returned to accept MTV’s version of a lifetime-achievement prize: the Video Vanguard Award.
Nirvana’s creative leader — singer, songwriter and guitarist Kurt Cobain — took his own life on April 5, 1994, at the age of 27. Novoselic honored him in his remarks as “one of the greatest artists of all time.”
“Kurt was one of one,” Novoselic said, adding that Cobain’s uncompromising vision is the reason “Nirvana continues to resonate so deeply.”
Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear of Nirvana accept the Video Vanguard Award.
(Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
“People are still hungry for authenticity,” Novoselic said as Smear lit up a cigarette. “For something real, something uncompromising. Something that tells you it’s just OK to ‘come as you are.’ Kurt would have loved that legacy.”
It was a fitting full-circle moment for a band whose stardom was supercharged by MTV — and who in turn “changed the [channel’s] entire look” by giving it “a whole new generation to sell to,” as Amy Finnerty, MTV’s former vice president of music programming and talent relations, once put it.
The anarchist pep-rally video for Nirvana’s breakout single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” premiered almost exactly 35 years ago, on Sept. 29, 1991. Over the next two years, Nirvana dropped one striking clip after another: the murky, aqueous “Come as You Are,” with Cobain’s hair dyed red; the swirling “Lithium,” collaged from live concert footage; the black-and-white, Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan spoof of “In Bloom“; the surreal, technicolor swan song of “Heart-Shaped Box.”