First off, this is hilarious:
I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said before about this performance, but I am going to repeat things that deserve to be said. For most humans, this is the last performance of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana ever seen. Recorded as the final song of their MTV Unplugged concert in November 1993, by April of the next year Cobain would leave us with a vast canyon of promise and talent deeply and unfortunately unfulfilled.
This song came to me twice, both in a ways that will date me as an artifact. The first was via Cutler’s, a long-gone record shop in Downtown New Haven. I purchased a used copy of the CD at some point in high school — a rarity for me as an amateur-yet-still-sticky-fingered web pirate with two, count ’em ✌️~*~TWO~*~, CD-RW drives.
I bought the CD for the performance because of a different song, actually. The idea of Kurt Cobain, king of distortion and sonic ferocity, singing a song called “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam” was peak hilarity. It was an ironic purchase, because I was 16 and there’s not much else you can do at that point in your life. However, this was always the track I returned to on my iPod (carbon dating continues).
The second, and most important, introduction was via DVD. I remember watching it, thinking it would be a revisit to a familiar concert with some new content — Kurt joking with the crowd here, a Freebird tease there. But then, the final song, my favorite song, comes on, and I am entranced.
When you hear this song, you hear the man was going through it. He’s howling, he’s grieving; he’s singing to and for himself, not anyone in the room or in headphones years into the future.
When you see Kurt perform it however… you feel that weight within him. His eyes are closed for most of it, channeling those demons that would defeat him months later. Then, this moment:
I wept that first watch-through. Each subsequent revisit, I struggle to hold it together. Knowing what we know now, it’s hard not to see what’s obvious in those eyes.
He deserved more, though we necessarily didn’t.