Nirvana will receive MTV‘s Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award later this month at the Video Music Awards, which will air live on CBS on Sept. 27. The awards show will also simulcast on MTV and stream on Paramount+. The network’s announcement did not mention who from the band would be on hand to accept the award.
MTV made the announcement on Sept. 9, the 34th anniversary of Nirvana’s instrument-smashing performance at the VMAs. At that show, the band performed Nevermind’s “Lithium” and Kurt Cobain teased the opening chords to the then-unreleased In Utero song, “Rape Me,” to irritate network censors.
The gig also featured Krist Novoselic throwing his bass in the air and having it land on his face, knocking him over during Cobain’s “I’m not gonna crack” refrains at the end. The performance ended in feedback as Cobain pushed his guitar into the amplifier and they pulled Dave Grohl’s drums off the stage. Grohl then went to the front of the stage and said, “Hi Axl, hi Axl, where’s Axl?”
The Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award recognizes artists’ legacies as music video innovators. Previously just the Video Vanguard Award, MTV renamed the award for Jackson, who’d won Video Vanguard in 1988, in 1991.
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Nirvana filmed seven music videos, including memorable clips for “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Come as You Are,” “In Bloom,” and “Heart-Shaped Box,” before Cobain’s 1994 death. Videos for “You Know You’re Right” and “Dumb” came out in 2002 and 2023, respectively.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which Samuel Bayer directed, cost a respectable $33,000 to shoot. Cobain’s treatment for the video took inspiration from Rock and Roll High School and Over the Edge, in which teens take over a school. “That [movie] pretty much defined my whole personality,” Cobain said in the book, Come as You Are. “It was really cool. Total anarchy.”
