Thirty-two years after the world lost Kurt Cobain, his bandmates stood together on the biggest stage MTV has and accepted the Video Vanguard Award in his name. Dave Grohl, 57, Krist Novoselic, 61, and Pat Smear, 67, took the honor Sunday night at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, where Public Enemy’s Chuck D presented the award. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the band chose not to perform.
The honor is especially fitting for a band whose rise was inseparable from MTV. The video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” helped turn Nirvana into a phenomenon in 1991, while “Heart-Shaped Box” later won two MTV Video Music Awards. Their relationship with the network also produced one of their most enduring performances: the 1993 MTV Unplugged set, which became even more poignant after Cobain’s death and later won Nirvana their only Grammy.
Nirvana’s Night Belonged To Kurt Cobain
Novoselic was the only one who spoke. He credited the band’s videos to “the vision of one of the greatest artists of all time, Kurt Cobain,” and offered his own answer for why the music has never faded. “Nirvana continues to resonate so deeply because people are still hungry for authenticity,” he told the crowd, in remarks also reported by Billboard. Smear, true to form, lit a cigarette on stage while the room stood and applauded.
Nirvana also gave MTV one of the wilder performances of its early-1990s heyday. At the 1992 Video Music Awards, the band played “Lithium,” ending in a burst of feedback and stage chaos that looked exactly like the kind of polished awards-show moment Nirvana had arrived to disrupt. More than three decades later, the Vanguard Award brings that relationship full circle.
Cobain was born in February 1967 and died in April 1994 at just 27. The Vanguard honor puts Nirvana alongside the likes of the artists who defined MTV’s golden era, and the moment landed as a reminder of how much of that era traces back to one voice from Aberdeen, Washington. For a longer look at Cobain’s life offstage, our story on his marriage to Courtney Love and their only performance together revisits the man behind the flannel.
Grohl, Novoselic, and Smear did not need to play a note to make the point. Some bands get louder with time even in silence.
