Nirvana Gets a Made-Up Award at MTV’s Never-Ending Wake

On Sunday night, September 27, 2006, the defunct band Nirvana received an MTV “Video Vanguard” award. To be completely honest, I have absolutely no idea what the hell “Video Vanguard” means, nor do I have the slightest interest in finding out.

It’s painfully obvious that this is an award invented to generate views by cashing in on the nostalgia that first-wave millennials (’83–’86) continue to feed with our wallets and our likes on social media.

The reality is that this whole mainstream media “nostalgia” trend is starting to smell pretty damn stale.

Yes, we all know it by now... Kurt was an important artist in the ’90s. And yes, we also understand that everything surrounding the Grunge genre and the Seattle music explosion helped trigger a major cultural shift—one that is absolutely worth remembering and introducing to younger generations.

But an award? 32 years after Kurt Cobain died? After four albums released over the course of Nirvana’s six-year history? Did absolutely nothing relevant happen in music videos during those 32 years?

But more importantly: how the hell do these MTV awards still exist when the network itself hasn’t even been broadcasting music since the early 2000s?

Let’s remember that “business genius” Phillipe Dauman, whom many regard as principally responsible for the total and catastrophic decline of one of the most innovative television networks of the late 20th century, decided to shift MTV’s programming toward reality television.

And he did so with the blessing of two executives who might as well have been born without a backbone, because all they seemed to know how to do was follow orders: Judy McGrath and Van Toffler, CEO and President of MTV Networks, respectively.

They happily went along with it, despite having been at the network far longer, following the orders of a lawyer who had absolutely no idea what he was doing when Viacom took control of MTV.

Back to the present: this whole thing is just fucking stupid, friends.

As I said before, it’s hype designed for millennials—the people who can actually afford to buy the newest edition of the newest edition of the newest $150 copy of In Utero, remastered so many times that it’s becoming nothing more than unbearable white noise with a voice and a beat.

Again: there’s nothing wrong with remembering the classics. There’s nothing wrong with introducing them to younger generations.

But the greed and avarice of the dying mainstream music industry, wrapped up in this kind of bullshit, have simply become too obvious—and too damn tiresome.

There are hundreds of new bands out there making great music, putting on incredible shows for people who actually give a shit about rock ’n’ roll.

Nobody needs a failed network like MTV to tell us that they are the ones who have the legitimacy to hand out awards to the same people they’ve been rewarding over and over again for the past 30 years.

Especially when that same failed network—and the same bunch of old executives—haven’t done anything meaningful for music since the century began.

We’ll never know what Nirvana, or Kurt Cobain, might have become if he hadn’t made the decision to take his own life in April 1994 at his home in Seattle.

What we can be sure of today is that, had Kurt grown old and received an award like the one handed out yesterday, he’d probably be loading the shotgun right now.