Totally Tunes: Three Decades of Unplugged Artists

Last year, MTV Unplugged turned 30, having premiered their very first set (featuring Squeeze, Syd Straw, and Elliot Easton) in November 26, 1989. Ever since, the network's staple has lend a yearly opportunity to a wide variety of artists to perform their most famous tracks (and whatever else they want) in an acoustic setting. In 2020, the Unplugged as we know it was paused and a digital edition launched, featuring popular musicians like Marcus Mumford and Hayley Kiyoko doing their thing at home (it doesn't feel like an Unplugged per se, but well...). Unplugged shows range from forgettable to very iconic, but most people know at least one track that came out of one of these.

The true star of this article, via Pexels

I have mentioned A LOT of times before how much I enjoy Placebo's Unplugged, recorded in 2015, which features reworkings of some of their most famous tracks, versions of covers they'd done before, and first performances of never-played-before songs. They even brought in odd instruments, and I was this close to reusing the "the qanun is out of tune" gif I created for Whatcha Listening To back in the Disqus Channel days for this article.

Maybe my taste in music is a bit eclectic, but I really enjoy whenever a band that's very electro/hardcore-oriented does one of these. Take for example Korn, who you'd never expect to have done an Unplugged because the vibe wouldn't fit much with their instrumentation and genre, and yet in 2006 they pulled an insane setlist that included appearances by Amy Lee and Robert Smith.

Being Latin American, our MTV version would over-promote the Latino artists' Unplugged shows over other languages'. In any other context I would be protesting over this, but actually there are very good Latino Unplugged gigs that I would not have heard of hadn't MTV bash them repeatedly in my teenage brain. Take Julieta Venegas' 2008 show, for example.

In that vein, most recently (okay, 2018) Argentinian band Los Auténticos Decadentes was chosen to do one of these as well, which proved to be quite the feat, considering the band has a truckload of members playing various instruments, all crammed up in a small space, and with guests! 

To close this article, I'm gonna go with what's most likely the most famous Unplugged performance ever, an iconic cover of a David Bowie song (recorded in 1993, a few months after I was born), to the point in where most people don't even know who the original artist is:

As always, it's now your turn to shine! What's your favorite MTV Unplugged performance? From which artist/band would you love to have an Unplugged?