Kurt Cobain was aggressively chewing on a piece of nicotine gum during the entire recording of the MTV Unplugged version of About a Girl, refusing to spit it out despite the acoustic, intimate setting of the performance.

A closer look

Kurt Cobain was aggressively chewing on a piece of nicotine gum during the entire recording of the MTV Unplugged version of About a Girl, refusing to spit it out despite the acoustic, intimate setting of the performance. If you watch closely, you can see him furiously chomping away between deeply emotional verses, perfectly encapsulating the raw, unpolished grunge aesthetic that completely defined the early nineties. The network spent thousands of dollars trying to make the stage look like an elegant, candlelit funeral parlor, and the lead singer treated it like the waiting room of a dilapidated bus station. It is exactly the kind of subtle rebellion that made Nirvana the voice of a disaffected generation, completely oblivious to traditional television etiquette. He basically achieved legendary musical immortality while simultaneously treating the biggest television network on earth with the casual disrespect it absolutely deserved