MTV was hip to the huge Hispanic music audience earlier than most, featuring its first Spanish-language artist on Unplugged in 1995 ( Los Fabulosos Cadillacs received that honor).
They did one or two per year after that, with the most popular coming in August of 1999 when Shakira recorded her acoustic session in Manhattan. Shakira ended up releasing this set as an album which sold 5 million copies worldwide and won a Grammy for Best Latin Pop album.
Fiona Apple was just 19 years old when she recorded her first and only episode of MTV’s Unplugged.
Supporting her debut album Tidal, she demonstrated the combination of poise and nervous awkwardness she would exhibit throughout her career.
The very first episode of MTV’s Unplugged featured British pop band Squeeze along with a pair of American singer-songwriters, Syd Straw and Elliott Easton.
Through some cosmic coincidence, that debut episode aired exactly 28 years ago today, on Halloween of 1989. I’d love to say I planned it this way, but alas, it was fate.
Back when MTV played actual music rather than Teen Mom: Roanoke or whatever, my favorite series was MTV Unplugged. These were the Tiny Desk Concerts of the 90s, presenting acoustic sets in an intimate environment. The artists had to be pretty good to pull that off, so you got a wide range of talented acts.
Well, apparently MTV Unplugged is still kind of a thing, at least online and at least in Norway. I know that because I happened upon a viral clip of A-Ha performing a gloriously stripped-down version of their classic ‘Take On Me’ in Giske Harbor Hall, against a beautiful backdrop of mountains and sea.
Bob Dylan’s closed out the 60s with Nashville Skyline (1969), a short, sweet, straight-up country album featuring a drastically different singing voice.
In the midst of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war, just after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, this was viewed as a puzzling move by an artist who just five years earlier was soundtracking the protest era with The Times They Are a’Changin’.
Meet Me In Montauk 