In the Sliver video, Nirvana chose to create an image of a garage band style performance. The song itself is about being babysat by grandparents as a child. The lyrics read as a personal story being told by Cobain about his life. In visual form, this is enhanced by the video's frequent extreme closeups on Cobain's face. It's contradicted by the presence of a medical model of a baby in the womb and a scarecrow-like dummy wearing a rubber mask. The juxtaposition of child-like themes, intimate close-ups, and things that a child would perceive as scary work to create an image that suggest a troubled childhood, something the lyrics do not confirm until the final moments.
The imagery looks as though it were made on low quality equipment. This is two-fold in meaning - firstly, the distortion of the music matches the distorted look of the video. Secondly, this can suggest the idea of young kids making their own music video, which plays to amplify the lyrics' storytelling quality.
The performance aspect of the video is very similar to a live Nirvana performance, but with a few key differences. The video is in a much more cramped space that the large stages Nirvana often played. The video is almost made in a way that suggests this is what the band looks like performing at someone's home. This makes the video more intimate and relatable than a performance video like Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, which takes place in a high school gymnasium.
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