COMM333: Analyzing Sliver

From it's intentionally low-fi video presentation (a novel idea in 1993) to the embracement of childlike consumerism, Nirvana's Sliver music video is something of a peculiarity. In 1991, Nirvana's Nevermind album knocked Micheal Jackson's Dangerous off the #1 spot in the charts. Yet two years later, here was Nirvana, the biggest band in the world, making a video that looked like a garage band.

Here's a song by a "big rich rock band" (as Kurt Cobain described his band on MTV Unplugged) that's lyrically about an upset child, yet the images of childhood are joyful, and the video looks like it was shot on the world's cheapest camcorder. Kurt Cobain's sweater is ripped. Krist Novoselic, generally the band's most charismatic member, is barely shown as more than a shadow. This is a video that hearkens back to the band Nirvana used to be during their time at Sub-Pop.

The video is interesting, then, because of the presence of Dave Grohl behind the drums. When Sliver was recorded in 1990, Interim drummer Dan Peters was the man behind the drums. The band used the audio from the Dan Peters version, but Dave Grohl is the one pantomiming in the video. The reasoning behind this is pretty obvious, being that Dave Grohl was the only drummer most Nirvana fans knew, and even Bleach/Sub-Pop era devotees would only recall Chad Channing's time with the band, but the idea gets fuzzy when one considers that, when Nirvana first recorded In Bloom, it was with Chad Channing, and he was in the original music video. When Grohl joined the band, they rerecorded the song and did a new, totally different music video. Why they would go to the trouble for one song and not the other is curious, but it speaks to a deeper meaning in Cobain's head.

Sliver was the video to promote Incesticide, a corporate cash-in album of unreleased tracks from the early days that Cobain only approved on condition that he was allowed to design the album art. If Kurt's gonna be forced to make an album just as quick buck for the label, he's sure as hell going to promote it in the most anti-commercial way he can. Of course, Incesticide turned out to be an awesome album, but Kurt's greatest influence on it was to make sure only the diehard fans would buy it. Making a music video that looked raw helped to insure that Nirvana wouldn't be only known as the band that beat MJ.