I looked through the albums and listened to some of the ones I didn’t hear from bands I find ok to very good. I didn’t listen to the LatAm artists. I’m unfamiliar with those artists normal work.

Key Takeaways:

• Nirvana was the best of the lot.
• The hiphop was really badly executed in this format overall with the exception of Lauren Hill. Still prefer the album versions of songs.
• Maxwell’s cover of NIN’s closer is odd. NIN music is closer to funk than most people realize but he chose to cover a track that is not funky at all. Daring move.
• MTV should have targetted indie bands instead of the washed up corporate rock bands they padded the episodes with.
• MTV Unplugged is very plugged. Every band/artist used at least one or all of electric bass, digital reverb, or backing tracks. This is the nature of live sound. These things are never purely acoustic.
• How you gonna do an acoustic “Can I kick it?” without an upright bass??? That would have sounded great. At least it was acoustic.
• The Police suck. Eric Clapton is boring as a solo artist. Fuck Kiss.
• Rod Stewart should have done “Do ya think I’m sexy”. Boring.
• Korn…was…ok? Amy Lee has a wonderful voice. No Auto-tune warble on her vox*. I wouldn’t go out of my way to listen to Korn but I would not be annoyed by this album if it was on.

I would say for the most part the “plugged” in versions are better but there are a few surprises.

• I heard light auto-tune on some of the post 03 stuff. They actually used the rack auto-tune at first and you can sort of tell with light warble on the higher frequencies being more apparent. It was a common limitation in the early hardware. I though I heard some in the Florence and the Machines set too but I could be wrong.