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MTV Unplugged in New York is a live album by the American grunge band Nirvana. It features an acoustic performance taped at Sony Music Studios in New York City on November 18, 1993, for the television series MTV Unplugged. The show was directed by Beth McCarthy and first aired on the cable television network MTV on December 16, 1993. As opposed to traditional practice on the television series, the band played a setlist composed of mainly lesser-known material and cover versions of songs by The Vaselines, David Bowie, Lead Belly, and Meat Puppets, whose Cris and Curt Kirkwood joined Nirvana onstage.

MTV Unplugged in New York was the first Nirvana album released following the death of Kurt Cobain. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, and has become the group's most successful posthumous release, having been certified 5x platinum in the United States by 1997. It also won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album in 1996. The performance was released on DVD in 2007.

Nirvana had been in negotiations with MTV to appear on its acoustic-based show MTV Unplugged for some time. It was while touring with the Meat Puppets that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain finally accepted. The band wanted to do something different from a typical MTV Unplugged episode for its performance. According to drummer Dave Grohl, "We'd seen the other Unpluggeds and didn't like many of them, because most bands would treat them like rock shows—play their hits like it was Madison Square Garden, except with acoustic guitars." The group looked at Mark Lanegan's 1990 album The Winding Sheet as a source of inspiration. Among the ideas the band members came up with included covering David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" and inviting members of the Meat Puppets to join them on stage. Still, the prospect of performing an entirely acoustic show made Cobain nervous.

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