What’s Your Favorite Musical Performance on TV?

Bands and artists often work their whole lives to get their big shot on the small screen. Sometimes, they bomb spectacularly (looking at you, Ashlee Simpson), sometimes they piss off the wrong network execs and get themselves banned for life, and every once in a while, they use their airtime to do something so spectacular that it sticks in viewers' minds for years. Below are a few performances that have burned themselves into the brains of the Noisey staff.

What's your all-time favorite TV performance? Tell us on Twitter. (And also check out all of our TV Week articles, from The Simpsons to Chappelle's Show.)

Many a book has been written about Nirvana, and why, exactly, the band appealed to a generation of young kids in the 90s. But it's not a difficult code to crack: Kids are loud and obnoxious and break shit, and Nirvana was a group of guys who were loud and obnoxious and broke shit. I was one of these shitty kids Nirvana appealed to in 1993. At ten years old, I was too young to attend concerts and I couldn't go anywhere cool because kids are too short and stupid to drive. So, like most 90s kids, I sat in front of the TV a lot. On New Year's Eve of that year, six weeks after Nirvana's iconic MTV Unplugged performance, the channel aired the band's concert that had been pre-taped in Seattle two weeks prior. This was a preferable New Year's viewing choice to Dick Clark, who was not very loud or obnoxious, and hardly ever broke things. The concert was everything a ten-year-old Nirvana fan could dream of. They played a career-spanning set, from "About a Girl" to "Lithium." Fresh off the release of In Utero, they leaned heavily on its songs, including "Rape Me" (on national TV!). But the part that bore itself into my dumb little brain, and which I still regularly think about more than 20 years later, was the finale. For their last ten minutes, the band completely trashed the stage—pushing amps over, spitting in the camera, and throwing guitars all the way up to the rafters and letting them smash on the ground. There was a six-foot-tall In Utero angel statue as set decoration and, before Kurt Cobain walked off, he grabbed his guitar by the neck, swung it like a Louisville Slugger, and knocked its head clean off, a move my friends and I would mimic every time we passed a department store mannequin. Until that night, the most mythologized concert of my parents' generation was Woodstock, but here was my tribe, stepping up to say, "We'll take it from here." I didn't know how to play music yet, but I knew how to be loud and obnoxious and break shit, and Nirvana taught me that that was enough. —Dan Ozzi

Late night TV performances have traditionally been the province of brash young bands neck-deep in promo tours. But for those with the resources or time to blow up the format, it can become a chance to shock the normies who tune in for bad suits telling MOR takes on political headlines. In recent years, that's led to performances both anarchic and parodic, but leave it to Björk to turn the whole endeavor into a theatrical meditation on love and existence. After a 1995 dry-run on Letterman to perform a tongue-tied version of "Hyperballad," she returned after releasing Vespertine for something truly special.

Backed by the forward-thinking electronic duo Matmos, free-associating harpist Zeena Parkins, a 13-strong Inuit women's choir from Greenland, and a giant transparent music box, the Icelandic songwriter delivers a version of "Pagan Poetry" that somehow unfurls even more elegantly and somberly than it does on record. With such a formidable band at her back, holding down the song's cavernous instrumental, Björk is free to map the song's vast emotional landscapes.

You can hear those depths on the record, but there's something even more striking about watching her face twist into knots as she sings of her slow awakening—receiving signals that "wake me up from my hibernating." It's a love song of transformation, of slowly discovering the boundlessness of the world outside of a cocoon. It's amazing in pretty much every video that exists of this tour, but the idea that something so personal and intimate aired on national TV is pretty amazing. As the song ends, the ever-chipper David Letterman asks the crowd "Pretty nice, huh?"—which is so much of an understatement it never fails to make me laugh. —Colin Joyce

This wasn't what I expected to come up with when I was asked to write about my favorite broadcast musical performance, but given that A) Chris Krovatin already ran down the most significant metal-on-TV moments in another piece and B) my television viewing habits generally do not take me into the kind of territory in which musical appearances occur (I like John Oliver, but he's more likely to have dancing penguins or some shit than musical guests), I felt I had to get creative. As I cast about for something to write here, one thing did pop into my mind: Kendrick Lamar's performance (a medley of "Humble," which I had heard in lots of taxi cabs this summer, and "DNA," which I had not) at this past year's MTV Video Music Awards. I don't remember how I actually encountered it (Twitter, probably) but after it ended and I'd scraped my jaw back up off the floor, I texted our editor-in-chief, Eric, "I finally get Kendrick Lamar." I'd never really listened to his music, because I spent 97 percent of my listening time on heavy metal, but after watching him tear through this particular medley, the seemingly endless acclaim that I've seen heaped upon Mr. Lamar over the past few years finally made sense to me. Both songs are aggressively catchy, and the chorus to "Humble" ended up stuck in my head for days after. Also, I appreciate his fiery black and red aesthetic, and general disdain for the police. What's not to like? —Kim Kelly

Looking back, it's pretty fun to think about this era of Kanye West. He released his sixth studio album Yeezus on June 18, 2013, but before that album dropped, he had spent about a year shying away from the public eye. In the month before the album dropped, on the season finale of Saturday Night Live, Kanye debuted both "Black Skinhead" and "New Slaves" and, really, his entire Yeezus persona. The music was loud and abrasive, a far cry from the sweeping melodies of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or the decadent Watch the Throne. Kanye was fucking pissed. And with the performance of "New Slaves," he stood on the stage stoically, staring straight in the camera, rapping fierce and biting lyrics straight into the eye of white America: "Fuck you and your Hampton house / I'll fuck your Hampton spouse / Came on her Hampton blouse / And in her Hampton mouth." West would then go on a tear throughout the summer, making wild statements in legendary interviews about how he was a god and essentially delivering a "fuck you" to anyone who challenged his greatness. In hindsight, this might be the best few months of Ye's iconic career. —Eric Sundermann

On the 2012 Grammy Awards, Maroon 5's Adam Levine and Foster the People's Mark Foster joined the Beach Boys for a medley of classics from the eternal pop game-changers. Sounds horrible, right? It was. So why is it on this list? Because Grammy performances more often than not carry at least a veneer of just-above-the-bar mediocrity—if you aren't getting Beyoncé, you're probably getting Kendrick Lamar headbanging to Imagine Dragons's "Radioactive," or Jessie J serviceably limping next to Tom Jones, or Demi Lovato trying to pay tribute to Lionel Richie. It's truly rare that you see something as jaw-droppingly uncomfortable as, say, Mark Foster staring into the Grammy audience with a mixture of amusement and terror as he warbles through "Wouldn't It Be Nice," like a child halfheartedly singing along to a song on the radio while they draw stick figures with chalk on the sidewalk. He looked like he was having a miserable time—and being that physically close to human pustule Mike Love, can you blame him? — Larry Fitzmaurice

I think Ellen secretly has some of the best hip-hop performances of any talk show around. Look no further than Future doing "Incredible" or Travis Scott with "Goosebumps," or especially, this performance of Chance the Rapper's "No Problem" with 2 Chainz and Lil Wayne. I love the energy of these three together. I love the idea of the three of them palling around with Ellen. And I love the new line Wayne drops in his verse: "And if the label try to stop me / I'm gon' let 'em rob me / Yeah right, like Ryan Lochte." Maybe I should be watching Ellen more often. —Leslie Horn

Years after watching this grainy video for the first time, I still have no idea how acerbic post-hardcore trio Mclusky ended up playing their hilariously bitter song "To Hell With Good Intentions" on a Welsh TV show called Pop Factory in 2001. I could probably find out, but that would kill the fun. What you get here is a spiky-haired Steve Jones, the man who went on to present the first season of America's X Factor, telling an early-Saturday morning TV audience that Mclusky are the band that "put the hard in hardcore." This video is worth it for that moment alone, an attempt to be jovial and punkish that sounds glorious in a Welsh accent. But keep watching. Look at the crowd's attempts to dance, then clap, then bashfully smile at the camera as it scans past them, baffled. Look at frontman Andrew Falkous's grin, around a minute in, when he realizes that he can't keep the menacing show up anymore and that this is all ridiculous. Perhaps these kids didn't hear him sing, "My love is bigger than your love / We take more drugs than a touring funk band" or "My dad is bigger than your dad / He's got eight cars and a house in Ireland." What matters is that, for reasons that I hope never to uncover, he stood up in front of a bunch of adolescents who probably just wanted to see Shaggy and screamed, demonically, "We're all going straight to hell." —Alex Robert Ross

Here's a good little life hack: If you want to find the best live TV performances of any act—or at least, a test of its live mettle—search for performances on Later…with Jools Holland. The UK music television series just celebrated its 25th anniversary on October 8, and its tenure, particularly amidst the media and music industry turmoil of the ensuing years, speaks to just how damn great it is. Unlike the shaky iPhone videos, low-def VCR recordings, and hollow in-studio performances that tend to populate live performance search results, Later offers up rich sound, dynamic camerawork, and an intimacy tailored to the particular mojo of each act. No band is too famous or little-known for Later, with an expertly-booked lineup of performances (a recent episode, for example, features Robert Plant, St. Vincent, Kelela, Beck, Nick Mulvey, and John Moreland) intercut with chats between Jools and the artists. It's the music fan's talkshow, Fallon et al. be damned.

Among these episodes, I've found myself returning over the years to Pulp's 1995 performance of "I Spy." The live set captures the Britpop greats at their incisive, libidinous best, backed by an orchestra as frontman Jarvis Cocker writhes and pantomimes about a platform, all Bowie staccato hip thrusts and scathing social critique. His movements are meticulous, his stares into the camera by turns chilling and blush-inducing; all the while, he and the band unfurl into insidious disco pop camp, navigating the space between self-loathing and sex, as only Pulp can.

"And every night I hatch my plan, It's not a case of woman v man / It's more a case of haves against haven'ts / And I just happen to have got what you need / Just exactly what you need, yeah," Cocker avows, gauntlet thrown as he doubles over, voice quivering, singing and hissing with such lust and contempt, you find yourself reaching to wipe his spit off your face.

Bonus round: Jarvis Cocker mooning the crowd during Michael Jackson's ridiculous, masturbatory performance of "Earth Song" at the 1996 Brit Awards is arguably one of the greatest live TV performances of all time—it's peak 90s cheek, pun very much intended.

And while we're on the subject of jaw-dropping Jools Holland performances, Cat Power's performance of "The Greatest" is, well… the greatest. —Andrea Domanick