Nirvana

Nirvana performed ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ on MTV Unplugged in New York in November 1993, and for a whole generation of listeners that haunting acoustic take simply became the song. Their version is genuinely theirs and genuinely great; the only error is chronological, the assumption that a song they made famous in 1993 must be one they wrote. It was Bowie’s, from 1970, more than twenty years before Kurt Cobain sang a note of it.