It's funny how something that started over 20 years ago is still influencing my music taste today. In the 1989/1990 TV season, the debut of MTV Unplugged coined a new catch phrase and re-imagined an old concept. A nicely written history of the show is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV_Unplugged
It was around this time my tastes were expanding beyond the rock (like Rush), pop (like Phil Collins) and so called “new wave” (Depeche Mode) I’d been listening to, to now include the new wave of folk artists. Thank you Indigo Girls, who emerged around 1989, for reminding me how great the harmony of Simon and Garfunkel was by doing it in your own unique way. Strangely, at that time of my life, the only time I saw MTV was at someone else’s house. I was jealous of those who got to see these MTV Unplugged performances. So many bands reinvented their popular songs in a new way on this show and it lead to other bands recording acoustic versions of their songs for B-Sides for their singles. Singles and B-Sides are a dying art, but the acoustic reinterpretations continue long after Unplugged gave way to crappy reality based shows on MTV (of course! Now I actually have cable and could watch it if it were on).
Not as many bands are using the ”unplugged” concept like they would have 20 years ago. A band that sounds just as good, possibly even better, in this “unplugged” format is The Airborne Toxic Event. On the surface they have a bit of a light gothic rock sound (not quite The Cure or Sisters of Mercy, but not far from solo Peter Murphy records), but when the strip things down and do what they call Boombastic versions of their songs, it really brings out something truly special. Seek out some of the unusual places they’ve done these versions of songs from their two records on You Tube or something and then consider getting a CD of them doing them as a rock band. Its good stuff either way and really getting my attention as of late.
