The 32 greatest Saturday Night Live performances
Oct. 11, 2024Ladies and gentlemen…
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It doesn’t get any bigger than Saturday Night Live. For over 50 years and counting, the weekly sketch comedy series – broadcast from NBC and produced out of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City – has also featured the biggest names in music as guest performers. Naturally, some acts wind up better than others. But which among them deserves recognition as the greatest ever?
Here’s some trivia for you: Saturday Night Live’s tradition of musical guests started as soon as the show itself did. In its premiere episode on October 11, 1975, funk singer Billy Preston and folk musician Janis Ian were the first to perform, paving the way for future major artists over the ensuing decades. From avant-garde jazz to hardcore punk to Korean pop, SNL has been an unofficial barometer for what’s “in” in the zeitgeist; to look back is to see American culture transform in real time.
In commemoration of SNL’s legacy, here are the 32 greatest Saturday Night Live performances.
30. Fleet Foxes (January 17, 2009)
Hailing from Seattle, Fleet Foxes made waves in the indie folk scene, first with two EPs before releasing their acclaimed debut self-titled album in 2008. Their unlikely profile afforded them an appearance on Saturday Night Live on January 17, 2009, performing “Blue Ridge Mountains” and “Mykonos.” SNL’s stage has historically welcomed musical acts who aren’t finely calibrated for Top 40 radio, but the arboreal vibes of Fleet Foxes is really something else under the bright lights of SNL’s metropolitan studio.
Whoever at Saturday Night Light booked socialist-leaning rock band Rage Against the Machine and guest host Steve Forbes (the affluent Republican figure and namesake to Forbes magazine) deserves either a raise or jail time. Slated to perform two songs, the group wound up playing just one after they tried to protest their joint appearance with a political enemy through hanging inverted U.S. flags from their amps. (They were forced to take them down before they went live.) It doesn’t stop their performance of “Bulls on Parade” from going so hard, however.
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Don’t you dare yawn in front of Alex Turner. A bit before Arctic Monkeys achieved a higher profile in the U.S., these English rockers from Sheffield paid a visit to Saturday Night Live and performed two songs from their 2006 debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. While the band was locked in for their performance of the propulsive “I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor,” someone who was probably up past their bedtime yawned during “A Certain Romance,” which prompted frontman Alex Turner to verbally call them out. A year later, the group released the rollicking Favourite Worst Nightmare, which left no one fatigued.
In 1981, Bronx natives Funky 4 + 1 made history by being the first-ever hip-hop group to perform rap music on American network television. The occasion happened on February 14, 1981. Introduced by guest Debby Harris (of the group Blondie), Funky 4 + 1 performed “That’s the Joint.” Fittingly, the song has the group rhetorically ask “Are you ready for this?” Whether or not America was ready for it, hip-hop was part of the culture, and this would be far from the last time it would be heard live on Saturday nights.
Only Madonna could turn 30 Rock into a thumping ’90s-era nightclub. In January 1993, the mega-star sang “Fever” and “Bad Girl,” two singles off her seminal album Erotica. While the album is characterized by overt sexual themes and lyrics, Madonna plays it somewhat safe on live television, dressed in a tasteful black outfit with an exposed midriff that was in vogue (ha ha, get it?) at the time. But really, when you’re Madonna, you don’tneedflashy gimmicks like revealing costumes or outlandish stage design. All that’s needed is some good music to get us dancing in our living rooms.
In one of the first new Saturday Night Live episodes since worldwide lockdown, musician Jack White stepped in as a last-minute replacement for country singer Morgan Wallen after they violated COVID-19 protocol. With only two days' notice, Jack White stunned masked-up audiences with a fine performance of the songs “Lazaretto,” “Ball and Biscuit,” and a cover of Beyoncé’s “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” Unburdened by needing to promote new material, White simply put on a good show that functioned as his own tribute to the late Eddie Van Halen as he performed with a guitar that Eddie personally made for White.
As grunge music grew in mainstream popularity, Saturday Night Live played a small role in solidifying the genre for a network TV audience. In 1992, Pearl Jam toured relentlessly in support of their seminal album Ten, which included a stop performing at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The band lit up SNL with a rendition of their songs “Alive” and “Porch.” Pearl Jam fans to this day love the performance, most of all Dave Abbruzzese’s drumming. Fun fact: Abbruzzese was a replacement for previous drummer Matt Chamberlain, who left the band to play… for the in-house band of Saturday Night Live.
In the same year that Radiohead unleashed their defining album Kid A, the band came to SNL fully prepared to weird America out. Performing “The National Anthem” and “Idioteque,” Radiohead adorned the insides of 30 Rock with its signature brand of psychedelic rock and Thom Yorke dancing like he’s possessed by an alien parasite. While the band had already cultivated a solid reputation with acclaimed albums like The Bends and OK Computer, their memorable performance on Saturday Night Live earned them even more lasting attention.
Early into Saturday Night Live’s now-legendary run, the show’s producers were less concerned about chasing trends and more about hearing what they wanted to hear. Thus was the case of its season three finale in 1978, which featured avant-garde jazz legend Sun Ra as the musical guest. Dressed like Egyptian pharaohs from outer space and rambling about the harmony of planets in a brief pre-performance interview, Sun Ra mystifies the studio audience with a lengthy 14-minute set. It’s the kind of performance that would never happen today in modern Saturday Night Live, and in retrospect, a miracle it ever did.
Mariah Carey was fresh out of high school when she made her first Saturday Night Live appearance in 1990. As a budding pop star, she was already a powerhouse talent even back then. But fast forward to 1997, amid the release of her acclaimed album Butterfly, Carey had matured into a true genre-bending phenom. Her growth is evident in her 1997 return to SNL, performing “Butterfly” and “My All” – two emotionally stirring R&B ballads that undoubtedly moved those lucky enough to hear it in person.
If you ask any Queen fan, they’ll tell you the band’s 1982 guest appearance on Saturday Night Live isn’t exactly canonical. But it has a place in the band’s lore for at least one important reason: It is the last time the band ever played on American soil. On September 25, 1982, still a few years shy from their history-making Live Aid gig, the band rocked out inside 30 Rockefeller for an in-between stop in the U.S. and European legs of their Hot Space Tour. The group played two of their biggest hits, “Under Pressure” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” Even an average performance by Queen is an astonishing day for most other bands, and considering Freddy Mercury et al. must have been exhausted from a summer of relentless touring, they’re more than excused for taking it easy.
It is almost,almost, the single greatest SNL performance in its storied history. With his boy band days behind him, ex-*NSYNC frontman Justin Timberlake was fully evolved as a blue-eyed soul singer and songwriter as seen in his epic double album The 20/20 Experience. The first of the two albums bowed with the singles “Suit & Tie” (a dressy number with Jay-Z as a featured artist) and “Mirrors,” an eight-minute long progressive anthem inspired by his marriage to wife Jessica Biel; Timberlake took both with him to 30 Rockefeller in a blockbuster display of showmanship The “Suit & Tie” performance is quite nice, and Jay-Z is a pleasant surprise. But “Mirrors” is close to perfect. There’s just something about the song performed live that makes it feel alive in its romantic mystique. If only SNL’s audio engineers calibrated Justin’s microphone correctly…
Is there any rock group more “Epic” than Faith No More? In 1990, the San Francisco rockers stomped into New York City for a dynamite performance on Saturday Night Live. The band played two songs off their smash 1989 album The Real Thing: “Epic” and “From Out of Nowhere.” As far as the mainstream audience tuned into SNL was concerned, Faith No More indeed came from out of nowhere. Lead singer Mike Patton is just as otherworldly, dressed in bizarre red outfits and moving all around the stage like he’s learning to walk for the first time. Off-putting? Maybe. Unforgettable? Definitely.
To understand what makes the Beastie Boys' joint performance with Elvis Costello so much fun, we need to rewind the clock to December 17, 1977. On that night, Costello was SNL’s musical guest. Midway through his performance of “Less Than Zero,” he cued his band to switch to “Radio, Radio” – a critique of overt commercialism of modern music. This made SNL producer Lorne Michaels royally mad, leading to Costello’s ban from the show for the next 15 years. By 1999, the ban was lifted. When SNL celebrated its 25th anniversary, the Beastie Boys were in the middle of their monster hit “Sabotage” when who else but Elvis Costello “interrupted” them, kicking off yet another performance of “Radio, Radio.” This time, it was actually planned.
Long live Seattle grunge. In 1992, as the grunge scene saw a meteoric rise to define early ’90s rock, Nirvana enshrined their place in music history when they played their enduring masterpiece “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” as well as “Territorial Pissings,” both off their seminal 1991 album Nevermind. In a lot of ways, Nirvana’s January 1992 appearance on SNL marked the official end of the 1980s. It simply doesn’t get bigger than SNL, and to hear Nirvana’s meaty riffs and see them in scraggly torn denim outfits in front of a mass audience – it all opened the floodgates for the rest to come.
Talk about trick or treat. On Halloween night in 1981, at the behest of former SNL star and fan Jim Belushi, hardcore California punk band FEAR invaded the inside of 30 Rockefeller Plaza and put on a sweaty basement show under the glamorous lights and cameras of NBC. With a gaggle of high-energy slam dancers who moshed around them and provocations from the band themselves – who shouted things like “It’s great to be in New Jersey” to jaded yuppie New Yorkers – FEAR earned their immortality in the unlikeliest of places. Music or mayhem, it doesn’t matter. With FEAR, they’re one and the same.
Eric Francisco is a freelance entertainment journalist and graduate of Rutgers University. If a movie or TV show has superheroes, spaceships, kung fu, or John Cena, he’s your guy to make sense of it. A former senior writer at Inverse, his byline has also appeared at Vulture, The Daily Beast, Observer, and The Mary Sue. You can find him screaming at Devils hockey games or dodging enemy fire in Call of Duty: Warzone.
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