Genre Survivor Round 8

Oh cool, you went record shopping at a Goodwill.

If Kurt was still around I have to think he'd be making hyperpop today

i'd argue that rap music, far more than grunge, defined the 90s.

I get why people are coming for grunge, especially people who either weren't alive or weren't of a certain age when it hit. If you weren't there, it's easy to not really grok what a Big Fucking Deal it was when it happened, when a band of shlubs like the guys in Nirvana (and I'm pretty sure they would've been the first people to call themselves that) playing punk-inspired noise knocked Michael freaking Jackson out of the number one spot on the album charts...and, yes, I know it wasn't a BFD for everybody, and there were other BFDs at the time, particularly with the explosion of hip-hop. But it really was culturally revolutionary when it happened, and it deserves at least a little love.

We had just spent a decade and change in Reagan's America. Popular rock music was cars, hair spray, and women as trophy objects. The Internet didn't exist in a mass-market way, so culture was dictated by the major networks and MTV, and it felt shallow as fuck. Shit was bleak, man.

Grunge blew all of that up. It made more thoughtful, introspective songwriting cool. It made being unpolished and raw - emotionally, musically, whatever - OK. And yes, most of the popular grunge acts were male, but we also went from "Girls Girls Girls" and Warrant's "Cherry Pie" and GnR using audio of Axl fucking Adriana Smith in the vocal booth to Kurt Cobain wearing a dress on stage and Eddie Vedder writing "Pro-choice" on his arm in Sharpie during Pearl Jam's Unplugged set - again, I know that's not much by today's standards, but at the time, grunge and the artists behind it really moved the needle on the conversation around masculinity and feminism. And, of course, that's just the male artists - you also had bands like L7, Hole, and the Gits changing the perception of the feminine and what a woman in music could be and do. None of these people were the first to do any of this, and I'm sure they would've been the first to say that, but they sure as shit pulled us out of a long period of wandering in the cultural desert when it came to these sorts of things.

It also helped re-democratize the concept of being a musician. There were great technical musicians in grunge, yes, but there were also people (some of them great technical musicians) hammering out three chords on bargain basement instruments and amps. Yes, yes, grunge became an aesthetic later once it was seized on and monetized, but Kurt Cobain didn't wear flannel on stage because he was putting on a costume - those were just his clothes. As a teenager at the time growing up sheltered as fuck in rural/suburban KY, the idea that my introverted ass could ever get on stage and perform music seemed crazy. You had to be a virtuoso, you had to be willing to throw on some leather pants and dump a bucket of hairspray on your head, or get full tattoo sleeves, or *something* like that - being a rock star meant adopting affectations in a way that I just knew I never could. Then, along came Pearl Jam on SNL playing "Alive" (this is just the rehearsal - the real performance doesn't exist on Youtube, for some reason):



and it dawned on me that all I needed was a guitar and some feelings, and it wouldn't matter if I was just wearing jeans and a t-shirt, or whatever. Again - basic now, but huge then. Seeing that performance literally changed my life - I never would've picked up a guitar (or any of the other instruments I picked up later), never would've written a song, never would have gotten on either the musical or theatrical stage, if I hadn't seen that. I listened to that song literally every day for a year after I was able to track down a tape of it (like I said: I was sheltered AF).

And yes, once grunge got popular, the music and fashion industries got a hold of it, and it became a cliche (something that probably bothered the people in the grunge scene more than anyone - I'll forever LOL at the "grunge speak" prank Megan Jasper from Sub Pop pulled on the New York Times in '92). And yes, grunge spawned some truly horrendous musical offspring. And yes, it was a short flash in the pan relative to just about every other genre on this list. It was what it was and it did what it did. But at the time, man, it was beautiful.

I'm certainly not trying to convince anybody of anything, here. A lot of this is rooted in my own personal experience, and I'm about 99% sure everybody's actively cringing as they read this, if anyone even got past the first couple of sentences without dying of said cringe. If this is grunge's time to go, then that's alright. But it kicked ass (sensitively) while it was around, and I'll forever be grateful that it existed.

Grunge is just a talentless version of people trying to be Jeff Buckley.

Look at all that talentlessness.

One might say that dinosaurs defined the Jurassic period. The fact that they no longer exist does not make that less true. (Bring on the old guy/dinosaur jokes.)

good grunge post from jorgeandthekraken, thanks for taking the time to write it.

grunge is a very specific sound that burned pretty hot for a brief period. just because a genre was short-lived doesn't mean it didn't have value. the great moments in popular music are when something hits that is a total reaction/rejection of the music that came before it.

i said a few rounds ago i don't care about grunge going out, but as jorge put much better than i can popular music is better for grunge having happened.

speaking of pivotal moments in pop music history, "dre day" and "nothing but a g thang" had a bigger effect on me personally than "smells like teen spirit" did. the bits of hip-hop i'd heard before then were either cheesy or sounded cheaply made, like it was throwaway joke music that didn't matter (it wasn't but it felt like it). but the production on "the chronic" was so meticulous and vibrant and beautiful and groovy. the MCing was of course solid on that record but it was the first time the production on a hip-hop track really shined through to me.

Hooray!

also when comparing grunge and hip-hop (and i love to be a part of a community that does so), hip-hop was truly an entirely new genre, whereas grunge was just a subgenre of rock.

Hip hop was not an entirely new genre in the '90s.

That was easy.

Grunge came out of nowhere, peaked and burned out when Cobain pretty much passed away. The cultural impact the following years was basically nothing. Now again, kids are getting their inspiration mostly from Kurt. But the genre literally falls off completely when you take Cobain out of the picture. Besides, there's better emo genres out there than growling grunge..