Grunge was originally a term used to describe certain Seattle bands in the late 1980s and their sound.

With Nirvana's breakthrough in 1991, the word began to be bandied about to describe the much cleaner, commercial sound from major label hard rock bands. The music industry and media were able to hastily cash in on this great new invention.

By 1992, grunge was widely disseminated as simply the latest word in vogue, alienated from its original meaning. Many see the word today as nothing more than a designation for a musical style which is a mixture between punk, heavy metal, and rock.

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A Bit of History

by Hendrik Heuser

The Melvins, Malfunkshun, Green River, and Soundgarden, I felt, were the core of what the word grunge is supposed to mean.
                                        - Chris Cornell, Soundgarden

Giving a complete account of the music history of all the grunge bands that gained success would fill a whole book, so here we will concentrate on just Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Mudhoney. I leave Nirvana out because none of their members ever played with any of the other bands mentioned.

It all started with Green River and Soundgarden in the late 1980s. When Green River disbanded, Mark Arm and Steve Turner founded Mudhoney, while Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament joined the glamour rock band Mother Love Bone. After the lead singer of Mother Love Bone, Andrew Wood, died of a drug overdose, this band broke up.

Wood's former bandmates Ament and Gossard then took part in some small projects, the most famous being 1991's Temple of the Dog. This album served as a tribute to Andy Wood and was recorded with Soundgarden's Chris Cornell, who had shared a room with Wood and was therefore affected by his death. Eddie Vedder, a relative unknown at the time, also participated in the project. After Temple of the Dog, Gossard, Ament and Vedder founded the band Mookie Blaylock, later renamed "Pearl Jam."

Grunge Shows

I'm not a fucking poser, and I'll fight for that. That's something I take seriously. I'm not up there [on the stage] to get women. I'm not up there playing to get money. I'm not interested in that. So what am I doing? I'm playing for the music. The one thing about going from the audience to the stage in just three years is that you know how it feels to be down there.
                                                            - Eddie Vedder

Future grunge stars met at Seattle's rock clubs where they jammed and performed music. When one band was playing, members of other bands would watch and listen. There was a huge amount of mutual support, and this made the scene strong.

Live grunge shows were really wild with the musicians simply freaking out on stage. Nirvana especially liked to destroy everything on the stage at the end of each show. Kurt Cobain would throw his guitar high into the air and jump into the drums, kick against the loudspeakers, and do many other crazy things, while Krist Novoselic slammed his bass on the floor. Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder liked to climb the beams of the lighting system and then dive down into the crowd.

Stage diving, headbanging, pogo dancing, and crowd surfing were integral parts of most live shows and made it clear how much energy was behind the music. The musicians didn't just produce sounds on their instruments but would release all their feelings, especially their hate and anger. I must also mention that some of the musicians were stoned or at least drunk at the shows.

Grunge Fashion

I still don't know exactly what it's really supposed to mean. When the word first started being used, as far as I understood it, it was being used as an adjective for something like 'dirty-sounding guitars.' And then the popular, fashion thing turned it into a word that seemed to apply to dirty-looking people, rather than dirty-sounding guitars.
                                              - Mark Arm, Mudhoney

Grunge style was a sort of rebellion against the starched yuppiedom of Seattle. There exists an unstated rule for yuppies which says that you mustn't look like a lumberjack if you want to be dressed properly, decently, and smartly. In revolt against this tacit regulation, the denizens of Seattle's underground scene appropriated the torn jeans, bulky shoes, and (often chequered) flannel shirts of Washington State's lumber country.

The grunge dress code was distinguishable from fashions that accompanied other musical styles. Grungers grew their hair long in reaction to the short haircuts of the hardcore scene. Grungers also looked with contempt on fellow long-hair rock and heavy metal musicians with their expensive leather clothes and glamorous costumes. For grungers, these heavy metal musicians really fit the image of the "big star," and were poseurs.

Grunge musicians were more anti-stars with their torn clothing and were just being "themselves." None ever really considered this a style, but later this anti-style would become a product of the fashion industry.

Fashion magazines grasped at grunge musicians' look and formulated a special "grunge fashion." Designers like Calvin Klein used it in their shows and the once-cheap grunge clothing became more and more expensive. Elements from grunge fashion such as wallet chains, ripped cardigans, baseball hats (preferably worn backward), and Doc Martens, were incorporated into these designer fashion shows. Like the music before it, grunge fashion was exploited, and young fans bought into the trend.

Grunge Isn't Dead

We kind of wrote these songs for ourselves really. Then all of a sudden, there's all these other people who connect with them and you're suddenly the spokesman for a fuckin' generation. … Any generation that would pick Kurt or me as its spokesman - that must be a pretty fucked up generation.
                                                            - Eddie Vedder

After all this, we can say that grunge is neither an ideology nor a religion (although there are some fanatical Nirvana fans who idolize, or even worship, Kurt Cobain, but they are an exception). The Hippie movement was for peace and love and against the Vietnam War, but grunge was not even a movement. There was some semblance of a "grunge ethic", which included the clothing and attitude, but it is more a musical style that got taken over by the media and influenced fashion.

Grunge is alive and will live on for a long time. Any kind of music isn't dead as long as somebody listens to it. Take classical music for example: it is over two hundred years old now and people still listen to it.

Perhaps it is a bit exaggerated to compare modern rockers with the masterpieces of Mozart and Beethoven. The Beatles might be a better example. Two of them are already dead, but their songs are still played on the radio, and they are idols for people around the world. Their music has made the Beatles immortal, and with people still listening to Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and all the others, this demonstrates that grunge isn't dead but will live on in people's minds.

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Based on Hendrik Heuser's An Approach to Grunge as a Cultural Phenomenon.

On the web at: www.geocities.com/hendrik_heuser/

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