The Official Grunge Thread

[Kurt_Cobain]

Sorry, it just seemed the part of your post "Everyone can gain from grunge music dude." , seemed a little patronising. I know how great grunge is. I was there when grunge was 'in'

[gottaSCREM]

Originally Posted by Kurt_Cobain

Sorry, it just seemed the part of your post "Everyone can gain from grunge music dude." , seemed a little patronising. I know how great grunge is. I was there when grunge was 'in'

Did you gain something from like a sense of someone knowing exactly what you feel. A bit scary how the life of band members closely resemble my own.

[Kurt_Cobain]

Not really, I couldn't relate at the time, the songs were just cool. But at my teens, when all the emotions flooded in, music was a hiding place, and grunge had iron doors.

[gottaSCREM]

Wicked awsome dude.

[~nutshell~]

Grunge music (sometimes also referred to as the Seattle Sound) is a genre of alternative rock inspired by hardcore punk, heavy metal, and indie rock. It became commercially successful in the early 1990s, peaking in mainstream popularity between 1991 and 1994. Bands from cities in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, such as Seattle, Olympia, and Portland, created grunge and introduced it to mainstream audiences. The genre is closely associated with Generation X in the US, since the popularity of the genre and usage of the generational term rose simultaneously.[1] Grunge was an early defining musical phenomenon of the 1990s which distinguished 1990s rock music from that of the 1980s.

from wikipedia

[Sparky]

Originally Posted by ~nutshell~

Grunge music (sometimes also referred to as the Seattle Sound) is a genre of alternative rock inspired by hardcore punk, heavy metal, and indie rock. It became commercially successful in the early 1990s, peaking in mainstream popularity between 1991 and 1994. Bands from cities in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, such as Seattle, Olympia, and Portland, created grunge and introduced it to mainstream audiences. The genre is closely associated with Generation X in the US, since the popularity of the genre and usage of the generational term rose simultaneously.[1] Grunge was an early defining musical phenomenon of the 1990s which distinguished 1990s rock music from that of the 1980s.

from wikipedia

um...thanks..

[~nutshell~]

Originally Posted by matious

um...thanks..

yeah.

[Moon Pix]

Grunge was just a word Johnathan Poneman used to market his label Sub Pop Records and the bands on it. He got it from a Lester Bangs article. You can use grunge to describe just a handful of records released on Sub Pop in the late '80s, records by bands like Mudhoney, Nirvana, Tad and so on.

It doesnt really mean anything though, it was just a phrase used to shift product product for a few years about 20 years ago. Nothing more.

[Loser]

Wait. Didn't Mark Arm come up with the name grunge to label this new genre. I heard that when he was in Green River he said it as a joke but the name stuck.

[Moon Pix]

Originally Posted by Loser

Wait. Didn't Mark Arm come up with the name grunge to label this new genre. I heard that when he was in Green River he said it as a joke but the name stuck.

It basically depends on what you read. It is true to say though that Poneman consciously used it as a marketing term. Apparently his thinking was that if you could get people to trust a label enough, they would buy anything that the label puts out as long as theres a certain consistency of style. Obviously Soundgarden, Nirvana and Mudhoney have very little in common other than the fact that they used the basic garage rock/punk rock setup of guitar-bass-drums-vocals and lots of distortion so in order to create the illussion of stylistic consistency he used the deliberately vague term grunge.

The term grunge comes from a Lester Bangs article about a Count Five album which, if memory serves correct, had a very muddy and indistinct sound because of all the distortion and cheapness of the recording sessions. Distortion and rough recording quality were basically the primary characteristics of a lot of those early Sub Pop records, regardless of who the band was. They served their purpose of fitting the labels identity. The whole point of Sub Pop in the beginning was for the label to bigger than its artists.

In some ways, Poneman is a great American raconteur, a great people manipulator, but he didnt have the business sense to go along with. If not for Nevermind Sub Pop would have gone under years ago.

ACTUALLY: I just fact checked and it was Bruce Pavitt, not Jonathan Poneman, who said all that stuff.