Quote:
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.
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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.
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