WildheartXXX said:

...and a badass guitar player. Kim Thayil was the sh!t.

Bootay!!!!

I used to listen grunge music a lot as a teenager; now I don't listen to it anymore, I find it boring; I mean, I still respect it and all that it did to make rock music relevant again...but...it's just that now I hear music with more production/instruments, not just the singer-guitar-drums-bass thing...

Grunge is another word for punk, if we want to pretend that we invented it first.

2freaky4church1 said:

Punk is way faster

2freaky4church1 said:

No its not. Punk wasn't depressing or thought provoking. They are very different.

thesexofit said:

huh? Sure it was. The rebellion was similar, the aesthetic slightly different.

2freaky4church1 said:

Everytime people go on about the glory of grunge, I'm like...wait a minute...didn't punk do that first?

Can someone tell me who first labelled it "grunge"? Who came up with that term to include a whole musical movement?

heartbeatocean said:

I think it was the British journalist Everett True. I don't think any of those bands chose it for themselves. There's a funny scene in the movie "Hype" (documentary of the Seattle scene) where the Sub Pop Records receptionist gets a call from the New York Times asking for "grunge slang terms" so she just starts making stuff up off the top of her head, and it ends up in the paper.

If I had to draw a distinction between grunge and punk, Grunge was made by kids who grew up listening to Aerosmith and Zeppelin as well as the Sex Pistols and Black Flag. While early punk bands wanted to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the "dinosaur rockers", grunge kids weren't ashamed of loving that stuff. So it sounds more like arena-rock.

They also weren't shy about trying to become rich and famous although they made sure to act a bit guilty when it really happenned. 80s American hardcore punk was very anti-record industry, and the industry felt the same way about them. It was extreme stuff and not fit for mass consumption. With grunge, you got a taste of the bad attitude, but wrapped in more accessible songs.

Re the comment that "punk was not depressing or thought-provoking", I could list lots of examples of bands or songs that were both - especially thought-provoking. Some of the best and most abstract lyrics ever written are found on punk albums.

"Punk" is such a wide-open term it's hard to put any characteristics on it. As soon as you say "punk is this", here's a band that's the total opposite, but everyone agrees they're punk as can be. Grunge was a lot more limited and thus, not nearly as interesting to me.

the term is horse-shit...they needed a name for the rock music that killed hair metal and that's what they came up with...most of those bands music still hold up as opposed to hair metal which most of it really doesn't

Slave2daGroove said:

Totally agree

bobzilla77 said:

Great post! Thanks all the info!

Slave2daGroove said:

Is that a statement that insults Grunge or Hair Metal? I'm sorry, I can't understand it.....

FarrahMoan said:

I guess it insults hair metal but that really wasn't my point. The title itself is (something as a previous poster has stated) just a bullshit term that someone made up. The bands never thought of themselves as that and neither do I. It just happened to be the music that brought an end to hair metal era (the 80s) but STP was from Southern Cali and their music (to me) is way different than what Sub Pop was doing out of Seattle and the just put them in a group would be more accurate to call them all early 90s rock.

As far as hair metal, yeah some of those guys are still touring but for the most part the music itself has not stood the test of time. Unlike bands that have come from the decades before or this early 90s rock that I'm going on about.

Clear enough, my young fellow Detroiter?

Slave2daGroove said:

The word "Grunge" itself was a corporate terms for bands that were playing gritty music and wore flannel shirts. It was a word used to sell music to a certain segment of society who didn't really listen to music and wouldn't know what to buy in the first place.

Slave2daGroove said:

Oh, yes! My friendly friend of a neighbor. Bad man, to the muthafuckin' rescue. HOLLA!!!!

Like everything else it was a phase in time that burnt out pretty quickly, right up there with Rap/Rock groups in my book. The grunge era, which lasted just a few years if even was nothing more than a rebellion to the rock bands of the 80's, the good looking new wave bands and things like that, the same way the early 80's was a rebellion against anything disco. And like anything else that is a "fad" few bands come through it, i guess Pearl Jam would be the only one really still out there, and i think it was because they werent part of it, they just got caught in it, just like Bon Jovi was considered Hair Metal, but that whole "hair metal" movement was all an LA movement, bands like Poison and Motley were more hair metal, which is mainly why Jovi survived the fads like them or not, the same thing with Pearl Jam.

lastdecember said:

But, who's to say that Nirvana (If not just Kurt Cobain.) wouldn't have survived the same way? Bon Jovi tend to be overrated, in my book. Although, I like "Wanted (Dead or Alive)". All that I've heard from Pearl Jam lately was "Worldwide Suicide". Red Hot Chili Peppers seem to last pretty good (Thanks to their greatness with Fusion and Chameleonizing themselves throughout the industry.).

I saw Nirvana at their last show in LA, the first time they'd done a big LA show since they went to number one two years earlier.

I thought it was gonna be crazy on the floor, like all these kids finally getting to se their favorite band would be going apeshit nuts in the pit.

But the show was not sold out, and the crowd was pretty milquetoast even when they did their biggest hits. Thinking about it now, it reminds me of that episode of the Simpsons where Smashing Pumpkins are playing and there's a hillside full of gloomy looking kids swaying side to side a little. Nobody was acting like this music meant anything to them. I was very surprised.

The band itself was pretty good, competent, not amazing. At the end they sort of lazily threw their gear around the stage. I remember thinking, "they're going to be about as popular as Warrant by the time their next record comes out."

Who knows how it would have played out in the long haul if he had lived? Artistically, he could have kept it going a long time, but I'm guessing their mass popularity would have declined, a lot.