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Grunge

Nirvana Ellensburg1988.jpeg

Flyer Kurt gave me

“Our little group, it’s always been, and always will, until the end.”  

-Nirvana

I have long tried to write about a short time in my life that was extremely important for my development as a human, and indeed for global culture.  Although we never called it Grunge, and our activities can be traced further back before the existence of Grunge by many decades, that is the name in which the world seems to remember.

 

The counter culture was more complicated than simple labels, although it did present itself as a united scene.  Nor was it based out of one place specifically, although it was certainly focused in urban areas.  I spent time in many different places, from Northern California, New England, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and all regions had a presence of this counter culture.  Why it was more associated with Washington State has always boggled my mind since the epicentre could have easily been in Los Angles or New York City, where some of more known bands came out of.  Indeed, if one was to put a finger on where it began, I think many would agree it came out of a few places within a short period of time, like New York (the Velvet Underground), Detroit (MC5 and the Stooges), and London (Marc Bolan’s T Rex, Roxy Music, David Bowie).

 

Grunge, specifically was created by the music industry and MTV, although the term described the Velvet Underground’s music in a late 1960’s review, and later in 1987 by a review of a single released by Seattle’s proto-grunge band Green River, where the term was allegedly coined.  However, even as late as 1991, the year Nirvana’s Nevermind was released, if someone asked a local (like me) what we thought about Grunge, we would have been confused, never hearing of that term before.

 

The term we would have used would have been the generic “garage band” which was actually more commonly used back then amongst my Washington State peers.  Indeed, I have been invited to many garage band shows, which were practices for up coming shows, introduced as a “garage band.”  However the problem with this term is that it can apply to any band at the formation phase of their career.  It was used since the late 1950’s and is most likely used even to this day.

 

My own relationship with Grunge has less to do with the actual music of Grunge, which in the main, I didn’t care for.  One must understand that the inception of the label “Grunge” came with its mainstream use.  It wasn’t like there was a bunch of people into Grunge, and then the mainstream found out about it, but rather it was introduced to the mainstream as Grunge from the very start.  Even as all music that didn’t fit into the known genres of pop, heavy metal, rap, etc got lumped into “Alternative”, a term none of us used at the time either, these different types of sounds had their own names.  Meaning that one didn’t actually like Alternative music, they liked certain aspects of the movement, with some bands crossing lines easily, like Nine Inch Nail’s “Pretty Hate Machine.”  Because you liked music that would fall into the Alternative classification, didn’t mean you accepted all of it.  I know many of my friends disliked the synthesiser bands I liked, or when introducing my friends in Albuquerque to Nirvana’s Bleach album in 1990, and they hated it. 

 

I think anyone from that time had their own relationship to the counter culture that would eventually be turned into some generic mono-culture by the mainstream.  Instead of having a relationship with the music, we had a relationship with each other as outsiders.  That is the common thread that seems to be overlooked in any conversation about the outcome of mainstream interference into our culture.  Another aspect of it that is reported on and mentioned in only a slight way is the larger connection we all had with the arts in general.  The Velvet Underground was famously connected to Warhol, Alice Cooper to Dali, Nirvana to William Boroughs

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