your friend from mazatlan, mexico,
salvador.
Hi Salvador!
Thanks at first for your mail! I'm happy about everyone who finds my pages.
Sadly I won't be able to help you very much with technical terms about what
grunge is. You know it's just like with every other musical style - it's hard
to always distinguish it from others and also hard to define it properly because
therer are so many mixed forms. Even a band like Nirvana that is commonly associated
with grunge has songs that are more punky or pop-like. To me Nirvana isn't even
a very good example for grunge because they're so commercial. Have you ever
listened to Green River or an old Soundgarden, Mudhoney or Melvins album? That's
what I call grunge! It's the fuzzy, strangely dirty distorted guitar and especially
such vocals as Mark Arm's that form a characteristic of grunge for me. I don't
know if there's a preferred chord progression or sth. like that as I've never
analysed the music of any grunge song so far. Some people would even say that
grunge never existed and claim that the Seattle bands playing alternative rock
(or whatever you wanna call it) got labelled grunge bands to pretend it's sth.
new and to sell more records. This theory could be sustained by the fact that
the so-called grunge bands are so different. You could for example say that
Nirvana is pop or punk, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains are Metal (and even
they differ a lot I think!) and Pearl Jam is Rock. Each of these bands developed
in a different direction.
I guess you see that I like to talk about this topic. I hope I'm not annoying
you with things you have already read in my work or somewhere else. You ask
me for ancestors of bands like Nirvana, PJ,... - you'll find a lot of non-grunge
music there - like the glam-rock bands Mother Love Bone and Malfunkshun or hardcore
tendencies like on Nirvanas 'Bleach'. The Melvins kind of introduced Kurt Cobain
into the local band scene but I don't know too much about that. As for the influences
or idols most of the grunge bands name Led Zeppelin and Neil Young (it seems
to have been kind of a dream-come-true for PJ to play with him on Mirrorball
and the tour).
For further information on the first grunge bands and the whole phenomenon I
can recommend you Charles Peterson's 'Screaming Life' which I think is also
available online. If you have any further questions or if there's anythink I
forgot to answer just ask again. I like talking about grunge as you might see
by the length of this mail.
Keep on rockin'... :)
Hendrik
thanks for your answer Hendrik, you
know, i have a band and we like to play Nirvana and other stuff, i make music
too, and it´s kind of pop-grunge, we haven´t recorded yet, but i
hope we will soon. i liked your articles very much because they don´t
only talk about grunge music and it´s origins, but they also reflect modern
society and how it has changed in the last years. i don´t need to say
how people like Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder had to do with this change, but
for some reason, most of the youth worldwide, and even older guys, got their
minds blown by this kind of music and by this people´s personalities.
For example, i´m from mazatlan, mexico, and it´s
funny how somebody from seattle, washington can influence me so much, i guess
the same happened in a lot of places around the world. Some people criticize
this kind of music and those kinds of behaviors, but i know that
deep inside, they also get turned on by this whole movement, that is now, the
mainstream movement, and it´s not that it got commercial, i think people
realized that´s what they had inside, and they just adopted it very quickly.
thanks again for your web page and for your answer, i have a web page too for
my band that is called (cesto), it´s a very simple page, and i only write
about stuff that happens to us so people that know us can read about it.
http://www.oocities.org/SunsetStrip/Amphitheatre/5044/
p.s.- you know, this email appeared
blank on the screen, i don´t know why, i only could read it when i used
the 'answer the author' choice, do you know why? i was going to email you saying
that nothing had appeared on the
email. by the way, are you from germany? i like germany very much, some of our
ancestors here in mazatlan were germans, we also have this huge beer factory
called 'cervecería del pacífico' that was built by some of the
german people who arrived here in mazatlan.
thanks again. bye.
your friend, salvador.
Hi Salvador!
Good to hear from you again! I don't know why my last email appeared blank on
your screen!? Strange!
If you talk about grunge (esp. Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain) influencing people
from far away - I in fact saw Pearl Jam's video for Even Flow on MTV when I
was about 15 years old. I had short hair and much too big eye glasses and some
of my clothes were still from the "look-what-mommy-bought-you" area. And when
I saw Eddie falling around on the stage and climbing up the lighting system
and jumping down into the crowd I just though: "Wow!!!! I wanna be like that
one day!!!" Maybe it wasn't fully like this but in fact looking back I can see
how strong this influenced me! I now have shoulder-long black hair, wear contact
lenses, play in a band where I used to fall around on the stage (and even from
the stage) singing (or better screaming) Clawfinger's 'Catch Me'. I guess today
no one is free from this in all ways. I think everyone saw something cool on
TV sometime and bought it or saw someone and tried to be like him/her even if
it was subconscious. We all get an overdose of influences on TV today. I'll
have a look at your Homepage if I can manage it. And yes, I am from germany.
Guess our beer is the only thing that's famous about us in all parts of the
world :)
Thanks and bye
Hendrik
P.S.: I'm thinking about putting up kind of a question & answer section
on my grunge homepage where I just put all the emails I got concerning my pages
and my answers to them. Would you mind me putting your email up there too?
hi hendrik, of course you can put
my email in your page. You know, i study communications science (like journalism,
broadcasting) and there´s a class
where i have to do a newspaper. i wrote an article about grunge, how this movement
changed the world, and how it helped define the new man (like what
they call generation x). We haven´t print the paper yet, and also, the
article is in spanish, but if you want, i can send you a copy. (your page
helped me in doing this job)
good bye man, your friend salvador.
Hello again...
Your Email and our conversation will
be up on my page soon. I've put it in a new section and I'm also working over
the whole work. It's quite long ago since I last did that. But your interest
in it made me think it all over again. Thanks for that. By the way, I study
musicology and also want to do something in the direction of journalism
later. :)
I'd be very happy if you could send me a copy of this article. Maybe also in
English and I can put it on my page too if you want (with a reference to you
of course).
Bye then
Hendrik
So if you want to email Salvador Mendez here's his adress smendez@red2000.com.mx
