I got the idea of writing a work about grunge when I was surfing in the Internet sometime back in 1996 searching for everything about my favourite band Pearl Jam. I liked those bands from Seattle like Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden for a long time and I was fascinated by the history of those bands. Nirvana (just like Soundgarden and Alice In Chains in the meantime) of course now is history but Kurt Cobain was not the first musician who died unnaturally (and neither the last as Layne Staley and others sadly proved). Andrew Wood for example, vocalist of Mother Love Bone (see 2.1.5), died of a heroin overdose. And members of Soundgarden and what is today Pearl Jam recorded a tribute album for him. But I don't want to go into detail too much right now. I read through many texts with the help of my dictionary always ready to hand and I found a lot of information about the phenomenon "grunge". So as I could freely choose the subject about which I wanted to write I said to myself : "Why shouldn't I connect fun with work" and I entered the word grunge into an internet search engine. What came out was a list of more than one hundred links to grunge-related sites on the net. I guess if I had entered it a year later or so I would have got thousands of pages. There is (and was) just too much irrelevant material on the net saying but little about grunge as a whole. Pages with information that no one needs, enthusiastic but totally uncritical fan pages... I hope you do not get the impression that this is one of these! With so much available material I decided to try what seems to be impossible: finding out what the word grunge really means.
A:
Alice In Chains: heavy grunge band from Seattle; albums : Facelift (1990),
Dirt (1992), Jar Of Flies/SAP (1992-94), Alice In Chains (1995), Unplugged (1996),
Nothing Safe (1999); vocalist: Layne Staley (d. 04/2002); guitarist: Jerry Cantrell;
side project: Mad Season
alternative: '90s term for counterculture; current use of the word in
the music/youth culture world; alternative to the mainstream music;
angst (noun): (psychological) fear, something along
the lines of depression, anger, glumness and basic all-around dark, negative
feelings, therefore often associated with Generation X; to angst (verb) : experiencing
the feeling of angst, sometimes synonymous with "fret", i.e. "what are you angsting
about?";
Arm, Mark: former vocalist of Green River; now vocalist and guitarist
of Mudhoney;
B:
Bleach: Nirvana's first album released on Sub Pop label in 1989 and
recorded at Reciprocal Recording by Jack Endino for only $600;
Bush: grunge band from England; albums: Sixteen Stone (1994), Razorblade
Suitcase (1996), Deconstructed (1997, collection of electronic remixes), The
Science of Things (1999), Golden State (2001)
C:
Cantrell, Jerry: guitarist of Alice In Chains; released his solo album
"Boggy Depot" in 1998
Cobain, Kurt: vocalist and guitarist of Nirvana; married Hole singer
and guitarist Courtney Love; committed suicide around April 8, 1994; labelled
"spokesman of Generation X" by some music magazines;
combat boots: cheap, unisex military footwear valued in punk and indie-rock
culture throughout the late 1970s and '80s for its aggressive overtones; about
1993 identified as part of the grunge fashion and absorbed by the fashion main-stream,
as designers like Calvin Klein used them in their shows
Cornell, Chris: vocalist and guitarist of Soundgarden; a solo album is
awaited september 21st 1999
crowd surfing: activity at many crossover, punk and grunge shows; the
crowd surfer is lying on the hands of the people in the mosh pit and being reached
around; the hands of the people in the crowd form so to speak the waves of water
on which the body of the surfer is carried like a surfboard; crowd surfing often
follows stage diving;
E: Endino, Jack: producer who worked together with Sub Pop and recorded the first albums of Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Green River and Nirvana in the Reciprocal Recordings studio; he created a consistent sound for the consumers to latch onto;
F:
flannel: type of soft loosely woven woolen cloth; flannel shirts: part
of the grunge fashion;
Foo Fighters: band founded by ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl; albums:
Foo Fighters (1995), The Colour and the Shape (1997), There is Nothing Left
to Lose (1999)
G:
garage sound: kind of primitive sound which should not necessarily be
taken as negative; it is called "garage" because it sounds like was recorded
live or in the surroundings of a garage which serves as rehearsal room rather
than in a studio; poor bands often rehearse(d) in garages because they can't
(/couldn't) afford a room for their rehearsals and in a garage there aren't
very good acoustics; therefore the sound is rather distorted and dirty; but
the so called original grunge bands like Green River and Mudhoney and also Nirvana
and Soundgarden on their early albums wanted that garage sound which was later
renamed as the typical grunge sound; kind of the birthplace of this homogeneous
but still a bit distinctive sound was Sub Pop's Reciprocal Recordings studio;
Generation X: the depressive, melancholic generation of youths with the
attitude that their future is out of sight; often said to be a generation with
no ideals which tries to escape from reality by taking drugs and sometimes escapes
from its bleak future by suicide;
Green Day: post- or rather pop-punk band, sometimes wrongly associated
with grunge; released their first album "Dookie" in 1994; not to be confused
with Green River;
Green River: late 80s Seattle band featuring members of today's bands
Mudhoney (Mark Arm and Steve Turner) and Pearl Jam (Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard);
Grohl, Dave: former drummer of Nirvana; founded the Foo Fighters after
Kurt Cobain's suicide where he plays the guitar and sings now;
Grunge: perhaps we'll know that at the end of this work!
grungers: grunge musicians and fans;
grungy: slang term for bad, lousy; adjective for "grunge-like" meaning
something like dirty, smudgy or muddy;
H:
Hole: grunge band around Kurt Cobain's widow Courtney Love. The whole
band moved to Seattle after the media focused its attention on the local music
scene. After Cobain's suicide the band got more and more successful; albums:
Pretty on the Inside (1991); Live Through This (1994); Celebrity Skin (1998);
headbanging: activity at many hard rock and heavy metal but also at grunge
and crossover shows; may be described as "heavy nodding" which means throwing
your head up and down really wild; often practised together with dancing pogo
and takes place in and around the mosh pit
I:
In Utero: Nirvana's last "real" album (after it only live-albums, rarity
collections and bootlegs were released);
Incesticide: Nirvana album including B-Sides, BBC Sessions, Original
Demo Recordings and other rare songs from 1988 to 1992;
J: Johns, Daniel: vocalist and guitarist of Silverchair;
L: Love, Courtney: vocalist and guitarist of Hole; widow of Kurt Cobain; went from the image of "rock whore" to superstar with the success of the movie "Larry Flint";
M:
mainstream: dominant trend or tendency; in musical terms usually a mixture
of rock and pop, today with a strong tendency towards dancefloor, hip hop and
techno;
Mirrorball: Neil Young album with Pearl Jam as background band released
in 1995;
moshers: members of the mosh pit;
mosh pit: term used to describe the crowd at a crossover-, punk- or grunge-show
which is directly in front of the stage and where most of the action takes place;
usual activities there are jumping up and down, dancing pogo, headbanging, crowd
surfing, and stage diving;
Mother Love Bone: glamour rock band in 1991; members: Andrew Wood (Vocals
and Piano), Stone Gossard (Guitar), Jeff Ament (Bass), and others (Gossard and
Ament now play in Pearl Jam);
MTV: perhaps the most efficient part of the music media in the 1990s;
it helped pushing forward the grunge phenomenon by playing the main representatives'
videos over and over again and by showing several specials like the Nirvana
MTV Unplugged In New York, the Pearl Jam Unplugged, and other programs which
concentrated on the Seattle music scene;
Mudhoney: band founded by former Green River members Mark Arm and Steve
Turner after the band split up; still has got the most original grunge sound;
N:
Nevermind: Nirvana's second album released in 1991 on Geffen Records;
with this album they managed the jump from obscurity to superstardom and launched
the grunge phenomenon;
Nirvana: Seattle trio around singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain founded
in 1986; called a punk/hardcore band until their success with Nevermind; albums:
Bleach (1989), Incesticide, Nevermind (1991), In Utero (1993) and Nirvana MTV
Unplugged In New York (1994); after Cobain's suicide Nirvana's drummer Dave
Grohl founded a band called the Foo Fighters; In late 1996 a live album called
"From the Muddy Banks of Whiskah" was released;
Nirvana MTV Unplugged In New York: Nirvana album released in November
1994.After Kurt Cobain's suicide MTV frequently showed the video to it and so
the album went to the top of the charts in a short time; with it kind of a myth
was built up around Kurt Cobain; total commercial exploitation of everything
surrounding Nirvana followed it;
O: Offspring: post-punk band; released their album "Smash" in 1994; had a lot of success with their commercial punk-variant just like Green Day and kind of created a punk revival with them;
P:
Pearl Jam: one of the main representatives of grunge; members: Eddie
Vedder (vocals), Jeff Ament (bass), Stone Gossard (guitar), Mike McCready (guitar)
and different drummers as follows: Dave Krusen on "Ten" (1991), Dave Abbruzzese
on "Vs." (1993) and "Vitalogy" (1994), Jack Irons on "Mirrorball", "Merkinball"
(1995), "No Code" (1996), "Yield" (1998) and the live album "Live on Two Legs"
(1998); Binaural (2000)
Peterson, Charles: photographer who worked together with Sub Pop; created
a homogeneous image of the Seattle scene with his black and white blurred photos;
belonged to the same social circle as the bands he photographed; preferred photographs
of live performances;
pogo: kind of modern dance but rather a wild and violent running, jumping,
pushing and shoving around of people in the mosh pit; often together with headbanging;
poseur: (derogatory) person who behaves in an unnatural affected way
in order to impress others;
punk: punk is a much too extensive subject so I have limited this definition
to some useful information about the music; so punk music is usually identified
by short, fast, noisy and mostly primitive songs which means that there are
often only three chords on the guitar which are repeated over and over again
and the loud, rough voice of the vocalist which fits very well into the garage-like
sound of the music; it may be called kind of an anti-rock movement because it
was against the values of rock music which included clothes like leather pants
and expensive costumes and usually an orderly though long haircut, whereas the
punk fashion consisted of combat boots, ripped clothes and an iroquois haircut;
most of the original punk music used to be very anti-commercial but after Nirvana's
success with Nevermind grunge was born as kind of a commercial variant of punk
with lots of other influences;
punky: adjective meaning "punk-like";
R: Reciprocal Recording: small Sub Pop studio inside a tiny house that looks a bit like a barn; here, with producer Jack Endino, most of the original grunge records like Mudhoney's Superfuzz Bigmuff, Nirvana's Bleach, Green River's Dry As A Bone and Soundgarden's Screaming Life EP were recorded here;
S:
Seattle: rainy metropolis in the state of Washington in the north-west
of the United states; vaulted into the cultural spotlight when Nirvana's "Smells
Like Teen Spirit" - a song from Nevermind - went to number one of the charts;
became the epicentre of the grunge phenomenon and is therefore widely regarded
in rock circles as "Grungetown" but it is still a gleaming modern city populated
by a lot of yuppies; it is renowned for two drinks: coffee and beer;
Silverchair: grunge band from Australia around Daniel Johns; albums:
"Frogstomp"(1995),"Freak Show" (1996), "Neon Ballroom" (1999);
Soundgarden: one of the main representatives of the Seattle grunge with
their frontman Chris Cornell; released their Screaming Life EP on Sub Pop; disbanded
in 1997 at the peak of their commercial success;
stage diving: activity at many crossover, punk and grunge shows; the
stage diver takes a run on the stage, jumps down into the mosh pit and then
usually ends up as a crowd surfer;
Stone Temple Pilots: grunge band from Los Angeles; albums: Core (1992),
Purple (1994), Tiny Music ... (1996), No 4 (1999), Shangri-La Dee Da (2001);
they were disliked by most of the Seattle bands (especially Pearl Jam) because
their first album was claimed to sound like a copy of some Pearl Jam and Nirvana
songs; the band's vocalist Scott Weiland has a very similar voice to Eddie Vedder
and in the Stone Temple Pilots' video for the song "Plush" Weiland even appropriated
Vedder's distinctive facial tics. Scott Weiland released a solo album called
"12 Bar Blues" in 1998;
Sub Pop: independent record label from Seattle founded by Bruce Pavitt
and Jonathan Poneman; it was instrumental in turning the Northwest into the
centre of the '90s youth culture; with producer Jack Endino and photographer
Charles Peterson Pavitt and Poneman;
T: Ten: Pearl Jam's first album released in September 1991, just as Nirvana had released Nevermind; outstripped the latter album in sales but didn't bring Pearl Jam as much publicity as Nevermind did to Nirvana; it is the only album for which the band produced some music videos for a long time (for Yield in 1998 there were some Videos);
V:
Vedder, Eddie: vocalist of Pearl Jam; extremely publicity-shy; labelled
"spokesman of Generation X" by some music magazines just like his fellow-musician
Kurt Cobain;
Vitalogy: Pearl Jam's third album released in 1994 with some experimental
and some punk-like songs;
Vs.: Pearl Jam's second album; also called "Five Against One"; they didn't
produce a single music video for it and therefore MTV couldn't show any to make
them successful but the album nevertheless went to number one of the Billboard
charts in October 1993 after its release in the same year;
W: Wood, Andrew: vocalist and pianist of Mother Love Bone; died of a heroin overdose in 1991; after his death some of his friends from Soundgarden and his bandmates Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament recorded a tribute CD for him entitled Temple Of The Dog; these two played together with Eddie Vedder for the first time in this project and later they founded Pearl Jam;
Y: Yuppie: abbrevation for Young Urban Professionals; (informal often derogatory) young and ambitious professional person, especially one working in a city and wearing business clothes;
