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
