I got the idea of writing a work about grunge when I was surfing in the Internet 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 of course now is history but Kurt Cobain wasn't the first musician who died unnaturally. 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 shit on the net. Pages with information that no one needs... I hope you don't think 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); vocalist: Layne Staley;
guitarist: Jerry Cantrell;
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; their first album "Sixteen Stone"
was released in '94 followed by "Razorblade Suitcase" in late 1996 and
the collection of electronic remixes called "Deconstructed" in late 1997;
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;
released their self-entitled album in 1995 and in 1997 the follow-up "The
Colour and the Shape";
G: garage sound: kind of primitive
sound which should not necessarily be taken as negative; it is called "garage"
because it sounds rather like was recorded live 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 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 the mosh pit;
I: In Utero: Nirvana's last
"real" album (after it only live-albums 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 "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; 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);
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 some 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); they are disliked by most
of the Seattle bands (especially Pearl Jam) because their first album sounded
like a copy of some Pearl Jam and Nirvana songs; the bands vocalist Scott
Weiland sings 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;
