Grunge

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Bill Freind

With the success of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, journalists, film crews, and fashion designers began flocking to Seattle to cash in on the music, which the world outside Seattle was calling "grunge." The flannel shirt became the ultimate symbol of grunge couture, although flannels had been popular for years in the national hard-core scene because they were cheap, comfortable and durable. Soon, upscale stores were selling "designer grunge," a bizarre inversion of a look essentially the opposite of fashion. Seattle bands on tour often found crowds dressed in flannels, ripped jeans, and Doc Marten boots: "more Seattle than Seattle" as one musician observed.

Many bands who had prided themselves on a punk ethos now found themselves signing very lucrative contracts. A popular tee-shirt in Seattle depicted the irony. It featured a large picture of a heroin syringe with the caption "I came to Seattle to score, and all I got was this stupid recording contract." The standard defense was an equally ironic pose. Kurt Cobain appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone with a hand-lettered tee-shirt which read "Corporate mags still suck"--an allusion to the bumper-sticker "Corporate music still sucks." Even Mudhoney signed with a major label and, in concert, began changing the lyrics of their song "Touch Me, I'm Sick" to "Fuck Me, I'm Rich." While those might have been effective comebacks, they did nothing to disguise or alter the fundamental fact that bands that had begun by satirizing rock stars suddenly became rock stars.

One of the reasons for that irony is the music that influenced grunge. While most independent music up until that time ignored commercial hard rock (or at least pretended to), grunge reveled in it. Kurt Cobain said "we just accepted the fact that we liked the music we grew up on: Alice Cooper, the MC5, Kiss. ... We're paying homage to all the music we loved as kids, and we haven't denied the punk-rock energy that inspired us as teenagers." But, with commercial success, many bands began to spend more time polishing their recordings in the studio. That effectively destroyed the "Seattle Sound," much of which came from producer Jack Endino, who used a simple four-track recorder to get a deliberately rough sound. Cobain himself admitted that he thought the production of Nevermind was a little too slick. Punk energy was often filtered out by producers looking to make a more palatable recording.

By 1994, many of the original grunge bands had cut their hair and begun to release more mainstream albums. Effectively, Grunge ended with the suicide of Kurt Cobain in the spring of 1994. Nonetheless, it had already forced an essential change in the recording industry; major labels became much more willing to sign new acts, even when they did not fit into a preconceived commercial formula.