Grunge

Defining and framing the historical, social and stylistic scope of the term “grunge”

"Grunge" is a specific cultural manifestation of the rock genre belonging to the second half of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. From the state of Washington - which is to say from Seattle (which had never before enjoyed such fame) - the "trend" radiated out across the whole world. This particular strain of rock music came to be codified as an anchoring to the traditional song form, whose rules and tones were altered in a systematically rebellious, depressed, pessimistic and violent direction (but above all a nihilistic and self-destructive one: scruffy, ramshackle, decadent, falling apart), yet with a power that always walked hand in hand with quiet moments and gentle collapses: a standard 70s rock song (verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo) would now be performed according to what would go down in history as the noise+chorus+noise formula.

The clothes of grunge fashion - ripped jeans (borrowed from the early-80s Californian heavy-metal bands, who had in turn borrowed them from New York's Ramones) and an open work shirt worn over a worn-out t-shirt - mirror the existential meaning of grunge, which in its most extreme forms registers the devaluation of all values, and the resulting apathy, more or less irreverent indifference, and the anguish of a life lived self-destructively out of sheer necessity. Just as one of the vows of faith taken by friars is "poverty", born of a fundamental contempt for the world in the presence of the Superior, so too does the grunge condition build itself upon a childlike, naive contempt for the world, one that rejects every display of ostentation - seen on one hand as the foolish illusion of believing the transient to be eternal, and on the other as a betrayal of one's origins in the poor, squalid, underground jungles of the urban periphery.

Like any phenomenon, grunge deserves to be circumscribed not only in time but also in space: punk belongs to London and the end of the 70s; hardcore, like rock 'n' roll, belongs to America, and in particular to its westernmost stretch (California). The sine qua non condition - properly and productively - without which grunge could not and did not exist, is Seattle and the years 1988-1991. There's little to laugh about here, but the fact that pizza comes from Naples is a deeper truth than one might think.

Technically, grunge was the natural continuation and simplification of the experimental hardcore and post-punk scene of early-80s California (Adolescents, Mission of Burma, Flipper, X, Legal Weapon, Bad Religion, Dead Kennedys), to which it applied hefty doses of simplification, bringing its heavier, more metal-leaning elements closer to hard rock and its catchier ones closer to pop, and delivering it all back in a fundamentally punk blend - performed with the attitude of someone who neither knows nor wants any revolution, but who, resigned and devoid of hope or expectation, simply endures until the duty of survival loosens its binding grip.

The most important thing is that grunge was the music of the "scream". That scream directly derived from garage-rock, the scream of Detroit, of Iggy Stooge. A musical device that for thirty years had been reined in and left to sporadic use, in this movement it reaches its peak in terms of radicalism and recurrence. It becomes something obligatory: and it has to be suffering, primitive, uncontrolled, off-key and total. It is the symbol of average-grunge and of the essence of grunge, which thus arrives at the essence of rock: average-grunge is a feline-chick, frail and venomous less as self-defense than as a way to guard against interference from anything but itself, since it wants to destroy itself and only in its own way: no interference (hence the rebellion) except for the natural-social kind that is chromosomally inevitable and innate to the individual - the kind for which the only "honesty" in terms of reacting to the experience of life is self-destruction.

Grunge was then the movement par excellence of the "suicidal drive", lived as an inescapable certainty as well as the sole source of nobility and preciousness. A drive and a reflection deriving essentially from speculations made under various guises (from dark to new wave to heavy metal) but always obsessively and programmatically pursued as never before throughout the 1980s. From self-destruction, apathy, disdain, disgust for everything: streaked here and there with the fanciful memory of transcendent moments steeped in America.

Grunge was the only movement to programmatically conceive of destroying instruments on stage, which, after more than 30 years of such a practice, thereby acquired a new, apocalyptic meaning. From the destruction of oneself (symbol: scruffy clothes - there's the punk derivation) to that of a world one doesn't take part in nor wishes for, but rather sees as inevitable.

Obviously such concepts, conclusions and devices had already been reached (and far more extremely) not only by the punk of the Sex Pistols, but by hardcore as a whole, of which grunge always felt like a lesser offspring (both because it too is a quintessentially American phenomenon, and because the new grunge musicians had grown up listening to Black Flag and company): yet they take on a sinister warning as they are effectively and originally restated right at the final moment of the rock act, which, in its extreme farewell, doesn't betray itself in the least.

If it's true that grunge used "the old trick of taking a rock novelty (noise-hardcore) and contaminating it with pop in order to sell that novelty to the mass of casual consumers" (a decontextualized quote from Scaruffi), in the genesis of rock history grunge was important above all because, after more than five years of systematic deconstruction of the song-form (albeit with other causes and effects, in this respect similar to what had happened between the late 60s and early 70s), essentially through the "noise-effect", there was a return (also because the "alternative" would continue well into the 90s) with equal systematicity to composing songs with a self-contained and coherent economy that, despite the expressionistic deformation via cutting, unpleasant noises, hoarse screams, metallic cadences, could be called "old style": almost (in effects and causes: the social context one is immersed in) singer-songwriter-country, that is, of the guitar-voice-message type.

The length of the songs, too, is usually radio-friendly: 3-4 minutes. No longer, or far less, the formal and thematic "metaphysics" of the masterpieces from the start of the decade (Swans, Sonic Youth), that is, when there is no longer a "mature", "grand", "difficult" metaphysics, but an immediate one, insofar as it is based on the small-yet-great sensations/feelings of the American teenager, more or less sensing social exclusion or difficulty fitting in. Difficult loves, personality complexes, other people's cruelty, the nonetheless undeniable will to survive: converging, as naively as it is childishly knowing, toward the synthesis of the "moment of life", historically-biographically-geographically situated (and all the more touching for being "moody", for being "in spite of": that is its "against") rather than eternally-universally (speculatively) concluded. There lies the essence and the "carefreeness" (the lack of contemplation of the absolute) of grunge.

Returning to the history of rock: it allowed, right at the moment of its final departure, a "child" to take all its best and painstakingly crafted furnishings and smash them, play with them, cry over them. It couldn't have been more "rock" than that. Rock wanted no funeral marches for its own funeral, but "grunge", the kind with "the smell of teen spirit". Not even at the end did rock betray itself; further heaping scorn on the pop(ular) masses who deluded themselves into thinking they could prolong its life as they pleased (see the post-'91 era).

Grunge was not a revolution, either cultural or musical, since it had no sudden or active traits, unlike punk. Changing things is the very negation of grunge: a synonym for apathy, fatalism, depression, nihilism, so internalized as to function as bearable everyday air, taken with nonchalance; a nonchalance like that reserved for the many heroin overdose deaths, of which there was a great and final, extreme, systematic revival in the grunge years - years in which cigarette nicotine (speaking of nonchalance) had to hover over every corpse thus reaped: and not out of contempt for the individual but for death itself (a consequence of that of life) as such. The distinction between being and non-being must be said to be coldly and rationally torn down. These are the reasons, to which must be added those of musical peculiarity mentioned above, retrospectively programmatic and clearly distinguishable when placed within their historical unfolding, for which it is possible and indeed necessary to speak of grunge as a concrete and autonomous movement.

Furthermore, grunge was the architect of the sound - and here I'm referring to its large-scale pop manifestations of the 90s - just as new wave was the architect of that of the (popular) 80s. The latter as nocturnal as the former is sunlit, in any case, regardless of the individual setting, each conceiving or recalling the day-night alternation. The 90s sound is a clear, decisive sound; and not only because of the (albeit considerable) technical improvements in recording. It is so (even the softer, more acoustic side of it, yes) because of heavy metal, which, with respect to sound, acted like a singing lesson for the vocal cords or a run for the lungs: once these are stretched and expanded, once the ceiling is reached, it becomes possible to articulate all the subtler variations with far greater ease and effectiveness. Well, given the divide between the metal world and the pop world, grunge was in every sense the filter between the two: and if in the 90s it was possible to hear little pop songs (but also heavy-metal clatter previously unimaginable) with an unhoped-for, fresh and modern sonic and performative quality, it is thanks to all of this.

If in its soft version grunge gave rise, whether willingly or not, to figures such as Alanis Morissette, the Cranberries (who nonetheless produced an anthem like "Zombie") or No Doubt (who nonetheless gave us the fantastically alienating "Tragic Kingdom" in 1995), but also the clear-noise singer-songwriter style of Jeff Buckley, PJ Harvey and (even) Lisa Germano; in its hard version, besides Korn and Deftones in particular, all of today's ridiculous nu-metal (directly inspired by the latter two), which interpreted grunge's marketable soft/loud dynamic not through the reconciliation of classic-rock melodies with hardcore or metal distortion, but through the (already widely seen, moreover) reconciliation of the heaviest metal (albeit watered down compared to death metal) with rap or disco; aided in all this above all, if not solely, by the great advances in recording and amplification technology.

Everyone at the start of the 90s played louder and harder: just as at the end of the 70s (want proof? Litfiba are, at least among Italian bands, absolutely the most chameleon-like in mirroring the trends in vogue at any given moment, almost scientifically sociological in this respect: well, just take their albums from that period.); and even those who played soft or remained mired in the 80s new-wave sound, or took their instruments and adapted them to the immediate, effective and pure clarity deriving (paradoxically only at first glance) from the aforementioned heavy-metal technical toolkit.

Anyone wanting to do 70s classic-rock (Creedence Clearwater Revival) could only do so by rereading it through the filter of more or less melodic grunge-sound: a host of "only-one-song bands" for a sunlit afternoon snack resulted from this: 4 Non Blondes, Joan Osborne, a few insignificant names, good enough though for their respective hits "What's Up" (1993) and "One of Us" (1995).

Even the new-punk of the early 90s would be called for once young ears had grown half-accustomed to certain sounds via grunge: hence Offspring, Rancid, NOFX, Green Day.

Finally, even digging back into 70s glam or garage would have to be done with grunge hindsight: in various ways: Marilyn Manson, Placebo, Ash, Feeder, Muse.

All of Britpop, the stripping away from a melodic grunge of its noise, leaving only an insincere and often ugly melody: Blur ("Song 2"), Radiohead ("1st album"), but also Oasis, Verve, and the latest arrivals: grunge legacies (above all sonically, but also through a certain ripped-jeans culture) used for exactly what they were used for.

This contemporary mass of the newly enriched has, over the last ten years, proven only one thing: grunge is dead, rock is dead, and either you make post-rock (the supreme Fugazi, Jesus Lizard, Jon Spencer, Morphine, Lisa Germano), or it's far better and far more honest not to use guitars, basses and drums at all, out of respect for them.

Grunge, like every fad, brought back into fashion all those more or less forgotten artists (regardless of their almost invariably very high worth) who now claim their share of importance for the movement: from Neil Young to Iggy Pop, from the Stooges to the Velvet Underground, not to mention the myriad alternative bands (Pixies, Husker Du, even Sonic Youth themselves: part of what lined their pockets was thanks to the marketability of Nirvana and company). Not only that: more or less historic bands temporarily steered their course toward the grunge sound: in their own way, everyone from REM to Faith No More to Red Hot Chili Peppers got in on the act. It's tragicomic to observe such dynamics.

Grunge alone (and on a numerically far larger scale than the Stooges and MC5 had managed for Detroit) managed, in a handful of years, to create in Seattle (a city that, incidentally, was economically and socially on the rise at the time, and is today considered one of the most prosperous and livable in America) an alternative hub to the two ping-pong paddles of Los Angeles and New York.

A question: how did such a self-protective, self-preserving society come to need, on such a vast scale, a sound and an attitude that were self-destructive, suicidal, ruinous, violent? Answer: see punk in 1977 (physiological needs recur, being urgent as they are — especially the need to recycle and the need for a scapegoat).

One childish naivety, though perhaps a physiological one, of grunge was wanting to present Seattle to the world as one big, close-knit community of artists all busy expounding their (otherwise sterile) existential philosophies (as opposed to a poetics that, when individual, could be deeply moving). It's impossible to account for every collaboration between the various Seattle bands and musicians (there isn't a single band or musician who didn't call on, or wasn't called on by, someone else artistically). Still, picture (and the image isn't gratuitous, even for its more or less veiled literal meaning) a group of 10 people, variously bound by family ties, who pair off with one another without much hesitation or second thought, who do everything together, and who confine the world to Seattle: from a (re)productive standpoint (and here we return to the metaphor, meaning this production as "artistic") inbreeding will indeed give the offspring (albums, songs) a notable "brotherhood", but will also weaken their bodies (repetitiveness, banality). Either way, it worked for at least five years, between the late '80s and early '90s.

In effect, grunge turned out to be the first true example of American punk, and just as hardcore and later heavy metal had been beforehand, it was absorbed by the "great American system", which used it as a backdrop or fashionable subculture to vent, via a controlled and harmless escape valve, the primal independentist urges of its adolescent children. If rock was the music of youth, its grunge incarnation was the music of teenagers par excellence, like no other: this aspect, never sufficiently stressed, ought to be written in giant letters whenever this phenomenon is discussed.

Moreover, historically grunge coincided with the crisis of heavy metal understood as speed and thrash, which between 1988 and 1992 suffered an unstoppable decline in both popularity and ideas. The worthwhile metal albums of that period aren't metal albums in that specific sense, but grunge, death or epic. By the time metal popularly and creatively rose again, grunge would be fizzling out through sheer inertia: but when metal did rise again, it wouldn't be speed or thrash but progressive-fantasy, no longer existentialist, instead devoted to doom, death and dark to conjure paranormal worlds. Finally, when existentialist metal returned with Korn and Deftones (spawning nu-metal), it would essentially be a grunge derivative.

Because of its spread into the bedrooms of minors — a fact that speaks to the immediacy of its message and its ease of comprehension, necessary at certain levels for any kind of consumption — the movement was exploited by public opinion in the most merciless way possible. First it was declared a "movement" when it wasn't one, then hyped as "revolutionary", and finally tossed in the bin once it became tiresome as an alternative to disco dance music. Heavy metal and hardcore managed to escape this ignominy thanks to a fanbase that, at its core at least, was elitist and non-commercial. Truly anti-pop(ular), and indigestible to the mainstream — unlike grunge which, however sincere its alternative and rebellious dynamics, had the fortune/misfortune of being hummable, and was thus swallowed whole by a society/public that only grants anti-pop a voice once it has been pre-authorized and assimilated by pop itself. The supreme rule holds: there's none so deaf as those who will not hear.

Just as "the well-off" engage in charity and make sure there's always someone to be charitable to, so as to feel their own well-being validated and thus feel even better, so the first grunge ragamuffins — coming from disastrous, irreparable family and social backgrounds (though this was, after all, the backdrop of the whole so-called American "alternative rock", indeed of rock tout court, from noise to metal, i.e. the kind that was purposeful, innovative, vital precisely because it signified death) — were, for a few days, cleaned up and welcomed to the table of respectable families; while eating and being dressed anew, they were made to lend their instruments to the sons of good families, who could thus sing of the misery next door, and sang all the louder the further removed they were from actually living it.

The first part of the metaphor (the grunge ragamuffins) refers to the late '80s; the second (the well-off kids playing at being bad) to the early '90s.

Although he couldn't avoid the invitation to the table, grunge's foremost representative, Kurt Cobain (Aberdeen, WA, 1967), turned it down on April 8, 1994.

History of grunge

Only the heavy-metal branch of rock can boast a genesis as long and troubled as that of grunge. To find the first systematic examples of quiet-loud-quiet, noise-melody-noise, making ample use of a frail scream that (precisely because of this, and all the more excruciatingly so, since it's deployed across its full puerile range) is at once extreme, and of garage (and hard-rock) devices set against punk rhythms and metal tempos (that is, garage-punk metallically reinforced), one has to go back to the post-punk/hardcore of the early '80s and to specific songs that, like flashes of genius, lit up certain albums of the period. Extreme adolescent alienation, howled despair, abrupt quiet-loud dynamics can be found in what can virtually be considered the first grunge song in history: "Ballad of Jerry Curlan" by the L.A. hardcore band Angry Samoans (see "Back From Samoa", 1982). Beyond its dizzying experimentalism and its formal-thematic perfection, forever pregnant with stimulating meaning, making it one of the most precious songs in history, for its extreme kitten-chick scream at the very peak of existence and for that post-punk noise-garage (already Pixies-like), "In the Night" by the English band Bauhaus (see "The Sky's Gone Out", 1982) must be considered proto-grunge. Also in that fateful year 1982, another of the most important tracks in the whole history of rock, straddling hardcore and heavy metal, with a metallically devastating violence never before imagined, rightly claimed a place of honour among the wellsprings of inspiration for the most extreme, heaviest grunge: the compositionally supreme, screamed-to-the-max "Riot" by San Francisco hardcore band Dead Kennedys (see "Plastic Surgery Disaster", 1982), a masterpiece of rational economy applied to the venting of animal frustration. A case apart in terms of importance to the grunge story is not the city's most illustrious son, Jimi Hendrix, whose guitar influence was inevitable but who, compositionally, with his rhythm and blues, offered nothing to these descendants — but rather a single track of his: 2'51" of dark, ferocious distortion, drunk and self-flagellating even as it soars beyond the material world: total rebellion, a plastic, gripping force like nothing before 1967; the track is "Purple Haze". Without wanting to lump everything into proto-grunge, but on one hand to show (as has too rarely been done) the long road toward the '90s sound, and on the other to illustrate its debt to the most extreme, searing garage-rock, it's worth mentioning what may be considered the ultimate example of garage-rock as a whole: guitars as essential as they are moving, noisy yet limpid, a voice whispering as if deploring everything, drumming as tribal as Keith Moon at his most primal: "So Cold" by Rocket From The Tombs, featuring David Thomas (see "The Day The Earth Met The...", 1975). Finally, there's the case of Husker Du, who alone, with their programmatic noise+melody+scream, post-adolescent, frail-yet-searing, extreme-yet-moving, are enough (prompting talk of hardcore-pop) to justify a direct line of influence: see "Wheels" ("Everything Falls Apart", 1982) through to "Pride" or "Broken Home Broken Heart" ("Zen Arcade", 1984), a sublimation of tragic, collegiate indie with clattering noise, screaming until the voice frays like no one else's, choruses all the more touching for it. It was, after all (if in other extremes), already a lesson taught by Metallica: the quiet-loud game used to stir the sentimental imagination of listeners all the more gripped and taken by the alternation of two tones so antithetical, and yet so perfectly expressing, in their very coexistence, the contradiction inherent in reality. Between those years and grunge proper, there are two things standing in between. Two cultures, both American, both of the disinherited and the desperate, both extreme, nihilistic, new, yet utterly different in their stance/reaction: on one side (and it is indeed worth saying so, even geographically, being based in Los Angeles) heavy metal (Metallica), on the other noise (Sonic Youth, New York). To mark the difference in decibels and epic scope between these two currents, we might say the former is self-destruction in the "masculine" mode, the latter in the "feminine" mode, giving the two adjectives their primal, symbolic connotations. Various, unrepeatable bands (all American), on their own doomed odysseys set to music, as a side effect of pursuing their own horizons, also laid the groundwork for grunge, absorbing, before it did, both the metal and noise variants of nihilism: Social Distortion (who were, culturally and socially too, the most immediate forerunners of grunge, besides being among the first to fuse punk and hard-rock), Butthole Surfers, Black Flag, Dinosaur Jr., Frightwig. One of them was destined to be just another feather in this cap; instead, it turned out to be grunge's most direct parent: and yet it was heavy metal, devastating heavy metal, courtesy of the Melvins (see the programmatic, avant-garde masterpiece "Gluey Porch Treatments", 1987). The Melvins formed in Aberdeen, WA, in 1985, offering an audacious, highly distinctive take on Metallica's recent invention: theirs was a heaviness that drew as much from thrash percussiveness (Motorhead) as from noise distortion (Flipper, Sonic Youth) and deafening industrial oppression (Swans), all held together, tribally and epically experienced, by a thunderous, never-before-seen slowed-down rhythmic tread (the dark doom of Black Sabbath) and by a howl classifiable among the earliest examples of death-metal vocals. In hindsight, the Melvins were playing grindcore (or, to tell the plain truth, "stoner rock", later copied by the likes of Queens Of The Stone Age), which they embellished with dizzying tempo changes (thanks to an exceptional drummer, Dale Crover) and powerfully sharp, recursive guitar distortion (courtesy of a leader who sold his soul for it: Buzz Osborne). Every member of the Melvins on this first album revolutionized the use and potential of his instrument, with a future impact no smaller than that offered by the Rolling Stones and Who. The band's attitude and cultural/social humus were those of punk-hardcore (chiefly Black Flag and Misfits). A mocking, cocky modesty, bordering on self-parody, along with some swaggering, taunting riffs, could bring to mind the archetypal hard-rockers, Kiss (an early teenage passion of theirs). All this needs some framing, which can be done via a twofold distinction. The larger set is that of the coast-to-coast American musical underground, the alternative rock music to which — in opposition to the programmatically "commercial" kind — rock music as a whole, as a self-sustaining structure with its own internal dynamics and development, can be reduced. In the first half of the '80s this large family was essentially united within its own elite offering, which, if we strip away metal and reduce it to indie or underground in the strict technical sense, ranged from noise to hardcore, mutually influencing each other by osmosis and thus providing the pretext for lumping it all under one "alternative rock" umbrella. In the second half of the '80s, with what is today called "grunge", a schism occurred (due to a popularity imbalance) within that common underground backdrop: some devoted themselves to an essential, catchy post-hardcore underground rooted in old rock traditions, which struck gold with the public and would do so on an even larger scale in the early '90s (by which point it would already be creatively dead): this is "grunge"; others persisted in the shadows, skillfully complicating — with exceptional, unprecedentedly extreme results — the great ferment of ideas of the early '80s (hence a whole series of hardcore-noise bands whose inhuman inventions would seal the fate of avant-garde rock even as grunge was busy sealing the fate of pop: Fugazi, Jesus Lizard, Pussy Galore, Squirrel Bait, Big Black, Rapeman, Laughing Hyenas, Pixies). Finally — and here's where our real focus lies — grunge itself can be spotted splitting into two distinct branches: one more extreme, heavier both in its metal and its noise leanings, which folds classic catchiness into an essentially post-industrial context that roughs it up all the more violently; the other far, far more classic-rock, at its best inspired by the electric-noise Neil Young rather than by Sonic Youth (who themselves owe a partial debt to Young). The Melvins, in their "extremeness", championed the industrial-heavy wing of grunge; for the second, for the hard-rock-classic strand, one can point directly to Green River (active in WA from 1983 to 1988: see "Come On Down", 1985) as the direct forerunner. In 1988, Melvins bassist Matt Lukin, singer Mark Arm and second guitarist Steve Turner of Green River formed Mudhoney in Seattle, the first grunge band in history (the term "grunge", from "grungy": scruffy, decrepit, falling apart, was — as usual — pinned on them by a journalist reviewing the band's early efforts; a more fitting label could hardly have been found) — a band that fully embodies, in every respect, the definition of the style just outlined (see the masterpiece "Superfuzz Bigmuff Plus Early Singles", released in 1990 but containing material mostly from 1988). Mudhoney came from the gutter and knew intimately the middle class they railed against — more existentially than socially, more petulantly than purposefully, more in words than in deeds, more out of desperation than out of seriousness or intent: yet certainly wielding the great strength that seriousness brings. Other grunge bands would later be manufactured to order, especially outside America; here, for now (and we're at the tail end of the '80s), we witness a surprising, spontaneous, naturally emerging outpouring, after years of expressive incapacity/impossibility caused, on one hand, by the intellectual difficulty of noise, on the other by the flimsiness of certain synth-pop, and on yet another by the excessive weightiness of heavy metal — an outpouring, as I was saying, of countless very young bands ready, as hadn't happened since the days of rock 'n' roll or punk/hardcore, to pour out their whole souls trying to convey to an audience of their peers their fleeting, vital feelings of the moment. Despite everything, grunge carries sunshine with it, just as, despite everything, whether crying or laughing, a child always carries sunshine: and in a child's mouth the word death becomes so friendly and translucent that it loses all fearful or physical connotation, dissolving instead into the admiring contemplation of young lives destined to pass, and pass again, like rebels fated for sympathetic compassion and for the only art available to them: rock. This and nothing else is what Mudhoney's songs achieve — radiant even in darkness because, precisely, "young", reckless in a violence that persists even in acoustic form yet remains fundamentally innocent, seemingly deserving forgiveness for everything, in their instrument-smashing, in their torn clothes and neglected long hair (incidentally, the early-'90s boom in long hair and ripped jeans owes itself, regardless of hair length and regardless of whether leather jackets with or without studs were worn over the jeans, to heavy metal and grunge, the latter being merely a prophet within pop's fringes). With Mudhoney, the independent label that was, for better or worse, grunge's Seattle godmother makes its grand entrance: Sub Pop (already involved with Green River); as does producer Jack Endino, grunge's inner sanctum with his Reciprocal Recording Studios in Seattle, an essential go-between for bands and Sub Pop. Grunge hadn't even properly begun with Mudhoney before it had to reconsider and decide whether to broaden or narrow its own definition and nature. Because if Mudhoney were Sonic Youth for minors, their fellow Seattleites Soundgarden (see the granite-hard "Badmotorfinger", 1991) put themselves forward, within that same nascent grunge context, as the most authoritative heirs to classic hard-rock, in a time-leap that, in its depth, reached directly back to the '70s (Soundgarden's guitars are black-and-heavy Black Sabbath; the vocals, when rhetorical, grandiose and technical, are Led Zeppelin), even while being updated through the hardness and fullness of early-'80s metal. In a word, Soundgarden leapfrogged Sonic Youth and, with them, that whole "adolescent" underground at the heart of grunge. Soundgarden had no interest in "deconstructing" anything (in this sense they stand at the opposite pole from all those experimental American bands mentioned above and dubbed "alternative"): instead they offered granite-solid, self-sufficient songs, complete and content in themselves (if still serving, incidentally, as vehicles for nihilistic, subversive messages). Soundgarden (guitar riffs, vocal tones, drum tempos) must nonetheless be considered fully grunge: indeed, in terms of decibels, belonging to that strand of grunge closer to heavy metal and hard-rock rather than to punk in the broad sense, they can be considered the first disciples of the heavy-metal Melvins. Soundgarden took themselves seriously and were epic when not outright bombastic; they demanded an "adult", "lived-in" following, more "weathered" (by something) than "dreamy" (about something); more survivors than the still-surviving, unable to return to some first stage of innocence. They were extremely well schooled technically, and rather pleased with themselves about it. They worked at music more than they lived it carefree. They claimed the history of peoples rather than the individual stories of misfit schoolkids. Bound to Soundgarden not just by friendship but also by a shared, more singer-songwriterly dimension, Screaming Trees (see "Uncle Anesthesia", 1991, produced by Chris Cornell: filed under "the great grunge family") led by Mark Lanegan offered essentially a power-pop (heavily influenced by the classic '70s rock of Young and Springsteen, but also by certain Dylan-esque rhetorical tics and quirks), like a grunge "with the brakes on", inevitably "depowered" and fossilized in the muffled, pre-dusk or afternoon-lit realm of country jams and more or less transcendent childlike endearments. And now it's time for Nirvana. Nirvana (1987-1994, Aberdeen-Seattle, WA) are grunge in all its forms, and everything said about this music only makes sense starting from the codifications that followed the interpretation of Nirvana's music. Objectively speaking: they took the grunge embryo and spread it around the entire world, turning it into one of the most considerable phenomena, at least musically, of all time, thereby lining not only their own pockets but also those of their otherwise-unknown, unwitting inspirations, as well as those of the many imitators ready to jump on the first passing trend. Nirvana were Kurt Cobain (1967-1994), and he was rock's last martyr, if not THE last, given the resonance of his figure and the manner of his life but above all his historical place as "the last one", par excellence. Another band, also from up near America's northern border, looking toward Canada, but from the opposite coast to Seattle's Pacific one, Boston's Pixies (1986-1992: see the masterpiece "Doolittle", 1989) were meanwhile crafting a garage-indie sound never heard before, one so unique and of such unrepeatable quality that it resisted plagiarism. Unexploitable, that is, except by those who knew how to grasp its message (naive, delicate, elusive, light yet surging, marked by sudden, devastating acceleration, extreme in both quiet and loud, always hyper-fast, made of candidly visceral screams) and thus transliterate it into their own vocabulary. This too is what Cobain did, alongside his ongoing studies of Melvins, Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Sex Pistols, Neil Young, Stooges, but also classic hard-rock (from Black Sabbath to Kiss) or the more power-pop side of David Bowie, before arriving at his own absolute masterpiece. It came out in 1989 and was called "Bleach". One can say nothing quite like it had ever been heard before: a work of synthesis nonetheless, not a wholly new work, an essential summa derived from the most sensitive, communicative personality within that handful of very young musicians (Cobain was just 22, and inevitably speaks of "lived experience") skilled at experiencing and sensing the faintest stirrings of that context — their context — of unrepeatable, irremediable fleetingness, and therefore worth a thought, or a sigh. Like some impalpable substance, radiating out from the American heartland, those stirrings (the effect of the school classroom / first heartbreak, in the otherwise sunny — and thus, so labeled — postmodern doom-and-gloom made of nicotine and rock and hopeful afternoons for evenings and more or less collective excitements) spread out, their intensity progressively fading the further they traveled, to teenagers the world over (though not of all eras: here the phenomenon is, and must be, strictly contextualized within a span of at most ten years: 1985-1995, to hold any value). "Bleach" is an album of full-throttle garage-rock; the finest of its kind, and, given the uninflated quality of its songs, arguably the finest rock album, period. Its ideal point of reference is the Stooges' "Fun House" from 20 years earlier: another one-of-a-kind album, in value and importance, in rock history. Like "Fun House", it speaks an essential, lethal language that is, or precisely because of this is, sublime — sublime in that it transcends the contingency of the particular and touches every chord of what is essential and foundational in the world. World understood atemporally, given that we're dealing with a work generated by, and referring exclusively to, the contemporary moment. The technical devices may at times be punk, at times hardcore, at times metal, at times (in one case) even folk: Black Flag, Black Sabbath, Sex Pistols, Neil Young. Yet the dominant, unifying atmosphere that lends coherence to the whole is precisely the "garage" one: minimalist, direct, devastating, because that is its message — unredeemed, in a word: dictated by life and not by art, here truly a mere means, if not an antagonist, discouraging any pretense at academicism. The twelve tracks, rigorously autonomous and self-contained, flow through the album's 42 minutes in a democracy of values that seems to render them indistinguishable from one another. Thanks to each track's calibrated internal economy, and each in relation to the others, thanks to a dominant color (black: think of the '80s) that seems to hold a horror of any other shade, thanks, in short, to a uniformly high quality throughout, it becomes impossible to single out any one track as better than the rest. This only happens with either exceptional records or garbage ones. "Bleach" is the perfect synthesis of Melvins (noise-metal) and Mudhoney (grunge with melodic peaks); with all its "garage" quality, it is the single most important grunge album. Grunge as a whole, and Cobain in particular, preaches a kind of "historicized surrealism": transcendence of the physical is only possible starting from one very specific, unreproducible context; escape only from prison; madness only from sanity. Opposites, then, permeate a single whole made not of contradiction but of endurance and, ultimately, of transcendence (more or less unearned). Grunge is escapist music, more than any other kind: not music of upheaval or reflection. And yet, or precisely because of this, it was destined, like few others, to have an enormous social impact (on teenage fringes first and foremost: in the future, that is). "Nevermind" (1991), from its very title onward ("it doesn't matter": the devaluation of all values), is the Bible of grunge as a whole; or rather, we might say that if "Bleach" is the Old Testament of grunge (numerically reserved for the study of a select, more conservative few — here the chosen people are represented by grunge's harder, heavier, more underground fringes, more Melvins-like), "Nevermind" is the Gospels, meant for wide dissemination and universal preaching. In between we might place Cobain as Christ, who, among other things, more or less brought it upon himself, and split grunge's first followers (mostly Seattleites, who still saw Nirvana as an underground-garage outfit, the makers of "Bleach") from the second wave (the rest of the world), a good many of whom cared chiefly about the melodic hooks that abound on "Nevermind", even though they come wrapped in endlessly nihilistic, despondent lyrics (Cobain's voice above all, caught between fragile and full-throated — Francis Black in a different register, but just as recognizable a mile off — is like that too) and fuzz-driven assaults. The main difference between Nirvana's first and second albums is neatly captured by their covers: one black, the other blue; one steeped in desperate evil, the other reflecting upon it; one turned inward, the other outward; one strictly autobiographical, first and foremost for its maker, the other "generous" in telling everyone where to find moments of superiority and escape even within catastrophic circumstances (life itself). The suicidal undertone, however, never goes away: if on the first album the act is carried out in the tar, on the second it happens among clouds of blue; as if to say that even the hope of something different from hell has been taken away. Nirvana sounds as though made by someone already dead, appearing like a guardian angel to sensitive young losers the world over, to cheer them up, charge them with energy, dry their tears; or to the satisfied and complacent, employed to prick them with the goad of damnation and make them tremble with socially sinful understanding. The influence (let this be clear: if "Bleach"'s reference point is "Fun House", "Nevermind"'s is "Nevermind the Bollocks") of Husker Du's melodic, collegiate hardcore (see the absolute "Zen Arcade", 1984) and of Cheap Trick's power-pop becomes more pronounced, while the Sabbath and Purple of "Bleach" recede to the roots of the compositions on the hard-rock side, replaced by more Kiss and Neil Young (already present here and there, to various ends, on "Bleach"). Cobain's rhythmic, imprecise, "wall of sound" guitar playing is what would ferry noise into the '90s: a noise in light and shadow, but always limpid, fresh, raw-skinned, magically young (see the odds-and-ends collection "Incesticide", 1992). Green River had been founded by guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament. After Mark Arm's departure, they carried the thread forward with the Mother Love Bone project (1988-1990: see "Apple", 1990). When the band's singer Andrew Wood passed away (grunge's first casualty: heroin overdose), the two threw themselves into a pathetic, dreadful memorial album alongside the singer and drummer of Soundgarden, Chris Cornell and Matt Cameron. For the occasion, the quartet called itself Temple Of The Dog. Upright and tireless, Gossard and Ament recruited, for their new band Pearl Jam, a gas-station-attendant-turned-surfer originally from San Diego, blessed with a voice that need envy no one: technically impressive and evocative, both raspy and clear at once (somewhere between Buckley, Thomas and Morrison): Eddie Vedder would turn the warmth of his vocal cords into a shoulder offered as consolation/charity to whoever needed it. Pearl Jam would progressively reveal themselves as the band most tied to classic '70s American hard-rock (electric-era Springsteen and Young above all), churning out a string of more or less retro classics. Pearl Jam are of no use whatsoever (to the evolution of rock), but they've remained the only band in the '90s able to write song after song (albeit, inevitably at best, new wine in very old, very ancient bottles) with tireless consistency — one melodic hard-rock song after another. Theirs is the quality of quantity: it's a matter of faith; but they sound (and it really is fitting to say so) like the Leaning Tower's rescue crew or the morning after fireworks: obsolete, occasionally malodorous through sheer stubbornness and petulance. Pearl Jam: lyrics of banal vindication and good intentions, age-old riffs, rhythms fried and refried. And yet, I repeat, that IS what hard-rock is: and Pearl Jam are the only ones left who still know how to do it. Nowadays there are still a few cobblers plying the trade: they know how, but who still cares? In any case: 1) a list of at least 15 tracks worth noting and genuinely gripping; 2) an album ("Vs", 1992) that is extremely devastating and uncompromising: primal, total, animalistic, panicked, raw; these are Pearl Jam's undeniable merits (incidentally, before their current senility, they were formidable live entertainers). Carrying forward the devastating, unlistenable, piercing line laid down by the Melvins (albeit diverted by a far more melodic sensibility) were Alice In Chains (see the eponymous "Alice In Chains", 1995: where Alice is more porn star than little girl): heavy, metallic, brutally slow, percussive. Theirs is the dirge of dissolution in liquefaction. The most, in various ways, perverted and politically incorrect band in all of grunge, who, amid so many acts damning themselves while showing charity and compassion toward others, sound like an indigestible dissonance within the genre. Melodic, yes, but only to offend all the more: as if the proceeds from sales were used to mock the gullible buyer. The 1995 album "Alice In Chains" was sensationally ignored by critics. It's a post-rock masterpiece (that is, one that reflects, technically and conceptually alienated, on rock's past with no prospect for the future): the industrial-metal of "Prong-meets-Pantera" heard on the previous record (1992) is stretched out into something hazier that loses in violence what it gains in dark, hallucinated, otherworldly, drugged, afflicted, deceased mood — as if contemplating one's own corpse with detachment. The rendering of this sulfurous, postmodern, drugged, unsettling, oddly fantasy-cowboy Alice owes chiefly to Layne Staley, who reinvests the voice as an instrument, staging an exhausting revolution. The singing is dirge-like and choral, more impassive and apathetic than ever, stretched out: it's as if the Beatles' harmonies had been slowed down and embalmed by the master of alienation, Ian Curtis. The result is a suffocating, oneiric, darkly visionary vigil, with a radicalism and totality that recall the omnipresent doom of Sabbath. Here is a tragedy (in the theatrical sense), orgiastic, werewolf-haunted, haunted by the demon of childhood, a hard-rock transposition of Nick Cave's acid, noisy blues, from which, however, only the passive component (being out of this world) is taken up, not the active one (compassion). In this album there are no souls, only things: things floating in a phantasmagoric space, cabalistically marked with meaningless symbols.

In the early '90s the oil slick of grunge spreads first across all of America, then across the whole world: Stone Temple Pilots, Smashing Pumpkins ("Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" from 1995, with the track "Bullet With Butterfly Wings", the finest example of American grunge from outside Seattle), Silverchair, Bush, Mad Season, Creed, Blind Melon, Stiltskin are just a few of the names.

The artistically most interesting thing to do with grunge, one that can partly be considered grunge's female counterpart, is the "riot grrrl" movement. Here things get complicated; let me explain it this way: 1) the term riot grrrl was coined to describe the upheavals of (very young) neo-feminists in the early '90s; 2) these were, however, feminists of a peculiar kind, far removed from the "suffragettes": what they essentially preached was running the family the way you'd run a punk band; in reality, what they meant was that punk fury was needed to overturn the tracks of abuse, boredom, injustice, squalor and betrayal that defined domestic life; 3) had they been able to, I don't know whether they would have wanted the traditional home-and-church family life, but by contrast they demanded it, given that the actual order of things was the opposite: though perhaps the spirit of contradiction simply won out over everything else; 4) in any case, punk was handed to the riot grrrls, obviously by other riots: and the punk of that moment was grunge; 5) yet, both technically and conceptually (rape, domestic abuse, lesbianism), it had all started in the early '80s when San Francisco's Frightwig (see "Cat Farm Faboo", 1984) had a great idea: play anti-male protest garage-punk fronted by women — only they couldn't find the means to fully realize it; every riff, cadence or rhythm of theirs, as well as every theme they tackled, would later be picked up again, but amplified, broadened, made expressionistic; in effect Frightwig sounded like Siouxsie and the Banshees plus a voice among the first systematic screamers in the whole history of rock: Cecilia Lynch, who held court all on her own; 6) in 1982 Wendy Williams of the Plasmatics delivered the definitive garage-metal performance on "Stop": absolute ferocity and riffs, the single most influential track for the whole riot movement and beyond; 7) starting in 1985 in Los Angeles, L7 set out to do what Frightwig hadn't been able to: album after album, each more violent than the last; they invented grunge, dubbed for the occasion fox-core, in parallel with the boys, but were only able to release their own invention once the men's version had already succeeded (see "L7" and "Smell The Magic": 1990, 1991); 8) again on that coast, from San Francisco, Babes In Toyland offered up a tribal, Oedipal, extreme fox-core starting in 1987 (see the masterpiece "Fontanelle", 1992): nihilism turns from historical to cosmic, Bjelland's scream is feral, and thus towering and total; 9) fox-core, which by then had already spawned its own school or brotherhood, passes over into riot and then into grunge with Hole (see "Live Through This", 1994), led by Courtney Love. The last grunge album that was ideologically and thematically purposeful and innovative dates from 1991 ("Nevermind" is, as a title, essentially the philosophical translation of "grunge"). From then on, nothing new under the sun as far as the rock landscape goes: everything that was "new", interesting, stimulating and meaningful made with guitar-bass-drums was, not by chance, called "post-rock". Grunge, in some of its breezier moments so fresh and, despite everything, carefree and simple and direct: grunge, the child, has historically been the tolling bell for rock's funeral. Before wondering about the value of life, and about whether the symbol of death should be an old man rather than a newborn, take a look at the cover of "Nevermind". Let the answer be affixed to the meaning of that final title, or word.

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14/02/2026