Grunge was a sales label that most of its famous bands disliked
The word grunge is American slang for dirt or anything repugnant, and Seattle's Sub Pop label happily steered journalists into using it. Kurt Cobain loathed the tag, Soundgarden's Ben Shepherd said he hated being tied to it, and critics still struggle to say what the genre actually sounds like.
The sound took shape in the mid-1980s in Washington state, around Seattle and Olympia, where the University of Washington and the Evergreen State College, a school without conventional grades and with its own station, KAOS, fed an underground scene. Bands such as Green River, the Melvins and Mudhoney mixed hardcore punk with heavy metal, borrowing noise from indie acts like Sonic Youth. The earliest printed link between the word and a Seattle band appears to be a joking fan letter by Mike Arm in the fanzine Desperate Times, dated July 22, 1981.
One origin story runs through Black Flag. On a 1984 tour of small American towns the punk band had slowed to a sludgy crawl closer to Black Sabbath than the Sex Pistols, and after one show the Melvins' Buzz Osborne started writing slow, heavy riffs. Musician Leighton Beezer later described Green River as playing punk backwards, leaning on the ominous diminished fifth that Sabbath used and punk avoided.
Commercial fortunes turned in September 1991, when Nirvana released Nevermind and record companies rushed north. Cobain complained that labels were signing old hard-rock acts who merely pretended to be from Seattle. Chris Cornell argued in 1994 that outsiders reduced the scene to four guitar bands, ignoring free jazz, theatrical and gothic groups. Players favoured offset guitars such as the Fender Jaguar and Jazzmaster partly because they were unfashionable and cheap compared with Les Pauls and Stratocasters.
Grunge deliberately embraced an ugly sound, roaring distortion and dark lyrics, as a rebuke to polished mainstream rock and a reflection of the grimness its musicians saw around them. The movement faded in the mid-to-late 1990s as bands split or slipped from view, and Cobain, dubbed by Time the John Lennon of the Northwest, died by suicide in 1994 after struggling with heroin addiction. Its socially conscious lyrics still left a mark on rock that followed.
Source: Grunge
