First of all, let me make it clear that I am not talking about relatively underground bands such as The Screaming Trees or Mudhoney. I'm talking about what became known as grunge in the mainstream. I feel like just about any alternative rock band that got big and was from Seattle got labeled 'grunge'. But beyond that, what really did they have in common? Nirvana was minimalistic alternative rock with a punk rock attitude, Pearl Jam sounded a bit like stripped down 70's epic arena rock, Soundgarden almost sounded like Black Sabbath updated to the 90's, Alice In Chains was like proto-alternative metal, etc. I bet that if, for example, Smashing Pumpkins or the Toadies had come from Seattle, they too would have been labeled as grunge. Again, I feel that the popular grunge bands were united by only two criteria (1) they played alt-rock or some at least loosely related sub-genre during the first half of the 1990's and (2) they were from Seattle. What do you think?

True, the musical styles of the grunge bands varied more so than they should within a genre...but there was plenty of common threads that linked the bands together. First the obvious one, location. Then the fact that the scene itself was fairly incestuous, members would quit/get kicked out of one "grunge" band and then immediately join another band in Seattle. Jason Everman played for Nirvana AND Soundgarden. Pearl Jam came out of Mother Love Bone (and Green River if you go back that far). Also you have the stage acts themselves. They were all fairly stripped down, no nonsense....no big spectacles. They all pretty much rejected the big lights, smoke and fireworks of the 70's and 80's. They dressed similarly...mainly because they were all so dirt poor.

Smashing Pumpkins is still sometimes mistaken as being from that whole Seattle grunge scene

True, the musical styles of the grunge bands varied more so than they should within a genre...but there was plenty of common threads that linked the bands together. First the obvious one, location. Then the fact that the scene itself was fairly incestuous, members would quit/get kicked out of one "grunge" band and then immediately join another band in Seattle. Jason Everman played for Nirvana AND Soundgarden. Pearl Jam came out of Mother Love Bone (and Green River if you go back that far).

This is true, there was definitely a common group of people involved. I think that this could be said to support the argument that grunge was more of a geographical/scene-based designation than a real musical genre.

Also you have the stage acts themselves. They were all fairly stripped down, no nonsense....no big spectacles. They all pretty much rejected the big lights, smoke and fireworks of the 70's and 80's. They dressed similarly...mainly because they were all so dirt poor.


Definitely. It's ironic that they inspired a whole style based on how they dressed for no other reason than the limited variety of clothes that they could afford.

Smashing Pumpkins is still sometimes mistaken as being from that whole Seattle grunge scene


I can imagine. If they had been from Seattle, they would have fit right in. I didn't know that they were mistaken as being from the Seattle scene, but maybe that's because I've lived near Seattle for all but the last two years of my life, and I think that we Seattleites would love to have been able to claim them, but alas, we can't, since they were from Chicago.

Smashing Pumpkins' earlier music could be considered grunge, but the height of their popularity was after the grunge era. In other words, even if they were from Seattle, they wouldn't be considered grunge.

Smashing Pumpkins' earlier music could be considered grunge, but the height of their popularity was after the grunge era. In other words, even if they were from Seattle, they wouldn't be considered grunge.


I don't know if that's completely true. Gish and Siamese Dream were released well within the grunge era (1991 and 1993) respectively. And they were well received albums. So they could've been lumped in that group if they were form Seattle...but likely behind Nirvana/Pearl Jam/Soundgarden.

You're right they didn't peak popularity until 1995 and that was definitely not a grunge album.

I don't know if that's completely true. Gish and Siamese Dream were released well within the grunge era (1991 and 1993) respectively. And they were well received albums. So they could've been lumped in that group if they were form Seattle...but likely behind Nirvana/Pearl Jam/Soundgarden.

You're right they didn't peak popularity until 1995 and that was definitely not a grunge album.


Well, I think that 'Zero' could have been considered a grunge song. Same with 'Bullets with Butterfly Wings' with its soft verse-heavy chorus contrast, as heard in countless songs from key bands of the Seattle scene, such as 'Smells like Teen Spirit', 'Lithium', 'Heart-Shaped Box', 'Rooster', 'Would?', 'Black Hole Sun', etc. Both of those songs were from 1995's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

Also, it seems that there was an impulse during the early 90's to sign any Seattle band that seemed to give the record labels a chance to cash in on the grunge zeitgeist, so maybe Smashing Pumpkins would have gotten major label attention sooner had they been from Seattle.

ADDENDUM: I mentioned Smashing Pumpkins because I think that they had more in common with Nirvana (at least in the early years of SP, Ava Adore and Machina were quite different from classic 90's alternative as a whole) in terms of sound than Alice In Chains did, for example. Yet, SP is not usually considered grunge, but the very metal-influenced AIC is almost always considered grunge. To see that metal influence, check out 'We Die Young', the first single from their first album, Facelift (1990). It has a classic 80's thrash sound but with a down-tuned 90's edge that prefigures the principal work of some metal bands that peaked in the 90's like Pantera. The roots of Alice In Chains lie in an obscure 80's glam band with the same name (written as Alice 'N Chainz). Here is the song I mentioned so that you can make up your own mind about it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0F25bC06Aw

Anyway, my main point in all this is that grunge to me seems to be more of a scene/geographic designation than a genre, due to the very fact that the core bands of the movement often had more in common musically with bands outside the movement than with other bands within it.

I feel like just about any alternative rock band that got big and was from Seattle got labeled 'grunge'. But beyond that, what really did they have in common?


Those two, plus angsty lyrics/subject matter.

Contrast it with what was available at the time: synthpop (occasional angsty lyrics, but emphasis on keyboards over guitars) or hair metal (keyboards rarely seen, and lyrics emphasizing boobs, cars, and the joys of partying hard).

If you felt depressed, you listened to The Smiths or the Sisters of Mercy or some other goth act.  We'll skip that, because we're concentrating on the evolution of guitar-oriented rock.  Here's a snapshot of rock as it stood in the pre-grunge era:

D4aob4zlhIk
  - Official video for Motley Crue's Kickstart My Heart, 1989.

This video is about the lead singer's heroin overdose less than two years before the song was written.  (The EMT who revived him was a fan and gave him one more shot of adrenaline for the hell of it.  It worked.  That pretty much sums up the gleeful excesses of good luck that marked the 80s.)  It features a cameo from Sam Kinison as the limo driver, drag racers, funny cars, speedboats, helmet-cam footage of skydivers, and large-breasted fans screaming in the audience as pyrotechnics go off on stage, and that's in the first ninety seconds.  I remind you, this is a song about a heroin overdose.

Before grunge, you listened to guitar-based rock while barelling down the highway at 90 miles an hour, because pre-grunge songs about stuff as deadly-serious as overdosing on heroin were still just that exuberant with joy. 

Grunge was a real music form, and as much as I enjoyed the Crue track back in my day (and am lucky to have survived certain youthful feats of stupidity best reserved for the racetrack instead of public roads), grunge was formed in reaction to precisely this sort of thing, and for good reason.

Foo Bar, I am aware that 80's rock was mired in excess and hedonism. I'm not sure that it's quite fair to say that Sisters of Mercy weren't guitar-based since the guitar was the dominant instrument, even if it was jangly rather than distorted and even though there weren't any solos. But you're right, that is not really relevant to the topic at hand.

I see that your opinion is that grunge was an actual music genre and not just a designation for a specific group of alternative rock musicians who lived in the Seattle area. I don't doubt that grunge was a huge turning point in music as a movement, as you have stated. It brought a kind of seriousness back to mainstream rock. However, I am still wondering what distinguishes grunge from other alt-rock from the period and from right before it. I am unfortunately not extremely familiar with other alt-rock groups from the period, but I don't imagine that they were singing about boobs and booze like the glam metal bands of the time.

I respect your opinion and you have argued it well. However, as I have said before, with groups inside the scene having greater musical similarities to other groups outside it and having huge musical divergences with their fellow groups in the scene, I find it hard to see grunge more as a genre than a geographical-scene designation.

I hated Grunge and I still do.  I love a good rock song, and the 90s had some great rock bands, but with grunge, it sounded like a bunch of guys singing like they were on suicide row.  Very depressing stuff. 

I see that your opinion is that grunge was an actual music genre and not just a designation for a specific group of alternative rock musicians who lived in the Seattle area. I don't doubt that grunge was a huge turning point in music as a movement, as you have stated. It brought a kind of seriousness back to mainstream rock. However, I am still wondering what distinguishes grunge from other alt-rock from the period and from right before it.


You raise a lot of good points (including a good reminder on the Sisters -- I'd forgotten how heavy their early stuff was the acoustic guitar; my brain was just fogged out by the use of choral singers in This Corrosion), and I'm actually a little out of my musical element here, because at the time I was listening to a lot of industrial/EDM stuff, and mostly missed the birth of grunge.  The problem with "alternative" is that it's sort of a catch-all category.  There might not be any real difference between pre-grunge-alt-rock and "grunge".  I guess what I was really getting at was how overdue "rock" was for a change in style.  Before it was popular enough to have a name, it was alternative, after it had a name (which is where Seattle came in), the name was grunge.

But the term "alternative" encompasses just about everything that's too unpopular to have a name.  It had everything from the Sisters of Mercy on the goth side to Sonic Youth, the Pixies, etc. on the noise side.  Grunge took that dissonant fuzzy noise thing to a new level of dissonance, not that much different to what punk did to rock.  (Punk, during the decades between its birth and the 90s, went down the road of thrash and created its wall of sound effect with speed, not dissonance.)  Noise was more of a direct antecendent to grunge; lots of feedback and fuzz, and pretty inaccessible to an ear that had heretofore heard only the overproduced glam metal stuff.  (And compared to stuff like Merzbow and the industrial noise scene, the Pixies were perfectly accessible :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B6qerZlczw
  - The Pixies, Gigantic, 1988

Imagine that sung with a male vocalist, it's pretty close to the sound that would eventually come to be known as grunge.


I hated Grunge and I still do.  I love a good rock song, and the 90s had some great rock bands, but with grunge, it sounded like a bunch of guys singing like they were on suicide row.  Very depressing stuff.


I never had an issue with the depressing lyrics (I was into NIN, and this was around the time of Pretty Hate Machine which opened with Head Like A Hole and got more depressing from there :), it was grunge's use of dissonance that I had to get over.

On dissonance, I'm sure my initial reaction was kinda like the first person to listen to a thrash punk band after a decade of prog/psychedelic/pop rock.  And the first guy to listen to Zeppelin or the Beatles after the rock-and-roll/doo-wop era.  And the first person to hear Chuck Berry after hearing nothing but jazz, blues, and country.  And then I realized hey, the guitar's supposed to sound like that.  It's a new sound.  Even though I never got deep into the genre, there was a lot of good stuff in there, and I'm sure I missed a lot of it.

Foo Bar, I enjoyed reading your post. I was very little when grunge got popular and I only began to actively look for music at the end of the 90's, with the beginning of my adolescence. For that reason, I think that the definition I have of "alternative" is different from and narrower than yours. When I hear "alternative," I think basically of the rock that was dominant in the 90's, as well as its 80's (but very 90's sounding) predecessors like Sonic Youth, the Pixies, REM, etc. And again, I would agree that the Seattle scene had some unique characteristics, but then again, I imagine that all regional alternative rock scenes at that time had some distinctive characteristics. I'm not sure that that necessarily constitutes a separate genre. For example, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that if the Pixies or Sonic Youth had been based in Seattle, today we would be calling them early grunge. So I guess what I'm trying to do is see the distinction between the narrower definition I have always had of alternative rock and grunge when we ignore the extra-musical aspects of them.

I wouldn't call "grunge" a genre, it's more like a style of music.

I wouldn't call "grunge" a genre, it's more like a style of music.

Isn't a style of music the same thing as a genre? Or at least the same thing as a subgenre?

Foo Bar, I enjoyed reading your post. I was very little when grunge got popular and I only began to actively look for music at the end of the 90's, with the beginning of my adolescence. For that reason, I think that the definition I have of "alternative" is different from and narrower than yours. When I hear "alternative," I think basically of the rock that was dominant in the 90's, as well as its 80's (but very 90's sounding) predecessors like Sonic Youth, the Pixies, REM, etc. And again, I would agree that the Seattle scene had some unique characteristics, but then again, I imagine that all regional alternative rock scenes at that time had some distinctive characteristics. I'm not sure that that necessarily constitutes a separate genre. For example, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that if the Pixies or Sonic Youth had been based in Seattle, today we would be calling them early grunge. So I guess what I'm trying to do is see the distinction between the narrower definition I have always had of alternative rock and grunge when we ignore the extra-musical aspects of them.


I think we're actually a lot closer to agreement than we look.  I think part of that might be due to geography and personal history.  I wasn't in Seattle (or Boston, or NYC), so to me (and maybe only to me!), the sound that would eventually come to be known as "grunge" was about the sound, and not any individual city's music scene. 

Before the word "grunge" came out, I think I probably lumped early Pearl Jam, the Pixies and Sonic Youth into "that rock stuff that isn't as cheezy as hair metal, but is heavier than REM" regardless of its geographical origin.  (That's where my personal history comes in - I was into industrial/EBM at the time and if you'd asked me what scene I was into, I'd have pointed in the general direction of Belgium, even though I knew Skinny Puppy and FLA were both from Vancouver.  If it had samples from Robocop in it, I was probably listening to it :)

As someone not living in Seattle, regional differences in the "proto-grunge" era were lost on me.  But now you've got me intrigued.  Regional differences were critical in the early days of rap/hip-hop; early east-coast rap centered around themes of poverty and empowerment, west-coast rap countered with the gangsta rap phenomenon.  If you were in Seattle when grunge emerged, I'm curious to hear what you've got to say on what made the Seattle sound different than the sounds from the other coast. 

I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that you heard something different -- pre-Nirvana, those of us outside the cities only had one or two examples of "the Seattle sound" vs. other cities to compare with.  What I'm curious about is what you (and other Seattleites) heard, that the rest of us may have missed.  And I appreciate how hard that request is -- even without the 'net, musical influence traveled pretty fast, and the time lag between the sound coming out and the sound being adopted by others in (or soon to be included in) the genre may have been as short as months, maybe a year at most.

I think we're actually a lot closer to agreement than we look.  I think part of that might be due to geography and personal history.  I wasn't in Seattle (or Boston, or NYC), so to me (and maybe only to me!), the sound that would eventually come to be known as "grunge" was about the sound, and not any individual city's music scene. 

Before the word "grunge" came out, I think I probably lumped early Pearl Jam, the Pixies and Sonic Youth into "that rock stuff that isn't as cheezy as hair metal, but is heavier than REM" regardless of its geographical origin.  (That's where my personal history comes in - I was into industrial/EBM at the time and if you'd asked me what scene I was into, I'd have pointed in the general direction of Belgium, even though I knew Skinny Puppy and FLA were both from Vancouver.  If it had samples from Robocop in it, I was probably listening to it :)

As someone not living in Seattle, regional differences in the "proto-grunge" era were lost on me.  But now you've got me intrigued.  Regional differences were critical in the early days of rap/hip-hop; early east-coast rap centered around themes of poverty and empowerment, west-coast rap countered with the gangsta rap phenomenon.  If you were in Seattle when grunge emerged, I'm curious to hear what you've got to say on what made the Seattle sound different than the sounds from the other coast. 

I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that you heard something different -- pre-Nirvana, those of us outside the cities only had one or two examples of "the Seattle sound" vs. other cities to compare with.  What I'm curious about is what you (and other Seattleites) heard, that the rest of us may have missed.  And I appreciate how hard that request is -- even without the 'net, musical influence traveled pretty fast, and the time lag between the sound coming out and the sound being adopted by others in (or soon to be included in) the genre may have been as short as months, maybe a year at most.


Hello there, I know this is about two months late, but now, after a long hiatus, I am planning to post here again on a more regular basis. Anyway, your questions are wonderful. Unfortunately, you have to remember that I was about 4 years old when 'Nevermind' came out, so while I was in Seattle at the time, I was probably watching The Real Ghostbusters or The Muppet Babies rather than paying attention to the burgeoning local alternative rock scene. Anyway, as to what would distinguish Seattle 90's alt rock (i.e. "grunge") from that of other scenes might be a sort of dark and sarcastic outlook on life. I think that Seattleites generally have a kind of dark sense of humor and may seem gloomy to others when in reality, we find a kind of joy in the melancholy aspects of life (such as cloudy weather, which is plentiful in Seattle), though maybe I am projecting my own personality on the city as a whole. You referred to music that you called "that rock stuff that isn't as cheezy as hair metal, but is heavier than REM," and again, I think that any band that had fit the description and lived in Seattle would have been called grunge. I agree that we are mostly in agreement and it is interesting how you saw things differently having lived outside Seattle at that time. I would love to be able to compare and contrast Seattle's scene with other scenes from the era, but I don't really have a sense of where different bands were from to be able to make the comparisons proposed in your post.

Hello there, I know this is about two months late, but now, after a long hiatus, I am planning to post here again on a more regular basis. Anyway, your questions are wonderful. Unfortunately, you have to remember that I was about 4 years old when 'Nevermind' came out, so while I was in Seattle at the time, I was probably watching The Real Ghostbusters or The Muppet Babies rather than paying attention to the burgeoning local alternative rock scene.


Two months late is still a pretty young thread around here.  We've had threads come back after multi-year hiatuses when someone comes back and finds something they forgot about, or someone else googles for an obscure track or lyric and ends up here.

On the grunge thing, no worries, it just means you've got a much better excuse than I have for not noticing it.  I was old enough to recognize that something had changed in music, and I even had free access to people outside my own geographical area via then-nascent internet, but I wasn't clueful enough to realize that it was going to be the next big thing.