There is a great lot to be said about Grunge on the internet - a lot of very useful information readily backed up by academic material, but also a lot of personal opinion. Below is a couple of paragraphs which I believe are fundamental in explaining many aspects of the birth of Grunge - the website offers a lot of information about Grunge as a musical sub-culture such as The Creation, The Consumers, The Interactive Process Between Individuals and Aspects of Popular Culture, Control of PC by Groups, Organisations and Institutions, Difference in Perceptions of SC and much much more.
It has been well documented that the subculture known as "Grunge" started in Seattle. To most teenagers, it started when Nirvana released "Nevermind" in September, 1991. That single record release was undoubtedly the key event in moving Grunge from subculture to popular culture.
As 'Spin' magazine proclaimed in December, 1992, "Seattle...it's currently to the rock world what Bethlehem was to Christianity". Seattle in the north western United States is rightly regarded as the launching pad of Grunge, but why? The journey from the local scene in Seattle in the mid 80's, through Nirvana's national number one with Nevermind in 1991, to the global success of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden et al is a classic example of the emergence and subsequent exploitation of popular culture.
According to those who were there, Seattle in the early 80's was a fairly isolated place culturally. Major bands often didn't bother adding Seattle to their west coast American tours, and the live scene was awash with derivative bands doing their best to sound like someone else. It wasn't an environment which seemed immediately conducive to an explosion of orginal musical vitality. Yet environment seems to be a key concept in explaining the 1985-95 decade.
In September 1991 Nirvana's second album, "Nevermind" was released. Nirvana were still a small scale local act, mainly recognised for emerging from the mind numbingly boring small red-necked loggin tow of Aberdeen. Local record promoter Susie Tennant remembered that "the record came out in the fall. The video, I remember when I first saw it, I thought this is so cool, but there's no way MTV will play this, and when they started going with it, it reached millions of kids instantly".
The song MTV had placed on high rotation was "Smells Like Teen Spirit". It became the anthem of a generation, and gave the mainstream media a focus point to categorise that generation with. Kurt Cobain suddenly found himself not only the financial saviour of Sub Pop, but more disturbingly for one who's psyche was so fragile, the spokesman of a generation. As he said in his last major interview (US Rolling Stone issue 674, Jan 27, 1994), "Everyone has focused on that song so much. The reason it gets a big reaction is people have seen it on MTV a million times. It's been pounded into their brains." Thus in the rock world of the 1990's, the key to national and global success was high rotation on MTV. In the age of satellite TV that was enough to guarantee a global profile. "Nevermind" knocked Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" off the top of the American Album Charts, Nirvana toured Australia as part of the Big Day Out, and Grunge was now a global popular culture. The merciless exploitation was about thirty seconds behind. As Eddie Vedder of Pear Jam explained, "when commerce is involved, everything changes".
This particular website gives credit to "Hype" as being an essential video to view in order to gain an appreciation for the Grunge movement. I have certainly put this on my "TO DO" list.
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