lunes, 10 de noviembre de 2008

How it all Began...


The grunge story, as I called it, is the story of how it all began and how it ended. When I say "it all" I mean the so called grunge phenomenon. The first band that got the grunge tag was Nirvana. In autumn 1991 their second album Nevermind was released. It went to number one in the charts and then the media fixation upon Seattle began. All the other great bands from Seattle, like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, were lumped together under the label grunge. The music business directly scented a chance to make money and started the exploitation of the Seattle scene. MTV broadcasted the music videos of the main grunge bands over and over and later even produced several specials and the music magazines printed endless articles about this new phenomenon called grunge. All the attention also drew a lot of bands from the surrounding area to Seattle. Everybody who came there seemed to become successful. The success of some bands even drove top acts like Michael Jackson and Mariah Carey out of their positions in the charts. The teenagers loved this new sound. They bought everything that sounded like it and so many bands copied the music of Pearl Jam and Nirvana. The latter was still the band which was most in the focus of the media and there was a lot of material to feed the scandal-loving press. Rumours were spread about Kurt Cobain and his wife Courtney Love and their privacy was raked for intimate details in search for new headlines for the yellow press. But at the same time Kurt Cobain was declared the "spokesman of generation X" by some magazines and was celebrated as a great rock star and songwriter. Sadly enough this was a nail to Kurt Cobain's coffin. He couldn't stand all the hype and so this was probably one of the reasons for his suicide. His body was found dead around April 8, 1994 with a shotgun blast right through his head. The end of the grunge phenomenon came just as surprisingly as this violent death. The hype went on to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden but they tried hard to get away from the grunge image. So after Cobain's suicide the media built up a myth around him and Nirvana and this seemed to be a very good strategy. Everything that was connected to Nirvana, no matter how or why, sold extremely good. The MTV Nirvana Unplugged In New York for example is not a very good record (there are lots of mistakes on it) but it nevertheless went high up in the charts. Anyhow after a while the dust settled and grunge was said to be dead. The fact that the two dates mentioned above are connected with Nirvana doesn't mean that Nirvana was the best grunge band. Pearl Jam have sold far more albums, Soundgarden existed longer and Mudhoney kept a much more traditional sound than Nirvana. But with Kurt Cobain and Nirvana two of the best targets of the mass media died. Eddie Vedder is much more immune to media attacks. He simply gives no interviews and his band makes no videos. Pearl Jam try to be as uncommercial as possible. So the grunge phenomenon didn't last longer than three years. In a way it never really ended but changed its meaning. The word grunge is today nothing more than a designation for a musical style which is a mixture of punk, heavy metal and rock.