When the likes of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and The Screaming Trees stormed onto the world's international musical radar, bringing with it their deafening cacophony of distorted guitars, soul tearing vocals and despairingly honest lyrics the world sat up and took notice. They wondered, what is this incredible music and where does it come from? And almost as quickly as these questions were asked, people started to come up with answers. It's grunge they said. And it comes from Seattle. It's the Seattle Sound. And everyone cheered. And suddenly that Seattle sound was everywhere. Grunge hit the airwaves and took the world by storm and then just as quickly as it had come, it was gone, Kurt Cobain was dead and everybody was left wondering "what now?".
But the story is never so simple and perhaps the creation of the Grunge Aesthetic, as it swept across all facets of youth culture, is as important in the rise and fall of grunge as the efforts of musicians themselves in crafting the "Grunge" sound, if one could be said to have existed. For as Thomas L Bell notes in his examination of the evolution of Seattle Grunge:
"First, there never really was, and there certainly is not now, a "Seattle sound" contrary to the wishes and the hype of the popular press. What there was in Seattle was a major university along with a lively and rather recent melange of music clubs and lounges that had sprung up around areas of downtown Seattle and near the University of Washington campus."
What Bell describes in the coming together of Grunge at the beginning of the 90's is a lively alternative music scene with bands exhibiting incredible creative energy, one which existed in juxtaposition to Seattle's primary alternative music label, Sub Pop Records and the new prevalence of A&R representatives in bringing new music trends to a changing musical market. Sub Pop Records itself is largely responsible for the promotion of Grunge in its earliest days, including Soundgarden, MudHoney and Nirvana on a boxed set called "Sub Pop 200", including 20 pages of pictures, largely responsible for the creation of the "grunge rocker" image itself.
This release, more than anything else would launch both Grunge and Seattle into the music scene. Designers, trend creators and aritsts alike immediately utilised this in marketing a new form of consumable youth culture, with journalists and music commentators alike labeling this new wave of music "The Seattle Sound", even if they were only able to piece together three common threads:
1. The music is loud. Really loud. Tinny guitars, screaming and low growly vocals played through deafening amps left no doubt of this. Grunge bands had little money to finance large ensembles and even less for studio time. What you heard on their tapes was what you most likely heard live. Some artists even recorded their tapes on bare bones equipment in order to retain this live feel to their music.
2. The lyrics and the musicianship is honest, true and vibrant. The lack of money available lends authenticity to their sound as we mentioned through the congruence between live and studio performance/sound, but the lyrics themselves are brutally honest and resonated deeply with the audiences they played to.
3. Many big names in Grunge have gained significant recognition elsewhere and internationally, before gaining any tangible following/credibility in their own home town.
However whilst some of these trends reflect the actual form and operation of the scene itself, much of Grunge's culture was itself constructed in reaction to the emergence of the genre, not by those embodying its sound. The importance of A&R music reps in picking up and disseminating Grunge music cannot be underestimated, as it is the explosive force with which Grunge was hurled from the alternative scene, into the music industry by these trend savvy music lovers that would be the cause of both Grunge's downfall in the end. Marketing of cultural cool is never to be underestimated, both in its ability to change a sound from niche to mainstream and the way in which it can limit the shelf life of those trends it elevates to the status of hip and trendy:
"As the music of Seattle became more mainstream, much of the creative energy was lost. Grunge metamorphosed into a Madison Avenue advertising ploy. Movies such as "Singles" hyped the Seattle scene until it became a parody of itself."
The death of grunge itself therefore, was a result of its own success and discovery by A&R music reps in a new era of cultural consumption. As Seattle became known and characterised for its Grunge "sound", the same forces which promoted the idea of a coherent link between otherwise creatively diverse bands, instead denied an emergent scene the ability to differentiate and develop as they were defined and culturally constructed as part of an imagined movement in music:
"Seattle thus became: less a geographical locale than a psychic space... an associative cultural signifier readily transferable from music to fashion, books, generational politics"
By creating the Seattle Sound out of disparate and incongruous threads, by marketing Grunge culture and engineering its consumption as commoditised mainstream chic, higher ups in the world of music effectively limited its creative expansion, geographic location/spatiality and its ability to develop independently. The overexposure of Grunge and the assertion of its personality as the "Seattle Sound", is the death of this unassuming child of alternative rock.
References
Bell. T. L. (1998), 'Why Seattle? An examination of an Alternative Rock Culture Hearth', Journal of Cultural Geography, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 35-49
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