A Tragedy Labeled Grunge
And then there were none. This short sentence sums up the entirety of the grunge rock era in the early 1990s. No musical genre in history has found greatness so quickly and then raced into oblivion as fast as grunge did and few genres have relied so heavily on just a handful of artists. In the early 1990s there was a new type of music that was taking the masses by storm. There had been nothing new in the pop music world for a number of years and generation X was coming of age and demanded some kind of change. The days when Michael Jackson 's style of pop and Metallica 's methodical hair/death metal ruled the airwaves were just about to end. Generation X needed more relevance in their music even if it was not as cheery and magical as pop had sounded for some time. Madonna, ZZ Top, Rick Astley nor any other of the day 's pop or rock singers could fill this void. The band that could be most closely considered in the realm of the message of grunge would have been Pink Floyd. The band has always incorporated a very real and sober message in the music they have produced. Nothing else mainstream was similar in any way. That is where the story gets fascinating because the original grunge band members never intended to be mainstream. The majority of the bands created music to play at underground shows and the music was intended only to be played for people who really wanted to hear and feel it. The popularization of the music and the bands that received the grunge label gave way to both the rise and the undoing of the genre, the bands and the band members themselves. This paper will concentrate on the short but very eventful life of the grunge genre. A focus will be on two of the pioneer bands, Nirvana and Alice In Chains, which were both from the Seattle, Washington, area and share an epic journey through the early 1990s. In the mid-1980s the new wave of electronic rock was wearing thin with the younger generation of musicians. There had been an
Bibliography: 5. Cross, Charles R. Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain New York: Hyperion, 2001 6. Cobain, Kurt Journals New York: Riverhead Books, 2002 The Tragedy Labeled Grunge A Research Paper Written By Patrick Kelley November 18, 2010 [ 2 ]. Curt Cobain Journals (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002) 168