“An oral history of grunge” more the history of the Seattle scene

book-cover-everybody-loves-our-townThe “oral history of grunge” subtitle to Mark Yarm‘s new book, Everybody Loves Our Town, is fairly inaccurate, but “an oral history of the Northwest music scene, 1980-present” isn’t going to sell books, nor intrigue anyone outside of music geeks and rock journalists.

There are various stories told in Yarm’s book, wherein there’s some confusion as to what song was playing at what time, or what show happened when – and that gets a little old. Does there need to be four people saying what song the U-Men were playing when they set the moat on fire at Bumbershoot? Not necessarily. What matters is the fact that they set the moat on fire, not what happened to be playing when they did it. It’s a forest for the trees kind of situation, and it one of the things that lend a dirty patina of complaint to the book. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that “grunge” is just a dirty, nasty-sounding branch of rock and roll, coming as it does from the worlds of both punk and metal, but Everybody Loves Our Town certainly has quite a few people manifesting themselves as cantankerous and negative.
Continue reading

From grunge to riot grrrl to girl power

book-cover-1989Read back-to-back, Joshua Clover’s 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About and Marisa Meltzer’s Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution In Music stand to offer a view as to how music had a chance to radically shift as the eighties ended, but essentially lost their impact after corporate co-option.

Clover’s book offers up a dense polemic that proffers hip-hop, acid house and grunge as the genres which were to cause a sea change as the decade changed. While a little over-reaching, and owing much of its narrative thrust to Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History?,” Clover still makes the point that “there are no novelty songs, only failed genres.”

From that phrase, one can extrapolate grunge as a genre that — and I paraphrase Clover here — takes the sword that punk had beaten from a plowshare and turns it upon itself. Grunge was so nihilistic that it was incapable of sustaining itself for an extended period of time. Grunge represented the general tectonic shift that Clover posits took place in the time around 1989: “a way of preserving antagonism in the very moment of its cancellation.” Essentially, grunge — while a movement that took the rage of punk — took none of punk’s politics, choosing instead to focus on that feeling.
Continue reading