“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.
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