What Is Grunge?
 

How would someone define grunge, was it a certain type of drum style, a bridge or pre-chorus, or what?

Please don't just give examples! Thanks!

Grunge was basically used to define any band that came from Seattle in the early 90's. It had hardly anything to do with sound as none of the bands really had much in common sound wise.

it was a lot of guitars and 'alternative rock'/'hard rock' music. grunge was all about the MUSIC, not the image. they were very anti-image as they just came out on the stage w/ normal jeans (often with holes on the knees) and plaid shirts. it was definately a style.. but an anti-style.

I was told back in the day that Grunge was music which was Verse-Chorus, Verse-Chorus, the likes of Pearl Jam and Nirvana.

The last two have it pretty much down. Grunge was an attitude as well.

Asta!!

grunge was ripped jeans, long messy hair, cigarettes and melancholy.

well, that was the image side of it.

interesting point about the song style Deflok... i didn´t expect there to be a uniform song structure. thanks

the irony about the anti-image stuff, is that, that became an image and style itself. You never can win with these things, other than juust doing what comes natural to you and not trying to do something.

Sleepyjack nailed it. Grunge was about playing what you wanted and looking how you wanted to look. Sort of like punk only without the forced imagery.

Grunge bands hardly had any musical similarities (Nirvana was punk-ish, Pearl Jam was classic rock, Soundgarden was trippy metal, Alice in Chains was some sort of new dark metal creation, STP had things from numerous genres). the term grunge was mostly image/marketing, but those bands it was applied to rocked.

not to be antagonistic about the verse-chorus-verse comment, but nirvana was the only band that stuck to that structure to any extent. the bands of the "genre" were willing and able to switch things up.

Here is some info on Grunge:

ON THE ORIGINS OF GRUNGE

"We didn’t really refer to it as ‘grunge rock.’ Frankly, the word ‘grunge’ has been bandied about by rock critics for ages and ages. I remember looking at a New York rocker magazine from the early ‘80s and I saw a record review by Howard Wolfing, who is now and has for a long time been an A&R guy over at Sony Music. I can’t remember what band he was referring to, but he referred to them as ‘grunge.’ This is five years at least before anything in Seattle was called ‘grunge.’ Basically, the generic phrase ‘grunge’ was coined by a gentleman name Everett True, a British journalist who came over here and did a piece on Seattle music for the Melody Maker Music Magazine around 1988 or 1989. He’s basically the person who coined the term ‘grunge.’ Taking the whole regional music perspective one step further, Bruce was interested in focusing on one particular region whose scene had continuity and vitality and had the ingredients of a situation which mirrored or rivaled the elements that brought forth the classic rock and pop independence from days gone by. Labels like Stacks, where you had a roster of artists and people who were working there that helped develop the local scene in the Memphis. At SST Records – a rock indie from LA in the early ‘80s – a lot of people were artists on the label, and at the same time record executives. The thing about grunge music, as it were, [as] Bruce and I both realized in doing the label, [was] that the vital scene happening outside the major media grid was in Seattle. It just happened to be that all the bands were playing this slow, heavy rock. Slow as compared to hardcore music. The Melvins and Black Flag, I guess, could both be cited as the bands that slowed down the heavy punk-rock guitar assault and turned it into something a lot heavier and a lot sexier. Basically, that’s what we had to use as a springboard to get the label going."

This is from an interview with Sub Pop owner Jon Poneman by Jeremy Hadley. You can read the whole article at the link below.

http://www.thelocalplanet.com/Archiv...ArticleID=2238