ENGLISH - REPORT TEXT

Grunge Music and American Popular Culture

The late 1980s found the landscape of popular music in America dominated by distinctive style of rock and roll known as Glam Rock or Hair Metal –so called because of the over-styled hair, makeup and wardrobe worn by the genre’s ostentatious rockers. Bands like Poison, Whitesnake, and Motley Crue popularized glam rock with their power ballads and flashy style, but the product had worn thin by the early 1990s. Just as superficial as the 80s, glam rockers were shallow, short on substance and musically inferior.

In 1991, a Seattle-based band called Nirvana shocked the corporate music industry with release of its debut single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which quickly became a huge hit all over the world. Nirvana’s distorted, guitar-laden sound and thought-provoking lyrics were the antithesis of glam rock and the youth of America were quick to pledge their allegiance to the brand-new movement known as grunge.

Grunge actually got its start in the Pacific Northwest during the mid-1980s. Nirvana had simply mainstreamed a sound and culture that got its start years before with bands like Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and Green River. Grunge rockers derived their fashion sense from the youth culture of the Pacific Northwest: a melding of punk rock style and outdoors clothing like flannels, heavy boots, worn out out jeans, and corduroys. At the height of movement’s popularity, when other seattle bands like Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains were all the rage, the trappings of grunge were working their way to the height of American fashion. Like the music, the teenagers were fast embracethe grunge fashion because it represented defince against corp\orate America and shallow pop culture.

The popularity of grunge music was ephemeral; by the mid- to late -1990s, its influence upon America culture had all but disappeared and most of its recognizable bands were nowhere to be seen on the charts. The heavy sound and themes of grunge were replaced on the radio waves by boy bands like the Bacstreet Boys and the bubblegum pop of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.

There are many reasons why the seattle sound faded out the mainstream as quickly as it rocketed to prominence, but the most glaring reason lies at the defiant, anti- establishment heart of the grunge movement itself. It is very hard to to buck the trend when you are the one setting it, and many of the grunge bands were never comfotable with the famethat was thrust upon them. Ultimately, the simple factthat many grunge bands were so against mainstream rock stardom eventually took the movement back to where it started: underground. The fickle American mainstream public, as quick as they were to hop on to the grunge bandwagon, were just as quick to hop off and move on to something else.