How Important Was Grunge As A Musical Movement?

Agree that it's easy to imagine "grunge" referring to Dinosaur though. Mascis just seems kind of grungy.

Vedder and his ilk are so fun to sing along to loudly with your friends. "eeeewaa flerrrrr, come arwahr like feeeevin flaaaaawwrrr".

Mascis' vocal whine also kinda similar to Neil

oh yeah totally -- dino jr and neil comparisons are valid!

and re: lazy journos calling non-grunge bands grunge, seems like there was maybe a lot of this in the UK?

Late 80s at WRCT, we used the adjective "grungy" a lot to describe Touch & Go type stuff, and eventually early Sub Pop. Killdozer, Drunks with Guns, Volcano Suns even. Don't remember it being pegged as a genre until after the NME thing in 1989 about Seattle.

and re: lazy journos calling non-grunge bands grunge, seems like there was maybe a lot of this in the UK?

yeah dinosaur jr, sebadoh,belly, sugar, helmet, babes in toyland even the lemonheads got called grunge.

yeah i feel like i read some old article from the UK referring to "American grunge group Galaxie 500" ...

dino jr kinda was grunge though IMO

yea i agree

i guess there was a period pre-nirvana where grunge could mean dino jr and sonic youth

SY and Dino Jr. had legitimate ties to the grunge scene...not the least of these being Nirvana themselves, who opened for Sonic Youth before they broke big...meanwhile J Masics was a serious contender to replace Chad Channing before they settled on Dave Grohl...

also SY's split 7" with Green River, and Dino Jr.'s whole Dio-meets-the-Cure (w/ special guest, you guessed it, Neil Young) aesthetic...

Don't remember it being pegged as a genre until after the NME thing in 1989 about Seattle.

WTF? Grunge was hyped in the NME???

that's the first place it was hyped! wasn't sub pop's whole marketing plan designed to sell a regional scene to the UK?

J Masics was a serious contender to replace Chad Channing before they settled on Dave Grohl...

I'm surprised that Masics -- who was a fairly big indie-star at the time, I'd guess -- would try to join Nirvana, which hadn't yet broken big (since Grohl was the drummer on Nevermind).

i'd heard that bit about mascis/nirvana too -- who knows how serious J was about that though?

I'm imagining some oakland impresario flying everett true over to introduce krumping or hyphy or whatever it's called.

re: jmascis what is the deal with him supposedly dating uma thurman at the time?

Why would the NME give anything even close to a shit about obscure rock music half a world away that even its own home country didn't want anything to do with?

get a clue

Late 80s at WRCT, we used the adjective "grungy" a lot to describe Touch & Go type stuff, and eventually early Sub Pop. Killdozer, Drunks with Guns, Volcano Suns even. Don't remember it being pegged as a genre until after the NME thing in 1989 about Seattle.

This was also my experience - though not sure about the NME thing. I was living in Houston at the time, and pretty much any gross, ugly, obnoxious, Stooges influenced rock group was described as grunge. Local stuff like Sugarshack I spent most of the early 90s trying to convince people that PJ and STP weren't real 'grunge' and didn't even make any sense as a description of whatever Pearl Jam was.

the Sugar shack mention was supposed to be backspaced over. nobody wants to see me reminisce about extinct local groups. :/

OK I'm assuming this hype didn't amount to much, since there are no grunge records in NME's 1989 EOY list.

Oops, wrong link!

x-post SY also had a Mudhoney split 10" where the bands covered each other's songs.

But I suppose so did Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

It was actually Everett True covering Seattle bands for Melody Maker that people are referring to I think, which was in 1989.

I spent most of the early 90s trying to convince people that PJ and STP weren't real 'grunge' and didn't even make any sense as a description of whatever Pearl Jam was.

this x1000

(except I'd given up by 1995)

x-post to ― slugbaiting (rockapads)'s namedrop. Ha. I put out a Sugarshack record! Actually upon inspection of Discogs, it appears I put out 2... (1993 seems so long ago right now). End reminisce.

Sugar Shack is exactly the kind of thing that I thought of as grunge back then. Hair, distortion, noise, garage, punk roots.

to me, the biggest development of the "grunge" era was the popularization of independent labels and being a music nerd, mainly because of kurt cobain. i honestly don't listen to too much Nirvana at this point, but Cobain will always be a hero of mine for opening up my conception of what music could be. i was 11 i guess when Nirvana broke, and since i was not really a rock fan before that (hair metal type shit was just not for me) it was kind of revolutionary sounding. i had been listening to mostly hiphop since that's what EVERYONE at my pittsburgh public school was listening to. some of that stuff may have been underground to most people, but it was just the most common shit to us since everyone knew about it. but Nirvana sounded like nothing i had heard, and upon reading about them, it was Kurt's non-stop giving props to various labels and bands that made me realise you had to go out of your way to find these things. immediately, i started digging deeper. the grunge-alternative connection via Dinosaur Jr., Jane's Addiction, REM, Sonic Youth, etc opened up me to labels like SST, Caroline, Sub Pop, and all those kind of typical bands.

by the time i was 12 i was trying to go to Lollapalooza to see all this music, but i didnt get there till i was 13 in 93. and that was some eye opening shit. all the second stage acts, the variety of genres (seeing bands like Fishbone, Front 242, and Arrested Development play in a row basically went on to define how i expect to hear music to this day), all the subculture shit associated with the music..... that was some very powerful shit. i started going to high school a few months later in the college neighborhood of Pittsburgh which left me exposed on a daily basis (we took public transportation to school so i got to fuck around after school as much as i wanted) to all the underground record shops, head shops, etc that were basically there for people much older than i was. this was like crack to my friends and i who ate it all up. basement punk shows, smoking blunts and drinking 40s with the hiphop crew, raving, crate digging, etc. this was our life starting when we were 13 years old, for some of us it never stopped. and really, it's all because "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was a pop hit. i can't thank Kurt Cobain enough, i can't imagine what my life might have been like without him. big fucking ups, RIP.

http://www.outpost-daria.com/images/mystik_spiral.gif

If I have to explain to my kids what the 90s were for some reason, I'll save myself a lot of time and show them that picture. Maybe I'll play a 4 non blondes song too.

whoa, nice to see some love for Sugar Shack! Some great music came out of TX in the late 80s, very early 90s.

Dino Jr was total grunge - can't understand you guys are debating this.

I wouldn't put SY in that category but back then they were def. championning the scene (cf. 91: the Year than Punk Broke) and appropriating the sound and the style ('Dirty' era)

my early teens paralleled pipecocks, only from a crappy northern irish perspective. spent 11-16 in bands constantly, hanging round practice rooms smoking doobs and hitting strong white cider. Im glad i got it out of the way early on so by the time i was 18 i could smell a ripoff coming. thinking back on it thats where my love of heavy, messy music comes from and my hatred for bandwagon jumping.

it was Melody Maker not NME championing grunge back in 89

Absolutely. NME had nothing to do with grunge.

Yeah, and IIRC, ET was using the grunge word to describe a few different things before it got firmly affixed to Seattle stuff. Should be mentioned though that the first guy that was really championing all the early Sub Pop stuff before it even got a mention in the music weeklies was John Peel.

No surprises there though.

Don't really know what NME was championing in 1989

Madchester maybe?

Bradford and the Sundays?

Anyway grunge was too rocky for the NME in 1989

NME was always behind Melody Maker. Infact NME was usually looking for the new smiths

Okay yeah, it was MM. NME was all Madchester with some Napalm Death thrown in, IIRC. I'm trying to find and online version of that MM middle-of-the-magazine spread they did on Seattle- that was the Everett True thing I'm thinking of, probably.

http://archivedmusicpress.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/the-sub-pop-rosta-18th-march-19891.jpg

???

http://archivedmusicpress.wordpress.com/2008/07/20/everett-trues-guide-to-the-sub-pop-scene-18th-march-1989/

Grunge Bands You've Written Off/Pointedly Ignored because of their name:

Cat Butt
The Thrown-Ups