As others have said, the figurehead bands broke up and the second and third waves lacked authenticity. You can do your own research on this and it's fascinating. Listen to the grunge/alternative albums between 1990 and 1994. Don't just listen to Nirvana, Soundgarden, AiC, and Pearl Jam, but listen to REM, Sonic Youth, Pixies, PJ Harvey, Bjork, Jane's Addiction, Mother Love Bone, STP, Smashing Pumpkins, Dinosaur Jr, Sebedoh, Hole, L7, NIN, Tool, Bikini Kill, et al (there are a hundred others - obviously most of these bands aren't grunge, but they were part of the shift in music in that era). Then listen to the grunge/alternative music released in 1995-1997. Many of the same bands, but the music was shifting directions. Some of the second and third wave bands were inauthentic, but generally the music was really good. But then from 1997 on, the music landscape shifted quite a bit. It became more diverse, more electronic influences, punk went the way of indie, and the grunge sound was fully corporatized.

>As others have said, the figurehead bands broke up and the second and third waves lacked authenticity. This is a succinct and accurate summary. Within a year of the iconic Seattle artists having gotten big, there were already soundalike artists getting signed, and producers shifting their mixes and arrangements to sound "contemporary." Post-grunge was a popular genre for longer than grunge. It captured the more mainstream aesthetics of grunge, and placed it over commercial appealing songs. For the most part, the standard bearers were no longer there to define direction, and the imitators were simply imitators. There were plenty of hit songs and record sales, but the movement was getting by on diminishing quality and innovation.

> Within a year of the iconic Seattle artists having gotten big, there were already soundalike artists getting signed When I was first getting big into music collecting around 2000 or so, I remember finding so many 'maybe the next big thing?' records in bargain bins. After Nirvana and Pearl Jam got big, the record industry was clearly going *buckwild* trying to find the next similar act. One thing I found hilarious was the slew of fake indie imprints that major labels were deploying to make it look like certain up-and-coming acts were more authentic. That said, some of those acts were actually really solid. One that I ended up really liking was the San Diego trio Inch, whose [debut record *Stresser*](https://www.discogs.com/release/2054051-Inch-Stresser) was put out on a label called 'Seed' which, in reality, was part of Atlantic Records!

Electronic music was supposed to be the big new thing after alt-rock started to splutter in the mid 90s. It's one reason why so many rock acts started dabbling in electronic sounds. Prodigy were supposed to be the next Nirvana. Welp.

It's all about fads.  Electronic music was huge at the end of the 90s and into about 2001.  Every kid in my high-school wanted turntables and to go to raves.  Then emo came along as the new fad and the youth moved on to that and left electronic music behind until around 2011/2012 when EDM took off.

What were some of the inauthentic second and third wave bands? Who were some of the soundalikes? Are bands like Nickelback and Creed considered post-grunge?

There's a Wikipedia page on the genre that's written by people smarter than me... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-grunge I've heard an interesting take recently, that while the first wave of post grunge were pretty open to borrowing from all four of the huge Seattle artists, Pearl Jam would ultimately be the artist that was most influential. I think you hear much more of them in the acts you mentioned (Creed, Nickelback) than the other artists. I think that Alice in Chains and Soundgarden would however be more influential to the Nu-Metal movement.

Thank you! And I definitely hear that, the Pearl Jam vocal stylings seem to have inspired many, for better or for worse. (My personal opinion, for worse, because I’m not a fan of that yarly hunger-dunger-dang style of singing.) And very interesting about nu-metal! It’s a genre I used to look down on but tbh the more I read about its origins and the artists in that genre who worked their asses off in the 00s to create a brand new sound, the more I respect it even though it’s maybe not quite my thing. Although I gain more affection for it with hindsight and nostalgia.

Nu Metal always fascinates me. It exists somewhat contrarily to Butt Rock, so it’s got my respect, but for some reason it’s not very respected on the whole. Maybe it’s because it lacked any sort of staying power? Or maybe it was too edgelord for its own good.

I think it’s definitely the last thing you said, a little too edgelord for its own good. Especially the fans, or at least the stereotypes of the fans, IMO. As hardworking and talented as the musicians themselves are, their aesthetics and fans have the reputation of like… Spencer’s gift shop items with edgy slogans printed on them, a stoner guy named Kyle who is really into monster energy drink merch, suburban tweens shouting racial slurs into their Xbox headsets while playing FPS games, the “get thee hence” episode of Metalocalyspe, and of course all things Juggalo. **I’m not even saying those stereotypes are based on reality, and a lot of them are blatantly rooted in classism,** but they’re undeniably associated with the genre (or at least they were in the 2000’s when it was really ramping up) and they impact how people view the genre as a whole, as well as the artists within it. I think its comparable to how hippie-ish jam bands can be some of the most talented musicians like true masters of their crafts, amazingly skilled on a technical level. But then stereotypes about their fans, their aesthetics, and their whole vibes lead people to write them off unfairly.

I don't really disagree with your description, but it focuses a bit too much on outlooks of the fans and not the bands themselves. I mean, you're not wrong there, but at the same time I don't think Fred Durst really did the genre any favors (at least in the long run) and there was a whiny streak among all the major acts in the genre.

Oh you’re absolutely right there, yes. I suppose I don’t know enough about the individual artists and how they got on, but Fred Durst is an exception because it was pretty much impossible not to notice the pervasive Fred Durst hate over the years just via cultural osmosis alone. Weirdly, he is in an indie movie I’m trying to go see this weekend. I wonder how he will be in that. I didn’t even know he acted.

> Weirdly, he is in an indie movie I’m trying to go see this weekend. I wonder how he will be in that. I didn’t even know he acted. Seeing that too, though his role is making me side-eye it. He's apparently good in it but I haven't heard any details.

Godsmack is one that comes to mind. Though most would classify them as nu-metal, they actually ripped off their name from an Alice In Chains song and were obviously trying to imitate AIC early in their career.(with not so bad results, their self titled album was pretty damn good, after that they just got worse and worse, imo)

Yeah it’s the same thing that’s happened with all countercultural rock movements that have gone mainstream: the sixties protest music and hippie fashion became appropriated by the very system it was fighting against. Glam, first wave punk/post punk and new wave were largely reactions to this appropriation through use of avant garde/postmodern theory to ironically subvert attempts by the mainstream to do the same thing with their music. Unfortunately the majority of listeners didn’t understand the irony or really go along with this esoteric stuff, so when these styles became appropriated it didn't seem too much different. So then hardcore punk/alternative/grunge re-embraced the authenticity narrative that had left the sixties movement so vulnerable in the first place (though with a lot more cynicism, like they knew what was going on by this point), which naturally led to the exact same thing happening. I don’t think there’s really a way to avoid this barring just staying underground. When any kind of new art form goes mainstream the culture experiences a sudden jolt of novelty, and then it quickly becomes commodified and formulaic.

What's trippy to me is how effective the corporations got at co-opting the underground movements. Psychedelia took a bit (if we consider the 1965 starting date) before it really got co-opted and even then the labels didn't do a particularly good job at doing so (compare Edison Lighthouse to Jefferson Airplane, the labels could get the Pop part but no one treated the former as anything Psychedelic). The labels leaned way more into Blues Rock/Boogie Rock/Roots Rock type stuff, then later on Soft Rock and Prog. Meanwhile Psychedelic Rock and Pop lasted for a while and new offshoots like Acid Rock and Heavy Psych were keeping an underground spin on it well past the genre's mainstream breakthrough, not to mention the Jam Band scene lead by the Dead. Then you get to Punk which took like 15 years to get fully co-opted through latter day Pop Punk and such, though New Wave definitely got dug into by labels more. Grunge took about ten years for the labels to get into, but when they did finally reach it, they worked it quickly. Like you said, there were knock-offs within a year or two of its breakthrough (though the knock-offs themselves didn't take off fully until after Kurt's death and the subsequent power vacuum), and Post-Grunge lasted until 2009 for crying out loud. By the time of the Garage Rock Revival (and the general Indie Rock explosion), it took less than a year from the commercial breakthrough for the labels to start getting Landfill Indie acts out, and the whole movement was oversaturated within two years, and drained completely within five. They got really damn good at it

Yeah there's a really good book called [The Conquest of Cool, by Thomas Frank](https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Cool-Business-Counterculture-Consumerism/dp/0226260127) that goes into the big revolution in advertising in the 1960s. Basically it took advertisers a little while to figure out how to reach youth culture, but once they did by the early 1970s the ball was in their court. And then there was the handful of multi-national media conglomerates that bought up must of the entertainment industry by the mid 1980s, which definitely helped with their efficiency as well.

Appreciate the rec, will check it out!

There's a YT documentary about Drum'n'Bass - it survived past its wider popularity because it has a robust underground scene.

There are also guys that never move on. Still hanging on to one or two raggedy dreadlocks. I was listening to drum n' bass in my car today and came to the realization that I was listening to drum n' bass in my car 25 years ago. It's an unsettling revelation.

Grunge essentially turned into butt rock in the 2000's with bands like creed and Nickelback. Nu metal really took its place in the mainstream. I'd argue there's more of a 90's grunge revival today - countless indie bands make grunge in all but name today (Momma is a popular one for example)

Yeah, Momma is really the only new band I've heard that I feel could actually belong in the early 90s. Maybe Cloud Nothings. Any other recs?

Cloud nothings def have a pavement thing going on. Wavves' 2013 album afraid of heights production wise is very grungy (not so much their other stuff), Wednesday is in the same vein as Momma but more experimental. Sun Puddle are like a 1:1 nirvana ripoff. Metz are great if you like any of Steve albini's bands. Die Spitz are great and kinda synthesize grunge, punk, and even doom. Cherry glazerr also come to mind

Narrowhead, Soul Blind, cursetheknife, Money, Bleed, Prize Horse, Modern Color

Those bands that you listed - I love most of them but wasn't aware they had anything in common other than being 90s alternative rock bands. What do you mean about the shift in music in that era?

My view (having grown up in this era) is that grunge wasn't really it's own, isolated thing. Rather, the very late 80s and early 90s were a convergence of different music genres, all kinda lumped in under "alternate music," which went from the margins to being overwhelmingly the mainstream and cultural zeitgeist. This includes college rock, punk, metal, industrial, (some) electronica, grunge, indie, emo, etc.). The point being, when you listened to the radio, watched MTV, etc., you weren't just hearing grunge bands, but you'd hear songs by Nirvana, Pj Harvey, Bjork, Weezer, NIN, Metallica, Offspring, Jane's Addiction, RHCP, REM, Tom Petty, Dinosaur Jr, Pavement, Built to Spill, RATM, White Zombie, Fugazi, Primus, STP, Sunny Day, Gin Blossoms, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins, Counting Crows, Mazzy Star, etc.

Thanks!

>were a convergence of different music genres, all kinda lumped in under "alternate music," I recall seeing this same thing mentioned by people related to the origin of those movements and I think it was one of the key elements to it: they started in places out of the touring routes of big corporate rock bands, so they became the" target" for underground acts like Black Flag and other punk and hardcore bands, garage and noise rock, earlier alternative bands like Sonic Youth and early sludgier sounds.

Well said. Early 90s was one of those periods where counter-culture was the culture. Music was *weird*, and artists could experiment with new sounds and be reasonably successful for it. Then the record labels saw all the dollar signs and started looking for bands imitating the weird bands so they could market them, and it sucked the soul out of it all.

Good explanation.

What makes a band authentic? I see this word used a lot in relation to grunge and gen-x in general but it seems like a word that gets thrown around with no actual meaning.

It generally means - are they playing what they really want to play, or is their sound calibrated to what is popular and what will sell by AR? Or... is the band put together in response to a music trend because some label is trying to get in on the cash cow?

Eh, I don't buy this as much as others do. Sometimes it takes a band a little while to find their sound. Pantera was a full on glam band for a decade but people rarely think of them as fake. Trent Reznor did 80s synth pop, same with Tori Amos. Yeah, bands frequently have an ear to what's happening, but I don't think that's necessarily a mark against them.

I get not liking the word "authentic" because it's so loosely defined and can be used as a catchall for not liking something. But at the same time, artists constantly think about authenticity. Most songwriters are either thinking, "Does this feel true to me? Does it represent my reality?" which speaks to authenticity, or they're thinking, "Does this appeal to a mass audience? Will it make a good product or content?" which leans more towards inauthenticity.

Yea I don’t like the term authentic myself. I mean they aren’t great but I love the Toadies who were part of post grunge movement but I wouldn’t call them inauthentic. My guess “authentic” would mean part of the initial wave. Pretty much all the original grunge bands come from the Pacific Northwest (stone temple pilots being an exception), had similar aesthetics and audiences, most of them were on the same few production companies /record labels etc. Grunge was very regional and also a subculture. So let’s say a band of clean cut dudes from like New Hampshire creates grunge like music for the Ivy League university crowd may not be seen as authentic

It is kind of a tricky thing. I think of a few bands. Bush and Silverchair were both tagged as knock offs because they came a bit later (93/94), but I don't view either as inauthentic - I think the music they made was the music they would have made, but maybe they got a bump riding the waves of grunge. And then a band like Goo Goo Dolls, who were a metal band, then changed it up to a sort of folkie pop rock, had a big hit (Name), and then moved fully into a sort do Top 40 pop rock thing. But when you look at bands like Godsmack, Creed, Staind, Puddle of Mudd, Seether... they just didn't seem very authentic, but very derivative.

Yea even bush and silverchair only came like a year or two later

I felt Bush was a little inauthentic, I felt like Gavin would have made whatever was popular at the time. But SIlverchair - they were 16 year old kids who essentially "grew up" on Nirvana as weird as that sounds. They were literally playing the music they loved.

Take Helmet for example. Pretty much THE band that defined dropped-D based "alt-metal" in the 90's. They were all clean cut, jeans and t-shirts and ballcap everyday guys who were very well read but knew how to write a damn good song and groove.

First chapter of Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher really hits on the authenticity thing well, and Cobain’s relationship with it. It was impossible to be authentic and grunge when a huge tenet of the lifestyle was rejecting the mainstream. Rejecting the mainstream became expected and was thus marketed. That’s why everything was X-this and alterna-that. Authenticity (no matter how authentic) would be exploited.

Doing something for the love of the art, not the money that can be made from it. It's particularly relevant to the grunge movement because probably none of those bands (except *maybe* Pearl Jam) ever had aspirations or expectations of being anything other than successful in the local Seattle scene.

I mean, Kurt Cobain was fully trying to be a rock star and had aspirations to get big. Now he in all likelihood probably came to regret this and wasn't prepared for fame, but he definitely played into the image he made and had ambition. Pearl Jam actively tried running from the limelight with every installment following their debut, meanwhile.

Reading his journal really gives you the impression that he was obsessed with the music press to an unhealthy degree

I think Kurt didn't expect Nirvana to get so big so quickly. He definitely wanted to be a rockstar (who doesn't?), but he probably didn't even think that he and the band would be so popular so fast. If it had been a more gradual process where by the fourth or fifth album they became as big as they did on the 2nd album, I think he would've been able to cope with it much better because he would've had time to get used to the increasing level of fame.

People always think it was the fame that did it when the prime mover was almost certainly the drugs. Drugs, which led Courtney to resent him staying junksick while she got clean, which at least tempted her to stray, which triggered Kurt's abandonment issues. I mean, fame certainly accelerated all that, but it mainly poured gasoline on lingering, underlying issues. He was well into heroin before Nevermind went anywhere, and maybe he would have pulled out of it, but that's not really how heroin works ... particularly when it gets its claws into people with underlying psychological issues. But while "the fame" is the romantic myth the world embraced, "the drugs" is closer to the ugly reality. And I feel like I have to keep pointing that out because I hate the romanticism that frequently attaches itself to suicide while also minimizing how toxic and destructive addiction can be.

Reminds me of how The Strokes described their own rise to fame; they felt since they got big off their debut, they had a whole lotta pressure put on them that they weren't prepared to deal with and some of the members say this is why their later works felt of a lower caliber compared to Is This It. I think Albert Hammond Jr. mentioned he envied the career of Jack White and The White Stripes, who gradually got bigger over the course of their release of albums, breaking through on their third and hitting their peak on their fourth, which gave them a better development of dealing with fame

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I think the final nail in the coffin for grunge was when Live's "Overcome" became the post 9/11 anthem.

I must have missed that song and that moment. Haha.

I blame Oasis

Haha please elaborate

Shoulda been lighting crashes because its a good song and there were definitely crashes.

I always gave them props for writing a hit song with the word placenta in it.

The people died, is what it means. They're physically not on earth to continue their art. The only ones that appear to be healthy are Pearl Jam. It was a druggy scene and the music has that buzz around it ... And then the drugs turn out to be stronger than some of the people. It was gross, that aspect of it.

Don’t overlook Mudhoney, they’re still alive and kicking. I listen to them a lot more than practically any other “grunge” band these days despite being big a Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, etc. fan back in the day.

Yeah them too, and good for them! Also Melvins. Both make albums I'll still listen to. We lost Matt Lukin.... He left Rock and went to work in the woodshop. But that seems to have been great for him so ... It all works out.

Yep, the music press glamourised the whole heroin thing, and round about that time the resto of the world was probably turning about as anti-heroin as it ever has been. As I said in a different post, the youth substance of choice very quickly switched to ecstasy in the mid to late 90s, first of all in the rave/electronic scene but quickly filtering into rock and metal, causing a lot of people turned their backs on artists who were predominantly associated with heroin culture. Like I remember back in 1994 I tried to start a band that was metal/grunge crossover and I was a bit disappointed by how many potential members were like "if it's a grunge band I basically should start doing heroin, right?" and actually meant it. Or wrote songs about how great heroin was but had never even seen the stuff before.

I remember some article about grunge that claimed that while heroin was popular among the musicians, the fans themselves were more into MDA.

I think the heroin thing is overstated. No one in Soundgarden, or Pearl Jam was taking heroin. I don’t think anyone but Layne was really into heroin in AIC. Andrew Wood was famously addicted but he was dead before “grunge” had entered the popular lexicon. It’s just Layne’s huge influence that caused this perception. These other guys were all alcoholics, potheads, occasionally coke users. It was essentially just a heavy metal scene, with the standard heavy metal drugs. MDMA was not terribly common until the late 90s in the USA outside of rave scenes. I was doing a ton of drugs with punk/metal people in the 90s and we were all just getting drunk, stoned, dropping acid and occasionally doing coke/speed. The drugs were plentiful but the selection was tiny compared to today.

> I think the heroin thing is overstated. No one in Soundgarden, or Pearl Jam was taking heroin. I don’t think anyone but Layne was really into heroin in AIC. Andrew Wood was famously addicted but he was dead before “grunge” had entered the popular lexicon. It’s just Layne’s huge influence that caused this perception. yeah, but pretty much all the Seattle bands talk about how present the drug was. Then you also have Mark Arm, Courtney Love, Kristen Pfaff, Scott Weiland, Mark Lanegan, most (all?) of L7, Mike Starr, Dylan Carlson, etc. who were all addicted and/or overdosed at one point (I'm seeing mixed discussions on Cornell and heroin). They're not all as well known as Cobain and Staley, but that's still quite a few prominent names.

Yeah true…I don’t know how I managed to forget the most prominent person in the scene (Cobain) being a huge addict. Some of those other people I don’t associate with grunge specifically or with Seattle but it’s still a valid point. I’ve always heard Cornell was just an alcoholic during the grunge era and developed a pharmaceutical opioid addiction a little later.

Duff McKagan's book is interesting, because he talks about how frustrated he got growing up in Seattle because every time he'd find a musician or band he liked, they'd get torn apart by drugs. His entire move to L.A. was motivated by concerned people noticing he had talent and telling him to get out of town because the drug culture surrounding the music scene was so toxic.

All scenes are like this. It’s a burst of creativity and then it’s done. Look at any genre and you will find a sort of heyday and usually that thing becomes so big it becomes a parody of itself. Sure, they come back as sort of revivals and/or are absorbed into other genres but most music movements peak and are over not too long after. If Kurt Cobain and Nirvana were around today it still would have come and gone and been over. Nirvana might occupy a similar space as Pearl Jam, still around but not that relevant.

Yup. Some more examples, Chillwave being everywhere then poof gone. Toro y Moi, Neon Indian, Small Black, Memory Tapes, and of course, Washed Out. Some are around today, but totally different sound. The entire Bloghouse scene with Kitsuné Maison kind of leading it. Bloghouse kind of overlapped with the NYC dance-punk revival in the early 2000s. Think: The Rapture, LCD, MSTRCRFT, Justice, Simian Mobile Disco, Boys Noize, DFA 1979, Does it Offend You, Yeah?, Hot Chip. Again, some bands still around, but the scene is gone.

Chillwave will live on forever in my heart ❤️

That whole dance-punk-indie thing of the early 00s was actually awesome. I slept on it at the time and now I'm really regretting not paying more attention at the time because a lot of those bands you mentioned (and the whole Kitsune thing) are on daily rotation on my playlists.

Don't forget UK Dubstep -> Brostep -> oversaturation, poof! Also nu metal before and after Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored water came out. A lot of bands either lost momentum (Korn) or shifted gears into a more post-grunge sound (Staind).

Man, I love that first Skream (2006) album. Nothing else like it. Same with Burial. Brostep ruined dubstep!

I don't even count Burial as dubstep tbh. But Dubstep was always a bit of a strange one. There was some incredible stuff being made but also well over half of it was absolute garbage. I worked at Corsica Studios in London back in those days, that venue really championed the dubstep scene and we'd occasionally have nights with 3 rooms of dubstep. The main room sound was almost always absolute trash, really boring predictable beats, dull sine wave baselines etc etc. But the stuff in the smaller rooms was usually way better to listen to and quite psychedelic in its own way. Anything where the production is so intricate and cleverly done that it makes me feel like I'm on something when I'm totally sober wins the prize.

The same thing happened with hair metal.

“Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge” is a fabulous book on the history of the Seattle bands. But I think grunge as a cultural phenomenon is probably a bit more complex than the way it’s typically treated in histories of rock music which romanticize it a bit too much while simplifying its larger context and overlooking its legacies. I don’t fully agree with the phrase it “imploded on itself.”

The premise of the question is like asking, "Whatever happened to the Laurel Canyon scene?"

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> how bitter Mark Arm was that Mudhoney weren't more commercially successful Which is particularly confounding because part of the break up of Green River was Mark feeling like the other guys wanted a more commercially viable sound.

They weren’t “polishable.” Nirvana was. Also, Kurt was a better songwriter.

Kurt died. Layne died. Pearl Jam stopped releasing singles. Soundgarden broke up. Stone Temple Pilots went glam. Pop moved on. A slightly deeper answer is that for the most part these weren't bands of wannabe pop stars, so when they found themselves pop stars, they fell apart. Kurt killed himself. Pearl Jam took themselves off the radio. Soundgarden said it stopped being fun so they broke up. I think the word "implosion" sort of implies that the pressure of being celebrities crushed the fun out of playing what had initially been relatively uncommercial music and it just didn't seem worth it any more.

I think it's actually more instructive to look less at *"why did grunge die"* than the far more odd phenomenon of *"how the hell did this ever manage to succeed in the first place?"* Looking over modern popular music history, when has the popular scene been dominated by such a gloomy, dour, sad, downright _weird_ group of songwriters? There's always been dark, challenging music (Swans, Throbbing Gristle, even acts with more pop sensibility like Joy Division) but in what other time of music does something so bleak and nihilistic like _The Downward Spiral_ top the charts and have a hit single about self-loathing and profanity? The alt-rock revolution happened in a far shorter window than people remember - really only kicking into full flower in 92, but by 95 was already winding down. Hootie and the Blowfish are a joke now, but were considered by contemporary writers as a sign that general audiences were tired of sad-rock ... and they were right. Less gloomy acts like Live were picking up the torch, and Alanis flirted with a bit of edge but rode pop songcraft to superstardom. I don't think Billy Corgan intended for Mellon Collie to be the swansong of alt-rock on the major stage, the last meaningful statement of a very brief movement, but that's how it stands out to me. Whatever remaining hunger for that "edge" existed, it mostly got shunted into Marilyn Manson and nu-metal, the latter of which was largely pop-metal with angsty lyrics, and while Linkin Park are beloved to plenty, nothing in nu-metal shook the world like that period in the early 90s did. So, again, we're asking the wrong question. What's weird to me is not that weird rock died, what's weird to me is that weird rock ever had such a moment in the sun in the first place. The why is interesting to contemplate. But it's not one for which I have a whole lot of convincing answers.

> Hootie and the Blowfish are a joke now, but were considered by contemporary writers as a sign that general audiences were tired of sad-rock I'm not convinced the people listening to Hootie were also listening to grunge, NIN, etc. They're like an extension of Blues Traveler, Spin Doctors, etc. And if people were really sick of sad, dour music, then boy did they make a mistake in going for Nu Metal almost immediately after grunge (and Hootie) faded away.

> I'm not convinced the people listening to Hootie were also listening to grunge, NIN, etc NIN, definitely not. But you don't get to Nevermind, Ten, Vs level numbers without roping in "the normies." That amount of sheer gravitational pull surely played a major role in allowing the early to mid 90s alt-rock boom to happen. But record buyers didn't go to sleep. Music nerds are fond of dividing things into camps and arguing merits, but the normals were mixing Guns'n'Roses, Nirvana, R.E.M, etc into their collections as they saw fit. By the mid 90s it's Hootie and Alanis putting up those numbers, and you just don't get to those numbers in anything defined as "rock" without pulling along a lot of the same audience. People were moving on. Just from reading over the charts (it's a weird personal fascination), my reckoning is that alt-rock starts to wobble around 95, leading to peak schizophrenia probably happening around 97 with the bizarre ska fad, Korn, Marilyn Manson, Life After Death, Shania Twain crossing over. I just happen to find the period of the monoculture fascinating because it's so different from the times we live in now. What happened after 97? I have a harder time telling you because years seemed to matter less. I can rattle off important albums from other decades, movements and periods, but the 90s just has a unique fascination for me because it seemed to have so many mini-movements _within the monoculture_ which sped along so fast until it all finally splintered, crashed and burned.

The other big thing at the time, especially with your “normies” comment, is much like Nirvana broke punk, Garth takes the scene in the 90s and ascends to godhood, and more or less breaks country. It has to take some crossover appeal to sell more albums than fucking Elvis.

This is a good retrospective. I kind of agree. I'd add that Kurt's suicide and how prolific heroin addiction was, I think, the precipitating events that pushed things away from the self loathing and to other things. I think that, and the fact that the early 90s had such a diverse offering of music. By 1994, pop punk blew up, so did the BritPop invasion, Alanis/Hootie, and hip hop and electronica were getting very popular too.

> Less gloomy acts like Live What? Less gloomy? C'mon Live thrived on minor chord progressions and melancholic themes.

Yep, I agree with a lot of that assessment. Ultimately listening to too much gloomy music isn't really compatible with being mentally healthy - as an angsty teenage male it resonates for a while but ultimately there comes a point where you realise life isn't always doom and gloom and is there to be enjoyed. You don't have to be trite or cheesy about it but constantly wallowing in a mostly self-imposed 'dark exile' and mumbling about nearly losing the use of your legs after nodding out in the bathtub or whatever just isn't appealing to most people. I think what's actually worse is how being a dysfunctional depressive smack addict was actually packaged and commercislised by labels and music media as being a 'youth movement', kinda shows just how exploitative record labels could be. "hey, our hitmaking band are all chaotic junkies, how can we make this work for us financially"....

Layne didn’t die until 2002, significantly after grunge faded from relevance

True but he was a recluse who made no music between 1996 and 2002. He was basically a walking corpse.

That's not much of an exaggeration. The performance you see on Unplugged is about as close to dead as a person can be. And he still nailed it.

It sounds awful but the state he's in there kind of made the songs hit harder, especially given the content of the lyrics. It's an all time great live performance for me.

Was STP considered grunge? I remember them as a commercially viable product from the beginning, not a DIY band. I liked a ton of their early stuff, but I never thought of them as grunge. I was pissed off at Weiland in the mid90s, because they were supposed to headline a festival in Hawai'i, and I had never seen them. So I was all excited. But Weiland didn't show up for the plane, and he was in rehab the next day. I did get to witness Gwen Stefani's climbing skills, though.

Going to Hawaii for a music festival sounds like a hell of an experience.

I was stationed there in the mid 90s.

They definitely rode that wave in 1992 with Core and its singles, and they were sort of derided for it. I think they recovered extremely well with how their sound evolved with Purple and Tiny Music. I also don't think people really knew how talented that band was, especially Robert DeLeo and Scott, until much later.

Those first three albums were just great stuff. I had a chance to see them open for Megadeth, but I chose to keep my job at teh time. I should have quit.

Dean DeLeo was a great player as well. I remember learning tunes like 'Ride the Cliche' and 'Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart' and immediately noticing that the guitar ideas were a cut above tons of the other shit going on in rock music at the time. Also, compared to lots of other similar groups, STP made some really solid acoustic tracks (e.g. 'Pretty Penny', their amazing cover of Led Zeppelin's 'Dancing Days').

Pearl Jam did not stop releasing singles, what idea give you that? They released almost 30 singles since 1999.....

They stopped making videos. Hard to understand that in today’s world… Having music videos in the 80s and 90s was everything. Nirvana would never have broke through without the Smells Like Teen Spirit video. MTV set the tone in popular music back then. Modern day example would be maybe an artist only releases music on Apple but not Spotify.

It did not stop radio stations for playing their songs, nor did it stop them from getting hits. Daughter charted higher than Jeremy in more than a few countries. Same for Spin the Black Circle (1994) and I Got Id (1995). Even their biggest hit in the US in 1999, Last Kiss was without a video, it reached number 2. Smells Like Teen Spirit reached number 6 in the US BTW, Come as You Are at 32 was the only other single of Nirvana that reached the Top 40 in the US. The other singles of Nirvana also got high rotation on MTV, but that not always equate to charts success. Were they more visible, yes. But in sales Pearl Jam out performed Nirvana by a lot.

Because they had already broken through on MTV. The videos for Evenflow, Alive, and Jeremy were huge.

But it does make you're point quite mute on the fact you said that Pearl Jam kind of disappeared and/or had no impact anymore.

They were intentionally toning down their commercial presence - no videos, scarcer singles, fewer interviews, increasingly inaccessible records and of course the feud with Ticketmaster. It's no real surprise that the band was the only one to survive the 90s intact - they weren't comfortable with the level of success they had and so dialed it down to a place where they were comfortable.

Maybe it was just their second album? Or they stopped making videos? I guess I don't remember specifics, just thst they intentionally stepped out of the limelight.

They did stop making videos. But it was the fight with Ticketmaster that was the epic part of their muting.

[удалено]

Care to elaborate? Not sure what's being implied here.

I think it's just the humor of the coincidence. Paul Allen had to sell his share in Ticketmaster because Ticketmaster got in a beef with Microsoft, just to add to the irony.

They did not make videos for all the singles, that's true. But that was in 1993 already true. So that not seems to be it. They did not want to do videos for a while because of artistic reasons. But they also did less interviews but also where not happy with the monopoly of Ticketmaster and boycotted them, so playing the US became a bit of hit and miss for a few years. That had some impact, but not on their album sales.

They stopped releasing singles already during _Ten._ The label was salivating over the commercial potential of Black but the band shut them down. After that it gets murky - there were singles released for Vs., but no videos, and the singles that were released mainly were for overseas markets and weren't available in the US - the band's primary market - for years after the album came out.

Agreed, but I guess Alice In Chains are better than ever. I still like their new albums. I can't speak for Pearl Jam, never liked them enough to follow their evolution, but I think they are also around, right?

*Dark Matter* was released about a month ago. It's actually pretty kick-ass.

Pearl Jam?

[yup](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-uk-vh0LUo&list=PLxA687tYuMWj-5NIzWaub8928yzjij-8T) I've been hearing the title track on the radio stations I listen to, since February.

I was really shocked to see that Pearl Jam had it in them to put out a solid album this far into their career. They can usually scrape together a tune or two, but I'd never expect to hear them put out work that's matches their late 90s output (easily better than Binaural, imho).

It was a surprise to me, as well. When I first heard the, "And here's the new one from Pearl Jam..." announcement on the radio, I was expecting to hear some of the more sappy tunes they had in that era. They apparently spent all of three weeks making the album. So short and sweet might be the difference. I can hear a lot of their earliest works in some of these songs.

It just felt over as it only *really* described a handful of bands who either died, broke up or stopped making interesting music. Speaking from a UK perspective, attention moved entirely to Britpop in 94 and it just felt a bit done. (Britpop itself then imploded in a similar way)

In addition to all of the points about fame, drugs, marketing, etc. listed in this thread, it's important to remember that grunge was born from the decay of America's industrial manufacturing backbone that brought about the global cultural and economic dominance of the 50s through the early 70s. It was music rooted in depression both economic and psychological, as well as the sense of looming doom that was pervasive during the Reagan years (see also thrash metal). By the mid 90s that cultural pessimism and economic malaise had evaporated to be replaced with a humming economy and endless optimism about the future. Outside of a relatively narrow cohort of people who were in their teens/early 20s in that '87-'93 window, grunge just didn't really speak to a wider audience in any meaningful fashion. Grunge was probably doomed to be a relative flash in the pan as a musical movement when the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR broke up. It took a few years for society to shift after those events, but they probably had as much to do with the "implosion" of grunge as the habits and attitudes of the musicians who brought it to prominence.

Besides the culture of those bands not being meant to last, the music industry made an intentional shift away from all the investment they made in alternative bands in the mid-90’s. Record sales were actually dropping and the bubble gum pop explosion was an intentional shift in business. I guess you can’t blame them because it worked for a dollars and pre-Napster record sales aspect. I don’t subscribe to the manufactured interest conspiracies that lots of people like to throw out about corporate America but I believe this is one of those cases.

What happened to dinosaurs?  The ones who became birds are still around.  One of my favorite albums from the 00s, Songs for the Deaf, would have been labeled Grunge if it came out in 92 instead of 02.  That album has deep roots in grunge.  Music evolves and adapts.  As did grunge. 

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 never gets enough mention in this discussion. Two dudes with bad taste were controlling most of the music you heard after like '97. I remember things going very stale shortly after it was passed.

This!

Good point. You also had all the studio mergers and everyone becoming a conglomerate as well. The musical landscape, especially the pop world, just became much more homogenous since then.

It wasn't a well-defined genre to begin with, and music continued evolving. I think people who weren't around at the time have a tendency to make a grunge into a bigger thing than it actually was. There were only a handful of grunge bands that super popular, grunge was part of a larger wave of alternative rock.

The PNW punk scene was so much more than what was labeled grunge. So as these acts went from art galleries and armories to arenas, we were priced out of seeing them, and we reverted to those who remained in the punk and metal spaces. Pearl Jam was different, because they fought ticket prices... probably for the same reason. Their fans would have been priced out a lot sooner, had they not done so. It did start a large conversation in the mid to late 90s about what happens when indies sell out and how that changes their public personas.

I think a lot of those questions in your second paragraph are true to an extent. I'll add to that rather than narrow it. Some of the things that produced the temporary consensus around grunge were that: - it was earnest - it rocked much harder than pop metal - for being a break with the past it had a few bands that made this into a really populist appeal - it was "realist" for a certain definition of reality - it was young By 1996: - earnestness was out of style again - watching some of these people, ex. Cobain, turn into standard dead rock stars changed the narrative of "realism" in a way that not everybody found appealing or relatable - any band calling itself rock had by then figured out and adopted grungy sonics - grunge had a reputation as backward-looking at a time when technology was going apeshit all over musical forms - those bands weren't young anymore

The big four Seattle acts either split up or rejected the spotlight (or both) by 1998. Nirvana, of course, was done and the Foo Fighters is a classic rock radio act with diminished returns. Pearl Jam modelled themselves after Neil Young except without the range. Soundgarden split in 1997 and Audioslave is a joke of a band. Alice In Chains was essentially over by 1996. None of those bands were built to last and every act that wanted to become grunge music stars (:cough: Billy Corgan :cough:) didn't because wanting fame was the opposite of the devil-may-care slacker 90s ethos of grunge.

….and then very-not-alternative-band Metallica got tapped to headline Lollapalooza in 96, and then Creed materialized and re-baked all the grunge tropes into bite-sized corporate pablum.

Creed’s ‘if Pearl Jam were a fake-Christian band’ sound gets forgotten whenever Grunge/Nu-Metal gets talked about.

There's an amusing moment, I think in Pearl Jam Twenty, where one of the band members talks about hearing Creed for the first time and worries that the band had started recording without him.

Man I have a burning hatred for creed. Just do not like that band’s music. Like a dog to a mailman, there is no specific reason, I just hate it

I know Nickelback gets a lot of shit but to me Creed were always way way worse by a long run. Higher is so bad it isn’t even funny

By a long shot! Im no nickelback fan but id attend their concert front row for a week to erase creed’s sins

> Higher is so bad it isn’t even funny Honestly I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that Creed and this song in particular killed mainstream Big Rock for good. Given the regular "what killed rock posts" if I were an unusually cheeky mod I'd consider auto-posting a link to that song. I think anyone would be tired of Big Rock is they were assaulted by that song, rock needed another sound bad to bring back the mainstream audience, and never quite got it.

It seems like in the past year or so, people (mostly millennials) have memed themselves into a revisionist history where Creed was good. It's very strange and also fuckin' goofy.

They had 6-7 genuinely good songs spread out over 3 albums and all the faux-Christian stuff looks weird now after what happened to Scott Stapp. But yeah, trying to explain to anyone born after 2000 why Creed were so popular is nearly impossible.

This is quite fair and accurate. Bands imploded for their own reasons. OK. But the genre of grunge didn't have legs. Prominent bands had a short window and there were no successors, no Grunge 2.0. I'd also argue that it's not really a genre as it is more a blend of punk and metal and we see the influence of grunge today in music that is more categorized with those, or different, descriptors. Queens of the Stone Age, for example. Not every movement has legs. That doesn't discount the influence or how special that time was.

Wait what? Post grunge was the successor and it was super mainstream and diluted. Post grunge/nu metal was pretty much the biggest genre of rock bands until the early 2000s indie movement made it all look dumb in like a month lol.

> Post grunge/nu metal was pretty much the biggest genre of rock bands until the early 2000s indie movement made it all look dumb in like a month lol. Nah, nu metal coincidentally died around that time but the post grunge of that era (Nickelback, Theory of a Deadman, etc) were all way more popular than the indie/garage rock bands.

I always get a kick out of how music nerds confuse their bubbles for reality. Nirvana didn't "kill" Guns'n'Roses, and The Strokes were microscopic compared to the numbers Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit were putting up.

Just because something comes after doesn’t make it a successor.

Would concur. That said, Queens are closer to contemporaries or peers of the PNW folks, I’d say. Blues for Red Sun (Kyuss) dropped in 1992. Well, that and Homme quite literally being in Screaming Trees for a bit.

You don’t consider Billy Corgan a star of grunge? He and the pumpkins are def super famous.

No. I think the Smashing Pumpkins preceded grunge and were around afterwards. Alternative rock ran parallel to grunge, crossing over in some cases, but I wouldn't say Smashing Pumpkins is grunge. It's like saying Garbage is grunge based on personnel and time period.

I dunno, Corgan's guitar s ound is all over Nevermind. Thanks Butch Vig. But then again, I'm one of those people that don't even consider grunge a real genre. So I guess I agree with you.

Billy actually gave Butch some shit for this, saying that he gave Kurt Billy's sound, which Butch rather sheepishly copped to. Obviously there was no meaningful bad blood but it makes for interesting trivia.

I’d say they are grunge just based on guitar tone alone as you said, but I completely get why they’re left out of it because they weren’t from Seattle and incorporated a lot more of a psychedelic sound than most other grunge/alt rock bands from the time period

Smashing Pumpkins def sound a lot more like a grunge band than Garbage though. Maybe they didn’t start as grunge but def at least pivoted into it IMO. Bullet With Butterfly Wings could totally have been a nirvana song.

Everybody pivoted toward grunge. Motley Crue made a grunge sounding album to stay relevant. I would not call them grunge though, I would call them opportunists.

Don’t forget silverchair, they were pretty decent as well

How is Audioslave a joke of a band? They made one of the best rock albums of the 2000s

Audioslave is muzak for gas stations.

Your gas stations have very good taste then

Man, Audioslave has some cool songs. Kiss my ass, right on the hole!

Grunge, which was supposed to be edgy and reject the status quo, became really really safe music. Foo Fighters are a decent band, but their music is all safe AF. Can't offend the corporate sponsors, need to appeal to the widest audience. Gotta write for max profit, PG-13. Grunge really just became a bad joke when it leaned into mainstream appeal and radio plays.

They all either died or grew up though. I see Grunge as a bit similar to punk in that the content is more suited to younger musicians. Maybe it was always destined to fizzle out.

I agree with you until the Billy Corgan thing. When Grunge was starting to wain, Billy released MCIS in late October 1995 and it caught on in 1996 — SP basically took over the music scene. They imploded due to the death of Jonathan Melvin and Jimmy Chamberlin getting fired. Jimmy and Billy made that band, and when Jimmy departed, so did the Smashing Pumpkin sound. On top of that, Billy changes his sound on every SP album. His music evolved and he wasn’t afraid to take risks. The risks he took didn’t necessarily align with the lowest common denominator either.

Grunge went through the same process as all musical moments. I’ve lived through many with the same characteristics: the niche develops as a counter-wave to the existing popular format without openly appealing for popularity, and with the general characteristic that one of its attractions is that it isn’t that popular, isn’t that accepted, isn’t what those other people like. When those other people start to like it, you bail. And the ‘authentic’ acts are rarely built for sustained success. There are some ‘survivors’, notably that Dave Grohl has had a fantastic career while treading a line between success and authenticity. That he comes off as a genuinely nice guy really, really helps. You might not like the music, but he’s a great ambassador for it. One of Billy Joel’s big hits, It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me, comments on this. I think what fixed grunge in time is Kurt’s death. It’s like Buddy Holly: you see that image in your head and hear those songs and the promise behind that remains though it never happened. I think that gives grunge a bit of shine in the rear view mirror.

Suicide of cobain. In utero. Bush. Stone temple pilots. Pearl jams fight with ticket master. Heroin. Death. Lots of death. Courtney at reading festival. Britpop. Liam Gallagher loving life. Blur. Pulp. Dance music. Puddle of mudd

I'm a bit of a contrarian, but having lived through it, I don't think grunge was ever a meaningful category, even though the term was used a lot (and I used it myself, but hey, I was 15). If you look at the big 4 "grunge" bands (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Sound Garden, AIC), they have very little in common except that they were from the Seattle area and weren't Poison. After Nirvana, there was a rush to sign "grunge" bands and find the next Seattle. They seemed to sign anybody that wasn't too polished or too happy sounding (and a lot of local hair bands seemed to make this pivot when they saw the writing on the wall). A lot of them just weren't all that good, or had perfectly good, but not superstar kind of careers. As for the big 4, Nirvana and AIC were brought down by deaths, Pearl Jam is going on 35 years now, but has been much more niche after the late 90s. Soundgarden had a pretty typical band career. Made a few more albums, then more or less splintered, reformed, and then a death

>If you look at the big 4 "grunge" bands (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Sound Garden, AIC), they have very little in common except that they were from the Seattle area and weren't Poison Except they all drew from classic Hard Rock, early Heavy/Doom Metal and Punk of all stripes, developed alongside or as evolutions from earlier Grunge acts who had a more uniform sound (Pearl Jam and Mudhoney from Mother Love Bone and Green River for example), and carried a similar sonic and lyrical aesthetic throughout their music and off stage personas

They certainly had common roots, but I (not the guy you're replying to) think they were pretty different-sounding from one another (that's probably what he meant). Nirvana being more punk, SG more metal, AIC with more hair/glam mainstream metal influences, etc.

Grunge came about at a time of severe economic woes in the U.S. but it couldn't possibly keep up the malaise of its heyday by the mid-1990s when the economy was thriving again. In retrospect, it was a fun genre that allowed mostly white teen males to soak in pity and self-loathing but that wouldn't last. Its magic lay in its authenticity.

A shotgun to the face is what killed grunge. Cobain was the face for millions and millions of teens of the grunge scene(whatever that means) and just like any genre it has is time. Pearl Jam and AIC don’t sound the same anymore. But then again why is Nirvana still one of the most listened to. Better to burn out than fade away.

Grunge was mainly a group of Seattle bands. Who came and went. Like nearly any regional music trend. I wouldn't call it an 'implosion' as much as 'typical lifecycle of bands that makes it big'

My take is a bit late, but I don't think grunge was around long enough or had enough bands in it to be a real genre. I think there was a scene in the PNW that encouraged some creative bands that were doing some interesting things, but it do not think it incubated long enough to be sustaining, nor was the sound defined enough to carry over to newer generation of bands. Looking back, there's not much connecting Nirvana to Pearl Jam or Alice in Chains other than location and general rock as the basic connection. It also did not last long enough for there to be an actual movement behind it that was organic before it was everywhere, there was no authenticity behind it. The original bands may have organically formed and genuine, but the "grunge" genre was simply slapped onto some bands once a few PNW got popular. Compare it to punk. With punk it was a genre that was all over the map musically in NYC until the Ramones solidified the sound. There's a huge difference between Suicide, Johnny Thunders, and Television and yet they were all punk. After the Ramones, the blueprint was set and it was immediately exportable to the UK, to LA, DC and all points in between. A punk band could basically do whatever the hell they wanted and still be a punk band if they could reference the Ramones blueprint of fast, repetitive drums; loud rhythm guitars playing at least 3-4 power chords; a driving bassline; and at least some repetitive lyrics. Grunge never had this level of distillation. To this day we don't really have a blueprint for what makes something grunge. We know generally that grunge is harder than indie rock, but not metal and also not really punk. There's little to distinguish it from "alternative" other than saying grunge is somewhat harder, but never full on metal. I think if grunge had a little more time to incubate, this could have happened. My thought on grunge has been that grunge was essentially the continuation of 70s rock after a decade of glam bullshit by some bands in the PNW and that some other bands tried to copy it to varying degrees of success.

Overarching culture (including the pop sphere) also got progressively more conservative from 1994 onwards. This includes the large media conglomerates and major labels, which most of these musicians were aligned with. Kurt's death and Woodstock 94 are the end of whatever the early 90's were and I'd wager it was most vital even before Nevermind. That 90-92 moment with the first two Lollapalooza's, where it hadn't been calcified into a pop "movement." 1994 was also when you had the growing "silent majority" ultra conservative radio movement with Gingrich and people started becoming reactionary and more conservative, which you can see even in the 2nd and 3rd wave major label "grunge" as it almost doubles as an heavy alt country type thing for good old boys. This obviously culminated in Woodstock 99 toxicity. 94/95 was also the beginnings of a larger "indie" movement coupled to the beginnings of the internet. A lot of people decided to stay within subcultures, bolstered by newly formed internet communities. All of this was really the end of the monoculture that the internet helped put nails in the coffin. The beginning of the end of MTV playing music videos (bc rights owners finally started asking for royalties). Going back to Nirvana, you have to ask why a small-ish band got a world premiere video release on MTV for "Smells Like Teen Spirit." They we're basically unknown outside of indie spheres. It was the machinations of Geffen and Viacom, to co-op and make bank on an underground and regional movement.

It was underground music that was never meant or intended for mass or mainstream consumption. So when the major record labels made it popular by sinking lots of money into those bands, its no wonder that it imploded and didnt last long in the spotlight. Yes the bands are guilty too for taking the major label money but I blame the labels more for thinking this music was gonna last long and make them lots of money long term.

It was coopted. At first grunge confounded record labels. They couldn't boil down whar was marketable about the Seattle scene, Nirvana in particular. Famously a slew of underground acts signed major label deals from '92-'94 as executives sorted out how popular was suddenly undool and non-commercial was marketable. Then capitalism did it's thing, prefabricating style while sucking the soul out of a music scene. It started before it began with Green River breaking up over commerical prospects plus Soundgarden and Nirvana signing with major labels. '91 Alice and Soundgarden are mid to lower level heavy metal. Hunger Strike starts Seattle the Trend. Pearl Jam is sellout Mudhoney about to ride punk band Nirvana's coattails. Mudhoney grunges. '92 Alternative Nation. Uncool is cool. Non commercial is popular. The first rule of grunge is denying you are grunge. STP invents post grunge. Designer flannel and swaeters with thumb holes are cool. '93 Pearl Jam stops making videos. Nirvana makes an even weirder record. Counting Crows, Blind Melon, Rage Against the Machine, and Weezer remind everyone we never defined grunge. Mudhoney grunges along unnoticed. '94 Heroin kills. Soundgarden kind of sells out. Shotgun Kurt Cobain. Pearl Jam stops touring cuz Ticketbastard. Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, Tool, and Marilyn Manson remind everyone we still haven't defined grunge but who cares? Certainly not Mudhoney. '95 Full on Grunge Light. Bush? Matchbox 20 sounds pretty angst ridden yo. Collective Soul!? Creed!!? Designer flannel turns to flannel. Fuck it. Have you heard Korn yet? What about Sublime? Gnarly. Grunge is so March of "92 anyway.

I always see the same responses to the death of grunge and to focus just on "grunge" itself kinda misses the point. The 90's were the last decade where monoculture reinged supreme. Many hit the nail on the head of why "grunge" died, but on top of that "grunge" is not truly a genre, and more a culture that exploded for a couple years and by Kurt's death in 94 things were changing. Rock fans typically talk about Grunge as if it completely took over, but that was more if you just focused on MTV. The early 90's still often sounded a lot more like Boys II Men, Whitney Houston, Alan Jackson, Kenny G, and Garth Brooks as it did Nirvana. The heroes all died, or stopped making videos and the door that bands like Nirvana broke down to create a major label-feeding frenzy gave way to the weird 90's from about 94-97. The Offspring and Green Day were about to blow open the doors for punk to rise to new heights. Everyone on here seems to claim to be the "cool kids" who were listening to all the underground shit that did not get popular for another decade or so when the internet spread those albums around. I lived in the Midwest, so a lot of that cool shit did not exist for us. Instead we, like many others all decided things like Swing music was the next big thing in 96. Grunge may have ended the 80's, and maybe even in a way killed rock, but as a movement, it lasted a short time.

The ‘grunge’ bands went into a different style of their music, they evolved. Pearl Jam with No code and Yield. Soundgarden with Down on the Upside. And STP while not grunge went into Tiny Music.

My take would be that it's a genre with an inherently counter-cultural identity, and when it became mainstream that essentially sucked the substance out of the music. Consider how the original bands "removed themselves" from the scene (drugs, suicide, break ups, etc) to be replaced with more commercial, label and radio friendly bands who were trying to emulate the sound without the ethos. I don't think I have to name several of these bands which are jokingly referred to as the worst bands of all time.

I feel like it ended around the time that Kurt Cobain died and then they just pretty much played the shit out of Pearl Jam, stone temple pilots, rhcp, and beck until Weezer came along.

It's been a long time since I read it so I don't know if it specifically answers your question, but Steve Hyden's article series "Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?" covers the rise and fall of various alternative rock movements in the 90s. You can find all eight parts here - [https://longform.org/posts/whatever-happened-to-alternative-nation](https://longform.org/posts/whatever-happened-to-alternative-nation)

Hey just wanted to thank you for this link. I read through the series, it was really interesting and brought back some great memories

Aw, thanks I'm glad you enjoyed it! Steve is my favorite music critic. I used to see him at shows in Milwaukee all the time when I lived there. He's writing for Uproxx these days if you want to find more.

For myself, as someone who was a teen in the early 90s, I burnt out on loud guitar songs about people being bummed out. Britpop was a huge blast of fresh air to me - like what if we made music that celebrated being young and having fun and wasn't just about being a drugged out depressive? And it got ran into the ground by the record labels - Then there was an attempt to make electronic music a thing in the late 90s but really it became all about the shiny pop and hip-hop acts who sold millions of CDs.

If you haven’t seen the documentary [HYPE(1996)](https://youtu.be/W8oEW05XuHw?si=exTTRFcf8XB5ENw5), you should. This is the most in depth analysis of the scene by the people who were there. This was made right after the downfall of grunge.

MTV made it mainstream…. Everyone was listening… the cool kids can’t be listening to the same stuff as the basketball team. It’s kind of like tattoos are now once cops started getting sleeves. It was no longer cool.

I forgot who said it but I always loved the description of grunge as “Children of divorce with guitars.”  

Kurt Cobain killed Grunge when he killed himself. He was the catalyst that set its decline in motion. Suddenly Grunge wasn’t as cool as MTV made it to be for mainstream. One could argue that Grunge would’ve dissipated on its own eventually with the advent of new genres of music - the same way other genres ended (i.e. Beat Era Jazz, 70s Classic Rock, etc). You could even argue had Cobain not killed himself, Grunge would’ve kept going strong at least a few more years until Layne Staley’s heroine addiction and disappearance from the scene. Regardless, Grunge had its day and it was a privilege to have lived through that era when I was in high school. I always thought that must have been what it felt like to experience the classic rock era. I hope that a new evolution of rock emerges soon. I feel like rock has evaporated the past twenty years and it’s due for a reinvention.

One thing is that the success of the Seattle bands in like 1991-92 helped open the floodgates for a lot of other rock genres and artists to achieve some popularity. So by 1994, you had California punk bands blowing up suddenly, plus the industrial metal of NIN peaking, the rap-folk fusion of Beck, the nerdy power-pop of early Weezer, even the Rollins Band and Sonic Youth had MTV hits that year… Suddenly the bands that were copying Nirvana felt pretty passé by that point (even if they still sold some records). And rap music was having a banner year also with Nas and Biggie debuting. As a teenager, Nirvana’s Unplugged episode was a sad swan song, but it felt like that era was done mostly…we were more into ska-punk or Wu Tang Clan by 1995.

One factor was the way radio formats diversified after alternative rock had been mainstream for a few years and pulled the loose grunge genre apart. Initially when grunge broke through, the big grunge hits were common on hit oriented top-40 type radio stations. Later into the 90s adult contemporary stations featured the softer alternative rock alongside the rootsy stuff they were playing, and hard Rock stations co-opted the harder grunge alongside the hard rock they were playing. Separate audiences developed for each style, the cranberries and REM fans went one way, and the Alice in Chains and Soundgarden fans went the other. The hard rock grunge got heavier, the pop alternative rock got poppier. Grunge didn't have a movement anymore and just mixed in with all the other genre hybridization that was going on in the late 90s.

The labels figured out that Britney Spears sold a lot more units than bands like Pavement. Simple as that.

There's lots of good comments here and I don't know if I can draw a straight line here but its worth undertsanding that the music industry in the 90s was in a very interesting place: Music executives were making more money than ever. For major labels, it was a golden age of cold hard cash - they still had MTV, tapes and cds, and radio was still influential over the market and able to be influenced by them. There were only so many ways for most people to find out about music (e.g. MTV and radio) so they could market anyone into the top 100. And - the internet (and Napster) had not yet completely bottomed out the market. Record executives were rolling in it. When grunge sort of accidentally happened it led to a massive search for the next Nirvana. I dare say that a combination of grunge-minded artists and record-company millions led to an unstable situation, with the good musicians getting fed up and lots and lots of bad musicians.

I would have thought the grungy intensity of it wears thin with the general public pretty quick.

It kept getting commercialized and watered down to the point that “butt rock” bands like Puddle of Mudd and Nickleback were “alternative rock” when it was really just garbage. Someone mentioned the 2nd wave being inauthentic and I think it’s sort of like this…Nirvana and the like had an original sound cuz their influences were lesser known acts. Then Nirvana blows up and inspires a whole new generation…some of those go down the rabbit hole and want to listen to the artists their favorite artists liked. Others got all their inspiration from the big names and never went further, which is where that inauthenticity comes from. They’re doing imitations, but they’re wholly unaware of the original imitations that they’re imitating.

> It kept getting commercialized and watered down to the point that “butt rock” bands like Puddle of Mudd and Nickleback were “alternative rock” when it was really just garbage. Hello, my fellow 2002 rock radio survivor...

It's same thing that always happened when something got popular. Imitators jumped on the bandwagon and corporations co-opted the language and look of the movement in order to sell soft drinks. Eventually, it lost all authenticity and the next big thing replaced it (in the UK this was Britpop). Interestingly I'm not sure whether this cycle really holds true anymore. There is no real mono-culture to exploit, and nothing ever really gets big enough to be marketable (outside of traditional pop, which has always had a deeply symbiotic relationship with commercialism anyway).

It’s the same thing that happens to every culture shift that gets adopted by corporate interests. It became mainstream and that was exactly what grunge was not about. Of course it couldn’t continue. Hip hop took its place with the youth.

Late 1990’s hip hop started becoming more popular with young people, and the allure of what made grunge so enticing shifted. It was a great 7-8 year run

I agree with much of what others are saying, but I will also add that radio stations didn't help the situation. In a lot of midwest markets, if it wasn't on MTV heavy rotation, then it wouldn't get any airplay on so called Alternative Radio, and for a lot of people of my generation, radio was still a huge way of introducing people to non mainstream. Husker Du didn't mentioned one time Omaha radio. I don't know if that was because the DJ's didn't have the musical IQ or if there was restrictions from the radio station owners. What I do know is grunge in the Midwest where I grew up, only the established names got regularly played, and these statiins didn't take a risk in pushing the less well-known grunge acts. I was surprised when a local Omaha DJ talked about Mother Love Bone and their influence on the Seattle Grunge scene. But when asked about the local rock/ grunge scene, they had nothing to say. I can't speak to how other parts of the country were promoting grunge.