PicoBlog

Grunge is everywhere again. Look around. Teens wear Nirvana t-shirts. Rappers make references to Kurt Cobain. And roughly every other time I tell a Brooklyn musician that I write grunge music, the response is, “me too.”

But what is grunge, anyway?

When I first began the Return of the Grunge project in 2018, here’s how I defined the new music I was writing:

Return of the Grunge consists of 11 original songs inspired by 90s alternative rock — those distorted guitars, loud drums, catchy melodies, angsty singers, and weird lyrics that first made me pick up a guitar. Dark and light, heavy and soft, quiet and loud, ugly and pretty, cool and weird. These songs are for everybody who ever felt like the hero was your enemy, or like you had an idol you didn’t really want to emulate, or like you really don’t need any sympathy. You just need to turn up the guitar.

Let me elaborate.

I think there are three main components that make up the essence of grunge. These components work both as a description for the 90s bands that created the genre, as well as for bands like the Foo Fighters who have continued to make grunge to the present day. They also describe the kind of music we make in my band.

These three components are:

I’ll talk about numbers 2 and 3 on that list in future blog posts. For now, I want to focus on the sound.

To begin with, a pretty good way to think of grunge is as a fusion of punk and metal, due to the heavy guitars, loud drums, and screaming vocals in grunge music. Those influences are so obvious even the New York Times figured it out. But what is often overlooked is a musicality in grunge that is largely indebted to classic rock.

Kurt Cobain wrote “About a Girl” after listening to Meet the Beatles over and over one night. Pearl Jam’s lead guitarist—Mike McCready—plays Jimi Hendrix licks all over his band’s records and talked about this influence as far back as 1995. Call me crazy, but Soundgarden’s “Somewhere” could be a Bad Company song—if Bad Company was having a really bad day. Nirvana’s “Aero Zeppelin” is a literal mashup of influences from two of their favorite rock groups from the 70s. Proto-grunge rockers The Replacements recorded a great cover of the Kiss song, “Black Diamond.”

The melodies and hooks in grunge music are catchy as hell. Even if they are partially drowned in distortion, somewhat obscured by screaming, and interrupted by weird sounds — the tunes in grunge betray a debt to classic rock songwriting from the 60s and 70s.

When I write for my band, I naturally tend to begin with something that sounds a bit like classic rock. Then I add some volume, some wrong notes, and some screaming, and that gets me pretty close to the sound I’m looking for.

Oh yeah, another thing: we don’t write love songs. And that will be the topic of my next post.

Happy August.

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