Grunge did originate in a tight-knit scene in Seattle, before links were drawn to like-minded artists around the States and (occasionally) elsewhere. There was also connective tissue, of course, unifying qualities. So when these bands broke, they often came from slightly different musical backgrounds, but they were all lumped together under one umbrella.

If you go back to some of its earliest flickers, youвЂ™ll find artists flirting with hair metal who were later credited with being the ones to burn it all down and usher in a new epoch of вЂњauthentic rock music.вЂќ It wasnвЂ™t disconnected from any of this, it wasnвЂ™t just this thing incubating in removal. It was germinating in parallel to the вЂ™80s college rock that would point the path towards the alternative becoming mainstream, in parallel to a lot of the artists who would become avuncular figures to the grunge bands. Grunge was germinating on a local level, while new wave and then hair metal dominated the airwaves and MTV. There were sludgy, foreboding riffs indebted to Black Sabbath, but there was also hardcore aggression by way of Black Flag, you know those parts but there were often healthy doses of glam and arena rock in the DNA, too. Here were a bunch of young musicians who had grown up with вЂ™70s hard rock and metal but came of age with punk and the burgeoning sense of a more prominent alternative culture via вЂ™80s indie. With those proto-grunge bands, a lot of the core aspects of the scene and sound were already evident. You see how eras and genres overlap, rather than exist within hermetically sealed five year intervals. But when you really examine it, attempt to parse all the different facets of a generational turning point that was summed up with one semi-meaningless word, you see all the transitions. Flannel, tragedy, Seattle, distorted guitars, and the big four of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains. When people talk about grunge on the surface level, you can reduce it to just a handful of signifiers. ItвЂ™s a funny thing, when pop history gets codified, either with in-the-moment trendpieces on the biggest players or with broadstroke retrospectives that donвЂ™t have room for all the tiny permutations. Green River, of course, wound up dissolving and eventually yielding both Mudhoney and Pearl Jam. Even earlier, there were groups like the U-Men, Melvins, Malfunkshun, and Green River, who in hindsight became progenitors of grunge whether in the stylistic groundwork they established or in the functional fact that several of these groups fractured and reappeared as more widely known artists in the milieu. Soundgarden, who would go on to become one of the defining names of the grunge era, formed in 1984 and unveiled their second EP the same day вЂњTouch Me IвЂ™m SickвЂќ arrived. And one of those happened 30 years ago today, when Mudhoney released their first single, вЂњTouch Me IвЂ™m Sick.вЂќДЇor years already, something had been percolating. Somewhere in between, there are a couple flashpoints you could look at. A completely different approach is to go back to its very roots, to the early and mid-вЂ™80s and the groups who were laying the foundation, in terms of character and aesthetic, for what grunge would become. One route might be to focus on the movementвЂ™s mainstream insurgence in the early вЂ™90s, to locate the true beginning of grunge as when it arrived and subsequently stormed the charts and popular consciousness with blockbusters like Pearl JamвЂ™s Ten or NirvanaвЂ™s Nevermind. You can choose all sorts of genesis points when you look back at a moment as era-defining and yet difficult to clarify as grunge.

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