Questions

After last week’s lecture on ‘Indie’ and Independent music and its inclusion of the ‘Grunge’ sound/subculture I became increasingly interested in Grunge. Watching the Hype documentary cemented Grunge as my topic for the final essay. Where did that term even come from? I must look that up…

AHA! “The word grunge is believed to be a back-formation from the US slang adjective grungy, which originated in about 1965 as a slang term for "dirty" or "filthy." Mark Arm, the vocalist for the Seattle band Green River—and later Mudhoney—is generally credited as being the first to use the term grunge to describe this sort of music.” (Wikipedia, 2009) Or of course it mentions Bruce Pavitt, one of the co-founders of Sub Pop record label, as responsible for popularizing the term in the late 80’s.

Green River, Mudhoney, The Melvins, The Monomen, Screaming Trees and, yes of course, Nirvana were all a part of this ‘Seattle sound’. What is most interesting is how the rest of the world interacted with this sound and the aesthetic connected to it. So for the essay question I am supposed to be formulating I will definitely be going with the second topic, “The Local and the Global”. Some rough questions I will look at answering -
How did grunge rise to such popularity? (I already of course know mostly how this happened as it was covered in the Hype documentary)
How the world became included in the cultural context of one logging town
What those included in the local scene, thought about all the ‘hype’.
So essentially how Seattle at the time of grunge kept its local scene mentality (if it did at all) despite the subcultures rising popularity? And of course…did Grunge really die?

So I will have to clearly do a lot more research to fully understand the ‘grunge’ phenomenon, its significance as both a local scene and/or how it, as a subculture, formed a global network. The range in the library catalogues seems a little limited, but I will certainly start there. As this is a University assignment I am reluctant to turn to the internet (ignoring the fact I used Wikipedia above!) for information but then again that’s where music is moving too, along with its fans and cultures.