Grunge: Music and Memory

Catherine Strong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317124351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Grunge has been perceived as the music that defined 'Generation X'. Twenty years after the height of the movement there is still considerable interest in its rise and fall, and its main figures such as Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. As a form of 'retro' music it is even experiencing a resurgence, and Cobain remains an icon to many young music fans today. But what was grunge, and what has it become? This book explores how grunge has been remembered by the fans that grew up with it, and asks how memory is both formed by and forms popular culture. It looks at the relationship between media, memory and music fans and demonstrates how different groups can use and shape memory as part of an ongoing struggle for power in society. Grunge was the site of such a struggle, as popular music so often is, with the young people of the time asking questions about their place in the world and the way society is organized. This book examines what these questions were, and what has happened to them over time. It shows that although grunge challenged many social structures, the way it, and youth itself, are remembered often work to reinforce the status quo.

Chapter 1
Introduction

I would like to start this book with what I think is a fairly typical description of how someone remembers their experiences of grunge:

When I was 15, living in a medium-sized rural town in New South Wales [in Australia], I saw a song on SBS’s1 very obscure music programme The Noise. It was an immediately engaging, catchy and yet edgy and loud piece which I heard once and loved. I had never heard of the band, Nirvana, or the song, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, before – I had seen no advertising, heard nothing from friends, seen no promotional posters in record stores or seen the song played on Video Hits as a chart-topper. The next day, I bought the album, Nevermind, from which the song was taken, though I had trouble finding it hidden away in a (mainstream) record store where the assistant behind the counter ‘had had a few people asking for it’. Within a fortnight, everyone had heard of Nirvana, they were being played on Video Hits and the grunge era was in full swing. I, personally, had found music that I felt really expressed something about my tragic adolescent ‘inner life’, and I had found it, initially, without anyone telling me what it was or how I should feel about it.

The really incredible thing about Nirvana was that everyone got into them. They created, for however brief a moment and in however insignificant a way, a playground utopia where there was no difference. The rough metal boys and the soft, ballad loving girls all ‘got’ Nirvana, and agreed that it was good, and our parents hated it. The importance of this feeling of unity amongst teenagers, all of us at that point in life where we felt most isolated and like ‘no-one understands’, cannot, I think, be underestimated or trivialized. And there was, I believe, a period – probably very short lived – where this was a genuine thing, where the success of Nirvana and their ilk took everyone by surprise, including their own record companies. It may not have been new to someone watching from outside, but for us it was both new and unexpected and so we just reacted.

My music tastes until then had been somewhat limited by what can be accessed in rural areas – that is, inoffensive ‘Hits and Memories’ radio stations, my parents’ record collection (old but not too bad) and whatever my friends were listening to. With the arrival of grunge, the interest of those around me in music increased dramatically, and recommendations and copied tapes flew around the playground faster than copies of grunge ‘fashion’ made it into designer shops. A friend made me a tape with Jane’s Addiction on one side, Joy Division on the other, opening up whole new areas of music to be explored, while I copied The Pixies for her. At first we explored bands in the grunge vein – Mudhoney, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains – but then we started moving into other sounds and eras. After a while, the sound became less important than the feeling – it didn’t matter if there were distorted guitars and anguished vocals as long as it seemed real. We happily called what we were listening to ‘alternative music’ because at the time it really did feel that way, something new and totally different to what I had been raised listening to. Also, many of the bands involved did retain some degree of obscurity, despite some chart success – or, at least, our parents hadn’t heard of them. It also came with an alternative message on the world than the one received from people in authority (teachers, parents, and so on). This is a hard thing to reflect upon, as the meaning of grunge has been discussed so much since, but at the time I think I thought it was about the realization that there were more options open to you than tamely getting a job you hated and working for the rest of your life, or getting married and having kids. Or, more to the point, I had always thought that, but the realization that there were other people who thought the same things was a revelation and a validation of my feelings. There was also an underscoring of the feeling that things weren’t quite right – nothing so big and all encompassing as, say, fear of nuclear war, but an unease and a questioning – maybe the way that they were doing things wasn’t such a good idea after all. No one, however, was ‘talking about a revolution’; they were talking about finding a worthwhile and satisfying life on their own terms, and, importantly, doing this in a way that didn’t cause harm, whether to other people, animals or the environment. However, it didn’t take long for problems to show. There was clearly a lot of money to be made from grunge and alternative music, so the money makers started to step in. It wasn’t long before the first debates about who was ‘selling out’, which bands were ‘for real’ and which ones weren’t began to occur – even kids in a country town know to be suspicious where money is concerned. (On a related note, I remember covering a school book with pictures of musical heroes of mine, including a picture of the guitarist from the Manic Street Preachers with ‘4 real’ sliced into his bleeding arm. Even that was barely enough to be convincing …) We started to see the grunge tag and associated look shoved onto anything and everything in an attempt to cash in (see the movie Singles for a good example of this), and expensive flannelette shirts started turning up in big-name chain stores where ‘fashion victims’ shopped. My recollection is that some people went along with all this (and some jumped onto the bandwagon as it progressed), whereas others withdrew and started searching for other (often associated) things that they could still call their own. I remember very clearly ‘discovering’ Siouxsie and the Banshees with a friend of mine, and her disgust when an album the band released six months later actually made it into the charts. At the time, I didn’t quite understand what she was worried about – as far as I was concerned, it didn’t change the music for me – but now I see more clearly her concern that something you love can be changed forever by being exposed to a mass audience. Plus, you’re really not as cool if everyone’s heard of your favourite bands. As a fan, I was aware of this and saw it happening. I saw the ‘grunge’ label being applied to anything and everything, and bands who had been around for years suddenly wearing flannies and adding more guitar to their music to try to restart their failing careers. I watched the big corporations that had been so mistrusted by my musical idols creep in and end up owning everything – even Sub Pop itself was bought by Warners in 1995. The musicians themselves became more ‘branded’ and mainstream – in the ultimate in product placement, pictures of Cobain’s body lying in his garage, clearly wearing Converse shoes, were printed around the world (I nearly bought a pair after seeing this). Bands with loud guitars and carefully messed-up hair who sang songs about love made their way into the charts. Singers like Alanis Morissette and the Spice Girls became the mainstream Riot Grrrls, while Courtney Love got plastic surgery and chased after roles in big-budget Hollywood movies.

In the early 2000s, when searching for a topic for my PhD thesis, I realized that grunge, the music I loved so much as a teenager, had been neglected within academia. The reasons were immediately apparent. Grunge was considered an overly commercialized, debased form of the rock music academic’s genre of choice, punk, and as such was dismissed as unworthy of consideration. I also had been initially considering punk as a field of study because I knew if I wanted to make a sociological case for the benefits of popular music (something which at that stage I felt would be required), then punk would deliver politics, community and resistance to consumerism, but the teenage girl inside me protested that grunge was a worthy object of study too. Upon deciding this, one of the first things I did, before having any real idea of what direction my research would take, was to sit down and write the above account of my own experiences of grunge.

Over the course of my research there was nothing in this account that I had written, simplistically and naively it now seems, that was not challenged, pulled to pieces and proved to be problematic. In many ways this book represents me grappling with a part of myself and my own identity. Including the above account is a way of putting my own position up front, but is also a gesture of solidarity with the respondents whose interviews make up much of the content of this book. At every point when I am analysing what other people have said, there is a part of me that is undergoing the same process. What I wrote is very similar in many respects to the accounts given by respondents, in particular in the way that it revolves around the commercial success of grunge, the sense of connection to others that it engendered, and the need I felt to construct a story that emphasized how I felt that my discovery of grunge was somehow free of ‘inauthentic’ commercial influences. It was clearly important for me to stress the way that I found grunge on my own, before it became big. These are themes that will be touched on throughout this book. Also of interest is the way that I have presented and created a story out of my experiences, that is, how I remember grunge.

While I decided grunge would be the subject of my research very early in the process, memory was not initially a major theme. At the outset, I hoped to examine grunge more in terms of identity formation and the relationship between music and emotion. However, it quickly became apparent that the amount of time that had elapsed since the heyday of grunge was an important element in the data being collected, especially since respondents’ identities and emotional relationships to this music had changed considerably over time, as had my own. Theories on memory provided a path to better analysis of this data and a theoretical framework through which to understand the relationship between grunge and social structures. Nevertheless, these theories did not seem to provide all that was needed to do everything I wanted to do in terms of explaining the place of culture in society.

Another major theme in this book is popular culture and its relationship to power. A noteworthy aspect of my account of grunge is the way that I have located it as oppositional, and as presenting a different way of doing things than what I considered to be the dominant message that my 15-year-old self was receiving from society. Therefore, the establishment of memory and power as the central ways of trying to understand popular music led to the following research questions:

What is the relationship between popular culture, memory and power? Does a form of popular culture such as grunge present a challenge to the power structures in society, and if so, what is the outcome of this challenge?

These research questions reflect the way that this book deals with three bodies of work: popular music studies, memory studies and the work of Bourdieu, whose theories provide a way to conceptualize power and its relationship to culture in a sociological manner. The overall argument being made is that although a form of popular culture such as grunge may present explicit challenges to existing social structures, these challenges can be defused as memories of grunge are organized in a way that reinscribes the overarching power relations in society. However, this does not occur unproblematically, nor is it accomplished completely, for fans of grunge individually or as a group.

The Structure of the Book

The focus on the three central bodies of work being utilized shifts throughout the book, and also moves between different levels of analysis in terms of the respondents. The empirical chapters expand in scope from a very close focus on the respondents’ experiences with grunge and the media to a broader examination of the relationships between grunge and respondents’ positions in the power structures of society. This allows for the incorporation of some of the most central concerns of sociology, such as gender and age.

Chapter 2 begins by situating the study of grunge within the wider field of popular music and memory studies. Particular attention is paid to the literature that does exist on grunge, to demonstrate how grunge is constructed by academics as an apolitical ‘poor cousin’ to punk. However, it is also demonstrated here and elsewhere in the book that grunge did contain both explicit political messages and a more generalized questioning about the nature of society and how it might be changed or improved. The success of grunge is considered in relation to theories of authenticity and commercialization. It will be shown that these are still central concepts in how value judgements are made about music in academia and wider society, and they must be taken into consideration in order to gain a full understanding of how grunge has been remembered. The chapter will then close with an examination of how memory can be central to the reproduction or alteration of power relations in society, by exploring the way that individual and collective memories are socially shaped. Memories are formed through social expectations about what should be remembered and there are conventional forms (narratives) that such recollections take. The sociological literature on the nature of memory, and in particular the way that certain groups who have more power or wealth have been theorized as having greater control over memory, will be examined in order to demonstrate the social nature of respondents’ memories and to establish a framework for subsequent chapters.

The following two chapters deal with the question of the nature of grunge. Chapter 3 examines grunge from the perspective of media reports at the time when the movement was most popular. This is done firstly to provide a ‘base line’ (Irwin-Zarecka, 1994, p. 15) of events and understandings of grunge which are, in Chapter 4, compared to respondents’ current definitions of grunge to see if these meanings have remained constant over time. This chapter also contains a consideration of Bourdieu’s work on fields as a way of understanding how and why grunge emerged at the time that it did. Grunge holds a particular position within the field (in Bourdieu’s sense) of popular music, and this position can only be understood with reference to other musical forms and the time at which it occurred. Bourdieu’s theories present a way of rethinking concepts such as authenticity and the mainstream, and introduce the idea of culture as an arena where power is situated.

In Chapter 4 data from respondents is used to demonstrate how their memories of grunge have been given particular forms, and it is argued that the way that respondents remember grunge constitutes a form of collective memory. These collective memories cannot be understood without referring to the media, as it is the media accounts discussed in the preceding chapter that helped to shape these memories and connect this otherwise dispersed group. It will be demonstrated that grunge is not endlessly open to interpretation, but has a definite centre of meaning which matches up across different groups and has remained relatively stable over time. Grunge has certain musical, cultural, temporal and geographic meanings which have not changed significantly since the time of its popularity, and these will be described in order to provide a base line of understanding for the remainder of the book, where audience perspectives as well as media definitions are incorporated.

In Chapter 5 memory is brought further into focus as a space where power can be challenged through an examination of how both fans and media remember Kurt Cobain and his death. It will be demonstrated that while the memories of fans have been (necessarily) constructed through reference to what the mass media said about grunge, their accounts have diverged from those of the media over time. The memories of fans and journalists differ due to the different requirements that these groups have in how they relate to and use Cobain. This shows that although the mass media plays an important role in memory construction, it does not control memory over time. Memory can be a site of struggle and contestation, and the group that may appear to have greater power over it (in this case the media) cannot necessarily control the memory of others.

Chapter 6 continues the examination of the connections between grunge and wider power relations in society by concentrating on the role that women played in the grunge movement and how their contribution has been remembered or, more often, forgotten. Although rock music is almost completely dominated by males, there was a significant number of important female musicians during the time of grunge. Both male and female musicians saw gender equality as a worthwhile goal, and this was one of the most prominent political elements of grunge. However, over time the contribution of the female grunge musicians has been almost forgotten, with the exception of Courtney Love, who is vilified and used as a cautionary tale. The way that women were denied a place in grunge history suggests that memory can sometimes be used to reinforce power relations in society. However, it is also noted that for a minority of female respondents, grunge offered new ways of thinking about gender that have had ongoing effects on how these respondents express their femininity.

Chapter 7 will examine different ways in which the period of grunge has been framed, specifically in relation to youth and youth culture. Grunge has often been discussed as being the music of ‘Generation X’ or of ‘The 90s’, and both of these are connected to the notion of youth and the position of youth as a relatively powerless group in society. Sociological theories that consider age to be an important aspect of inequality, as well as those that see generational membership as being a type of collective remembering, are discussed, along with the idea that youth is no longer associated with biological age. Accounts of respondents suggest that they remember youth as a specific, bounded period of their lives which they have moved past. In doing so they also dismiss the questions that grunge raised about society because they see these questions as being part of an inauthentic youthful experience, and through this dismissal they reinforce the status quo.

This book cannot, of course, examine all aspects of grunge and its aftermath and there are theoretical approaches that also cannot be explored in depth. For example, if it was being researched at the time of its formation and early success, grunge may best have been understood using theories relating to scenes (for example, see Cohen, 1991; Connell and Gibson, 2003; Finnegan, 1989; Jipson, 1994) or subcultures. Scenes are usually described as ‘situations in which the distinctions between informal and formal music activity, and between the activities and roles of music audiences, producers and performers, are blurred’ (Cohen, 1999, p. 239). While it is recognized that local scenes are embedded in global processes, especially as ‘cultural activity is increasingly important to the “branding” of regions and cities as markers of difference’ (Homan, 2003, p. 16), given that this book is not focused on Seattle as such, these theories were deemed to be less relevant to this study.

With regard to grunge being a subculture, since the heyday of the Birmingham School (see Hall and Jefferson, 1996; Hebdige, 1979) there has been much debate on the usefulness of the idea of subcultures. It has been suggested that the concept of the subculture is fundamentally flawed as it has been centred only on the visually spectacular members of these groups, thus disregarding differences and change within subcultures, as well as ignoring women and girls (see Bennett, 1999; McRobbie and Garber, 1997; Redhead, 1997). More recently the ideas of the Birmingham School have been revisited and reconceptualized in order to broaden their applicability and to redress some of the omissions of the original body of work (for example, see Muggleton, 2000; Thornton, 1995). This has led to a situation where the term ‘subculture’ is now often used interchangeably with ‘scene’ and ‘community’ (Cohen, 1999, p. 239), with all of these notions suggesting a group that is still in some way easily identifiable and ‘special’. Although these theories will be touched on throughout this book, I will not attempt to contribute in depth to the debate. The present study concentrates on grunge’s effects as a large-scale cultural phenomenon, which I argue was more an inhabitant of the mainstream than a subcultural space (while not denying the ability of the audience of grunge to create their own meanings in the way that participants in subcultures are seen to do). While much time has been spent, in academic literature on popular culture, focusing on groups that are seen to be somewhat separate from the ‘mass’ of consumers, and generally arguing for why such special groups are in some way better than this ‘mass’ (usually through being conceptualized as somehow resistant to the dominant forces in society), I will not be trying to demonstrate such separateness for the fans who are the subject of this study. One of the most interesting things about grunge is the transition it made from a localized ‘scene’ to a massive worldwide stage. As I will discuss in Chapter 2, this shift is almost always characterized by commentators, be they journalists or academics, as damaging and problematic. I wish to resist this automatic assumption and instead ask questions about this transition and the way that it has created certain narratives around grunge and the artists associated with it. This is of particular interest in the case of Kurt Cobain, who has been portrayed as a direct victim of the ideological gap between the special groups that inhabit ‘scenes’ and ‘subcultures’ and the mass culture that supposedly exists outside these areas.

All the grunge fans who have been interviewed for this book (with the possible exception of two respondents who lived in Seattle during the early grunge years, neither of whom was intimately involved with the music scene) encountered grunge as part of a mass-mediated, global cultural event. It was, in this way, part of the mainstream, in that it became part of the collective consciousness and helped to reshape the meanings of success in popu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theories of Grunge and Memory
• 3 Defining Grunge in the Media
• 4 Defining Grunge in Memory
• 5 The Memory of Kurt Cobain
• 6 Gender and Grunge
• 7 Generation X, ‘the 90s’ and Youth
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Outline of Questions for Interviews
• Bibliography
• Index