During my freshman year in high school, my only friend was an older kid who, a few years before, had lost half his face and a few fingers in a fiery drunk-driving accident. I’ve never forgotten the sight of him air drumming to his favourite song, “Kerosene” by Big Black, and singing along to its lyrics about small town boredom and arson. The upshot to the accident, as he would often point out, is that he got a really big insurance settlement, bought a lot of gear and joined the Sub Pop Singles Club. So for much of 1989 we’d sit in his house across from the CIL plant, listening to Mudhoney, and an “OK” band named Nirvana — seriously, they just weren’t as good the Melvins.
Though inchoate, we were probably intuiting that a) these bands were from a place no better than where we were from and b) that being fans of Venom, MDC and the Pixies simultaneously was starting to make sense, even without our glue huffing, as a cultural through-line. To wit, what was happening to rock music in Seattle was happening everywhere. That was the start of my 1990s. If you can’t remember yours, make your way to Grunge is Dead, a complete, exhaustive and authoritative account of Music 1.0’s last successful marketing experiment.
Journalist Greg Prato has gathered original, semi-honest interviews with dozens of players, both known and unknown, to tell the story of Seattle rock music from 1980 on. Like Please Kill Me, Grunge Is Dead gets incredibly depressing half way through, though for completely different reasons. Please Kill Me ended with its heroes fading into obscurity, rehab and marriages to Laurie Anderson while Grunge Is Dead ends with millionaires patting themselves on the backs, and that is only interesting for so long before it starts to feel like a lengthy Guitar Player magazine article. Prato’s book would have benefited from insight by two notable über-critcs of 1990s hype: Steve Albini and Buzz Osborne of the Melvins. On the opposite end, I’m assuming Chris Cornell was unavailable for interview due to a bitch being “part of him,” or something.
But damn if the first 150 pages isn’t a hymn to the glory of Mark Arm and Mudhoney, the passionate sleazebags behind Sub Pop Records, and an industrial city in Reaganomic freefall. The story’s weirdness peaks with The New York Times phoning Sub Pop and needling an employee for examples of “grunge speak,” which she hilariously improv’ed on the spot.
By the time Grunge Is Dead starts dwelling on Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam and the metallicized Soundgarden, there’s a perceptible shift towards joylessness and industry talk via Jeff Ament, the Tom Vu of grunge. Of course, the word “grunge” was, and is, meaningless. Aesthetics develop for a thousand different organic reasons while style is born of copy-writing and manufacturing. “Grunge” infected everyone, above and over ground, with an easy code that made for equal opportunity yawning for the rest of the decade. Note that the unjustly vaunted music of Hammerbox was as rote as the justly reviled Candlebox. Grunge Is Dead is an invaluable record of a strange process that we may never see again.
Don’t listen to me, though; I’m just a mickey stick who can’t fit into his old wack slacks anymore.