The Story of Grunge

De: Michael Stewart Foley, The Great Courses

Narrado por: Michael Stewart Foley

You can’t truly understand the last decade of the 20th century without a look at the muddy, electrifying rock music that would come to define it: grunge. For such a short-lived genre—at least in the mainstream—grunge had a lasting impact on American music and culture. It also provides a unique lens through which to examine the post-Reagan, pre-internet America of the 1990s.

In the six lectures of The Story of Grunge, you’ll explore the rise and evolution of the genre, tracing it from Seattle subculture to MTV and the Billboard charts, all the way to its decline and evolution into new forms. Along the way, you’ll meet the pioneers of grunge and see how they, and their music, continue to influence popular culture today.

While the emergence of Nirvana in the early 90s marked grunge’s ascendency, you’ll begin at an earlier point in the story, exploring the birth of the genre’s unique look and sound from within the wider punk scene in the Pacific Northwest. From there, you’ll see how grunge was a vehicle for politics and social consciousness in music, including feminism and the Riot Grrrl movement. And you’ll also understand why the rapid rise of grunge was not quite the authentic, organic process it might seem, but rather the result of marketing savvy and cynical commercialism.

The death of Nirvana’s lead singer and grunge icon Kurt Cobain in 1993—combined with increasing oversaturation and commercialization of the genre—certainly diminished the creative energy that spurred the rise of grunge. And yet, as you’ll see, the music, style, and anti-corporate philosophy of grunge has had a deep and lasting impact that continues to resonate well into the 21st century.

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I learned a lot.

I liked the way the story was told. I learned a lot about how grunge music became what it is and I loved it.

Excellent cultural anaylsis

I appreciated the historical development of grunge and how it emerged as a counter cultural movement then coopted by corporate entities. He also dives into the important and lasting political influence.

A great job explaining the mindset on using the scene at the time.

Growing up in Tacoma, Wa during the birth of grunge was a great experience. I was 13 years old in 1988 and spent my youth driving between Seattle and Olympia seeing all the shows I could. You do a great job representing this era and area!

A Scholarly Study of Grunge

If you're looking for some sort of pop-journalistic history of your favourite grunge bands, you may be disappointed. This is a rather serious academic study of grunge as a social movement. Issues such as economics, politics, feminism and the ethics of commercializing angst are the author's/lecturer's focus. I'm glad I listened, for I now have a better understanding of the origins and impact of music that was once often in my ears.

Social and political backdrop to grunge

So I thought this was interesting. To hear about my favorite musical genre from this angle. One shouldn’t be shocked that “grunge” was/is counter culture, much like the 60s. And that some artists were pretty vocal about their attitudes and political views, nirvana and Pearl Jam especially. Spends almost too much time with those bands, as if the Seattle scene didn’t already exist before them. As usual, Alice In Chains (my fave)gets a few mentions at best. Maybe because they werent as political? But still, an interesting listen.

A great brief overview of Grunge

Pleasant voice to listen to. I learned quite a bit about grunge. I enjoyed learning more about the artists intentions and artistry.

Homily and history

Knowledgeable historian, but s one of this is just political opinion. Author minimizes justifies drug abuse by not offering any counter argument

A Miasma of Tedious Leftist Mythmaking

As one who was ensconced in the visceral pulse of the late 80s early ‘90s underground—specifically in the fetid, luminous subterranea of Chicago’s true scene (Naked Raygun, The Didjits, Big Black, The Jesus Lizard, Albini's serrated minimalism)—I approached The Story of Grunge not only with curiosity but a certain proprietary nostalgia. Grunge, after all, was never merely the flannel-clad effusion that seeped from Seattle into the maw of MTV; it was a feral cry against suburban anesthesia, a muddy, misanthropic sacrament performed in smoke-clogged clubs with bad wiring and worse acoustics. It was the authenticity that mainstream rock had long since bartered away.

Alas, what we are offered here is not a history but an ideologically embalmed caricature—one that sound less like a retrospective and more like a progressive sermon in six predictable parts. All the requisite pieties are present: a sanctimonious hagiography of third-wave feminism, abortion lionized as an unimpeachable good, the Riot Grrrl movement held up as the genre’s teleological apex—as if it were the logical telos of a sound forged more in psychic disintegration than social theory.

What grunge was—the scream, the drone, the sludge of spiritual disillusionment—is here reduced to a moral allegory for leftist virtue. And nowhere is this more nauseating than in the author’s gleeful nod to how young Gen Xers supported Bill Clinton, that arch-priest of neoliberalism. This, we’re told, was a sign of political maturity. As if it were not Clinton who, with his NAFTA treaties and free-trade dogmas, gutted American manufacturing, eviscerated working-class stability, and consigned entire towns to economic oblivion—all while selling it with a saxophone and a smirk. The same generation that shouted along to Cobain’s howls of alienation was, apparently, meant to cheer for the man who sold their parents’ jobs to the lowest bidder.

There is no sense here of the tragic, Dionysian core of grunge. Little of Cobain’s weary nihilism, of Layne Staley’s haunted narcotic liturgies, of the abrasive genius of Albini’s anti-commercial sonic theology. Just sterile analysis, moralistic teleology, and the self-satisfied reduction of subculture into sociopolitical parable.

If you remember the real underground—not the VH1 version, but the unwashed, unkempt, and unclassifiable scene where the music actually happened—you’d do better to revisit Goat or In Utero than endure this lecture. This is not the story of grunge. This is its eulogy, read aloud by the very forces that killed it.