Many people cite the release of Nirvana’s watershed album “Nevermind” in 1991 as the key date in the emergence of grunge, but for me its impact came several years later. I was living in Iowa at the time and as an episode of South Park once joked, Des Moines is 5 years behind the rest of the world. It wasn’t until I moved to Texas in the mid ‘90s that I discovered the sound, and I was instantly in love. I’d always had a major antipathy to modern music (excluding MC Hammer) as I felt that it failed to really express any serious emotions. Yet with grunge, I felt that I had found a music culture that expressed more than cheap noise. Listening to grunge I could hear potent melodies, and in a lot of cases you can really feel the emotions behind the songs coming forth.
The grunge emergence really only lasted a few years, but the culture lived on in the music known as “post-grunge”. This still makes up a majority of what I listen to today; bands such as Collective Soul, Nickelback (before they made the jump to pop), Splender, and so many other members of the post-grunge alt-rock scene have provided me with a soundtrack for my life, with music for every occasion. Anytime I want to relive a good memory, or deal with a bad one, the grunge culture produced the music that can take me back or move me forward, and that’s a power no other culture has had over me.
- A bunch of different people talk about the emergence of grunge here
- What's post-grunge? (note: Creed is terrible; it's only impact on me has been to inspire anger)
