everybody loves our town an oral history of grunge

Blending loose, noisy instrumentals with even looser, anguished, often humorous and self-deprecating vocals in a style all their own, grunge artists were neither punk nor metal, but somehow appealed to both audiences in an infectious fashion that flourished in Seattle’s wet and fertile music landscape. Young artists took inspiration from progressive and genre-stretching punk bands like the Melvins, the U-Men, Iggy Pop and the Ramones. Grunge rose out of the ashes of the decline of punk, and returned underground in the late 1980s after having given way to new wave, heavy metal and glam rock. Grunge is a style of rock music that emerged in the Pacific Northwest from the mid-1980s into the 1990s. They speak conversationally, about who they were then, and what went down as they remember it. Woven together into something resembling temporally accurate order are over 250 unique interviews, phone conversations and folklore from the people who lived grunge before it had a name. The music insider Mark Yarm, a former senior editor for Blender magazine, presents a narrative history of grunge, putting readers in the same room with many of the musicians, band managers, roadies, club owners and record-company professionals who lived and breathed Seattle music during this historic era.

Grunge music came, saw and conquered, but by the late 1990s - barely 10 years after grunge prototypes like Mother Love Bone and Green River first began breaking out of the dreary, as yet unheard of Northwest music scene and onto the world stage - it was dead.Īt the time of Cobain’s death in 1994, numerous bands from the Seattle area had enjoyed incredible success, and many more musicians and bands were flocking to Seattle to take part in the recording-industry feeding frenzy in the wake of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album and its iconic hit single, “Smells like Teen Spirit.” The lyric greeting readers at the beginning of the book alludes to the horde of talented musicians, followed by large recording studios trolling for the “next Nirvana” descending on Seattle at this time. It is perhaps not coincidental that this particular song was written and performed at the height of grunge music’s ascendance to the top of the American popular-music landscape, and just two years before the loss of its scion, Kurt Cobain, frontman for what then may have been the most prominent band in the world: Nirvana.

In Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, the reader is presented - even before reaching the table of contents - with this haunting refrain from Mudhoney’s 1992 album.

Everybody loves our town an oral history of grunge