Grunge

Grunge is a four-piece rock format with two heavily distorted guitars, bass, drums, and a singer who alternates between low conversational delivery and a strained yell. Tempos sit 100-140 BPM — slower than punk, less precise than metal. The defining arrangement move is the soft/loud verse-chorus contrast: a clean, almost folk-like verse opens into a full-distortion chorus. Lyrics work in anxiety, self-disgust, alienation, and depression rather than sex, cars, or rebellion. Production is intentionally rough — backing vocals are minimal, harmonies sparse, and the recordings sound like a band in a room.

The scene cohered in Seattle in the late 1980s around the Sub Pop label, with Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and Mother Love Bone as the local foundation. Nirvana's 'Nevermind,' released September 1991, sold ten million copies in the US alone and displaced Michael Jackson at the top of the Billboard 200, taking the genre from independent regional scene to global commercial center in a few months. Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Stone Temple Pilots followed. Kurt Cobain's suicide in April 1994 functionally marked the scene's end as a mainstream force; Alice in Chains' Layne Staley stopped touring in 1996 (and died in 2002).

The cleanest example is the opening of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' — single-note clean guitar for two bars, then the full band crashes in on the same chords with distortion. Listen for the way the bass and drums hit hard accents together on the downbeats, leaving space between. Vocal performances are physical: Cobain's throat strain, Cornell's whole-band-loud belt, Vedder's vibrato-heavy baritone. The studio-clean version of grunge (Stone Temple Pilots) versus the genuinely loose version (Nirvana, Mudhoney) is a useful split.

Nirvana's 'Nevermind' (1991) is the obvious entry point. From there, Pearl Jam's 'Ten' (1991), Soundgarden's 'Superunknown' (1994), and Alice in Chains' 'Dirt' (1992). For the quieter, acoustic side, Nirvana's 'MTV Unplugged in New York' (1994) is essential.

'Grunge' was originally a Seattle press term for 'grungy' — dirty-sounding — and the bands the label was applied to mostly disliked it. Cobain's preferred Fender Jaguar and Jazzmaster guitars were unfashionable and undervalued before he played them; his use of them in 1991-94 caused Fender to reissue both models and made them mainstays of alternative-rock setups thereafter.