Grunge: A Success Story

Published: November 15, 1992

WHEN did grunge become grunge? How did a five-letter word meaning dirt, filth, trash become synonymous with a musical genre, a fashion statement, a pop phenomenon?

From subculture to mass culture, the trend time line gets shorter and faster all the time. It was just over a year ago that MTV began barraging its viewers with the sounds of Seattle "grunge rock," featuring the angst anthems and grinding guitars of bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. By last summer, the glossy magazines began tracking grunge looks, the threadbare flannel shirts, knobby wool sweaters and cracked leatherette coats of the Pacific Northwest's thrift-shop esthetic. Hollywood weighed in, too, with a grunge-scene movie, "Singles." Then two weeks ago -- all in the blink of a flashbulb -- the fashion designer Marc Jacobs, who has never even been to Seattle, was hailed as "the guru of grunge."

All this has happened before, with the mass-marketing of disco, punk and hip-hop. Now, with the grunging of America, it's happening again. Pop will eat itself, the axiom goes. Here's how it feeds:

In 1988, a fledgling Seattle record label called Sub Pop released a three-boxed set called "Sub Pop 200." It was a compilation of bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden and Mudhoney, and it came complete with a 20-page booklet packed with pictures by Charles Peterson, the photographer credited with creating grunge's hair-sweat-and-guitars look. Sub Pop also sent a catalogue to the nation's alternative-rock intelligentsia describing its bands' punk-metal guitar noise as "grunge," the first documented use of the now-ubiquitous term. "It could have been sludge, grime, crud, any word like that," said Jonathan Poneman, a Sub Pop founder.

Grunge stuck, maybe because it so vividly evoked both the black-noise sound and the smelly-caveman look. Ratty rec-room chic has been hibernating since the 70's, emerging from the basement every so often in movies like "River's Edge," "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" and "Wayne's World."

This generation of greasy Caucasian youths in ripped jeans, untucked flannel and stomping boots spent their formative years watching television, inhaling beer or pot, listening to old Black Sabbath albums and dreaming of the day they would trade in their air guitars for the real thing, so that they, too, could become famous rock-and-roll heroes.

A culture was born.

"Thrifting" is a verb in Seattle. Flannel and leatherette, the boho-hobo staples of second-hand attire, are the basics of a nonfashion statement. A flannel shirt worn around the waist is a precaution against the Pacific Northwest's mercurial clime. Army boots slog effectively through mud. "It wasn't like somebody said, 'Let's all dress like lumberjacks and start Seattle chic!' " Mr. Poneman said. "This stuff is cheap, it's durable, and it's kind of timeless. It also runs against the grain of the whole flashy esthetic that existed in the 80's."

"Kurt Cobain was just too lazy to shampoo," said Charles Cross, the editor of the Seattle music monthly The Rocket, talking about Nirvana's lead singer. Mr. Cobain's matted sheep-dog mop became a much-emulated cut when his band's first single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," hit last year. A native of Aberdeen, Wash., Mr. Cobain was also "dirt poor," Mr. Poneman said. He looked like (and was) a guy who slept on friends' couches or under a bridge, and bought his clothes at thrift shops.

Mr. Cobain has since become wealthy and married (to Courtney Love of the all-women grunge band Hole).

Nirvana's first album, "Bleach," was recorded for $606.17 in 1989. Shrewdly, Sub Pop spent more money flying in a writer from Melody Maker magazine, who carried the hype back to London. The band left the little label in early 1991 for Geffen Records.

MTV put "Smells Like Teen Spirit" into its "Buzz Bin" in September 1991. Picks & Pans in People magazine picked Nirvana's "Nevermind" album last December, and by January it was No. 1 on Billboard's pop album chart. Rolling Stone put the band on its cover in April and called Seattle "the New Liverpool."

Musically, grunge's roots lay elsewhere. In the early 80's in Minneapolis, there was the proto-grunge of Soul Asylum. Out of the Los Angeles post-punk scene came the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Nine Inch Nails and Henry Rollins, who spread their maximum-decibel gospel in the summer of '91 on the Lollapalooza tour, an alternative-rock road show. In Seattle, the movement was localized. Melodies filtered through the mist, inspired and tempered by that city's three principal drugs: espresso, beer and heroin.

"The vibe now is a little bit like the early 70's, before metal ceased to be heavy and relied on adrenaline highs as opposed to despondency," said Simon Reynolds, the author of "Blissed Out" (Serpent's Tail, 1990), a chronicle of rock subcultures. "There's a feeling of burnout in the culture at large. Kids are depressed about the future."

James Truman, the editor in chief of Details, the young men's style magazine that is taking grunge to the masses, said: "To me the thing about grunge is it's not anti-fashion, it's un fashion. Punk was anti-fashion. It made a statement. Grunge is about not making a statement, which is why it's crazy for it to become a fashion statement."

In Details' July issue, a member of a band called Firehose wrote a paean to his flannel shirt. In September, the magazine ran an article called "Nirvana-bes: A Bluffer's Guide to the New Indie-Rock Superstars." Entertainment Weekly discovered underground music in August with its "Complete (Idiot's) Guide to the Future of Rock & Roll." Vogue dispatched Steven Meisel to photograph grunge fashion in Northwest noir for its December issue. But none of this would have happened without MTV.

Not long after its debut, Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video ran four or five times a day for weeks. In October 1991, Steve Isaacs, MTV's first grunge veejay, was hired and was put into equally heavy rotation. But by last May, Pearl Jam's acoustic jam on the network's "Unplugged" show made Nirvana look like last year's model.

"We have a pretty big role in spreading something from the underground to the heartland," said John Canelli, the senior vice president of music and talent at MTV. But a band playing the heartland isn't underground anymore, which explains why, Mr. Canelli said, "we're always looking for whatever the next thing is."

MTV embodies the paradox of selling a phenomenon like grunge. When an alternative movement goes mainstream, it relinquishes its alternative credentials.

"You cross over to the point where you lose the original following," said Jay Coleman, the president and chief executive of Marketing and Communications International in New York. "But you pick up 10 times the original audience." Mr. Coleman's company marketed an alternative-music compact disk, "Stolar Tracks" (available from a "900" number), for Stolichnaya vodka, starring, among other artists, Seattle's Screaming Trees. He offered to arrange corporate sponsorship for the organizers of the second Lollapalooza tour, held last summer, but was turned down on the grounds that it would be like "sponsoring Woodstock."

By the same logic, Mr. Truman of Details thinks that "buying grunge as a package from Seventh Avenue is ludicrous." When Marc Jacobs sent out a parade of the world's most beautiful women wearing wool ski caps, unlaced combat boots, clashing prints and dirty-looking hair (styled by Oribe) for his spring Perry Ellis collection, Women's Wear Daily dubbed him "the guru of grunge." Now, Frederic Fekkai, the Manhattan stylist, says all the young models are asking him to make their lovely locks "a little more greasy-looking."

"A hippied romantic version of punk" is how Mr. Jacobs described his collection. Another W.W.D. story said the unwashed Goodwill-garb look "bombed when it was too grungy," quoting buyers' complaints about the creations of Mr. Jacobs, Anna Sui and Christian Francis Roth, who dressed for his show in a wool cap and played an electric guitar.

Cliff Pershes, an assistant designer at Perry Ellis, admitted to being influenced by grunge rock's moldy chic but insisted that he "used it in a new way." The Perry Ellis "flannel" shirt that models tied around their waists was in fact sand-washed silk. Mr. Pershes swears there's "not a drop of polyester" in the whole collection. It just looks like polyester.

A DESIGNER can steal street style and put it on the runway in the space of just one season, noted Walter Thomas, the creative director at J. Crew. "By the time you see it in Kmart, which you will, it can be three years," he said. The difference with grunge is that it was already for sale at Kmart, not to mention the Salvation Army.

Outdoorsy trading posts like L. L. Bean, Timberland and Lands' End have been flogging long johns and flannel forever. "I haven't heard it called the grunge look," said a baffled L. L. Bean spokeswoman. But notice that Timberland stock has doubled in the last year.

"The interval between something being dangerous and being normal is very short," said Mr. Reynolds, the author. And, in fact, the month that Rolling Stone put Nirvana on its cover, Weird Al Yankovic's "Smells Like Nirvana" parody video was already a hit on MTV. When Cameron Crowe shot "Singles," the members of Pearl Jam were sufficiently unknown to appear in the movie as extras. (Matt Dillon, the movie's moody leader of a garage grunge band called Citizen Dick, stereotyped their kind.) But by the time the band played the premiere party at the Plaza Hotel in September, they were rock stars.

Back in Seattle, a backlash is brewing. "All things grunge are treated with the utmost cyncism and amusement," said Mr. Poneman of Sub Pop. "Because the whole thing is a fabricated movement and always has been." The still-unfamous Seattle band Mudhoney even wrote a song about it: Everybody loves us Everybody loves our town That's why I'm Thinking of leaving it Don't believe in it now . . . It's so overblown. HB>LEXICON OF GRUNGE: BREAKING THE CODE


WACK SLACKS: Old ripped jeans

FUZZ: Heavy wool sweaters

PLATS: Platform shoes

KICKERS: Heavy boots



SCORE: Great



DISH: Desirable guy


LAMESTAIN: Uncool person

TOM-TOM CLUB: Uncool outsiders

ROCK ON: A happy goodbye