Essay On Grunge

3076 Words7 Pages

This paper is an analysis of the grunge movement, an exploration into genre classification, audience and artist identity and how it is related to media and cultural capital. This paper will also highlight the vast difference between literary perception of the movement (analysis and articles written about grunge) versus the perception of inhabitants of Seattle that witnessed the grunge movement as it happened (extracted from interviews in the grunge documentary, Hype!).

The late 1970s gave birth to a punk culture that further distended into an evolution of the genre during the mid-1980s, particularly in Seattle, USA. A punk inspired movement called grunge became internationally recognized after Nirvana’s debut release album ‘Nevermind’, in 1995. Grunge gained a mass recognition for its punk ideology, attire and music, which stemmed further away, and was in itself a rejection to the mainstream metal and pop boom in the music industry of that time. Grunge incorporated a fusion of cultural and social threads that linked themes like feminism, liberalism, anti-authoritarianism, wry post-modernism, and not least a love of dirty, abrasive music; grunge reconciled all these into a seminal whole. (Standard grunge definition, Internet source)

According to the various residents of Seattle and their interviews conducted on the documentary known as Hype!, Seattle was a far off state with low temperature weather conditions where popular bands refused to hold concerts, which is why the locals made their own garage bands, produced their own songs and records and held concerts.
In analyzing the consumer of this music, one has to look into the economy to get a fair idea of where the young white male stood in his life that he was attracted to t...

... middle of paper ...

...oots, and cowboy hat. The ‘she’ becomes a ‘he’. This band member is, in reality, was a male. The visual transformation of the character in the video illustrates that gender is a social construction and is, therefore, subject to conflicting construct.
In conclusion, I would like to state that even though this paper has marked a clear difference between what is perceived through the eyes of a witness as opposed to a research, the grunge movement, although a media commodity, an ironic mainstream movement whose philosophy was to oppose the mainstream in the first place, has left its mark on the music industry. It should, under no circumstance, be assumed that all there was to the grunge movement was a manipulation. It was the heart and soul of its audience, and remains quite so today, on an international basis. Not for its history, but for the content of its music.

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