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It is a mixture of punk and heavy metal that emerged in the mid-80s in Seattle, a city in the northwest of the United States, almost on the border with Canada. the term grunge – which in its original meaning means “dirt” or “filth” in English – describes both the visual style (disheveled hair, old and baggy clothes) of bands and fans, and the saturated and distorted sound of the guitars that set the tone of the songs .
At the time, nobody could imagine that such anarchist and noisy bands could take over the world pop market. But that’s exactly what happened in 1991, when Nevermindthe second album by the trio Nirvana, knocked none other than Michael Jackson off the top spot on the American charts, opening the way to mega-stardom for other bands from the Seattle underground scene, such as Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains.
This whole story, however, began a little earlier, when the bands Green River, formed in 1983, and Soundgarden, from 1984, became the first of their kind to record for the local independent label Sub Pop, whose name would soon become synonymous with of grunge. Soundgarden even left the founders of two of the most revered bands in the group: Mudhoney and the aforementioned Pearl Jam. In the following decade, MTV took care of spreading the style across the planet, turning it into a real fever in the early 90s.
The genre only began to decline after the suicide of its greatest idol, Kurt Cobain, the leader of Nirvana, in 1994. But, in a way, grunge lived on with the success of Pearl Jam and Foo Fighters (founded by the former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl), the style’s influence on indie bands in the 2000s and the participation of big names in the genre in other successful bands, such as Scott Weiland (from Stone Temple Pilots and, later, from Velvet Revolver) and Chris Cornell (of Soundgarden, then Audioslave and solo).