I'll bite. Even if it exposes my ignorance. Will you elaborate? I can't figure out what you are talking specifically. Neither my friend Google nor Wikipedia are much use to me today.

Baffled here as well. Nothing in any of the "this day in music" sites about the date 9/19/96.

What are we missing?

You're right. This is a totally random comment.

I guess it came from all the band-surfing I've been doing on Wikipedia lately. I decided to start taking all my unclassified MP3s and putting album, artist and genre information on them. In doing so, I often forgot which songs went on which albums, so I looked them up on Wikipedia.

In doing so, I noticed that rock bands with successful releases pre-summer of 1996 were often described as "grunge," while big releases in the fall of 1996 and onward would garner a label of "post-grunge." This, of course, led me to the inescapable conclusion that grunge must have died sometime in the late summer or early fall of 1996.

Today seems as good a day for a 10-year observance as any...

Grunge is considered to have died when Pearl Jam came out with No Code in late August of 1996. The album sold poorly and was more of a progressive rock album than what one would call a grunge album. Cobain was dead, Soundgarden released their last studio album late in September of '96, and Layne Staley was deep into his heroin addiction preventing Alice in Chains from coming out with a studio album after '95. Also of note is that Tupac Shakur died on September 13, 1996 which helped to fuel the rise of hip-hop and in turn killed off a large section of the grunge rock-listening teen crowd.

Interesting note from RS review of recent self-titled PJ CD.

However you define grunge music, Pearl Jam didn't play it. They were, from jump street, a classic rock band, building their bawl with iron-guitar bones and an arena-vocal lust that came right from Zeppelin, early-Seventies Who and mid-Eighties U2 (with distortion instead of the Edge's glass-guitar harmonics).

Grunge died on November 15, 1992. That's when punk was reborn, thanks to a New York Times article on "grunge music".

As part of that article, a Times reporter called the offices of a record label in Seattle and spoke with and employee and asked her for some grunge slang. The resulting sidebar read as follows:

"All subcultures speak in code; grunge is no exception. Megan Jasper, a 25-year-old sales representative at Caroline Records in Seattle, provided this lexicon of grunge-speak, coming soon to a high school or mall near you:

WACK SLACKS: Old ripped jeans
FUZZ: Heavy wool sweaters
PLATS: Platform shoes
KICKERS: Heavy boots
SWINGIN' ON THE FLIPPITY-FLOP: Hanging out
BOUND-AND-HAGGED: Staying home on a Friday or Saturday night
SCORE: Great
HARSH REALM: Bummer
COB NOBBLER: Loser
DISH: Desirable guy
BLOATED, BIG BAG OF BLOATATION: Drunk
LAMESTAIN: Uncool person
TOM-TOM-CLUB: Uncool outsiders
ROCK ON: A happy goodbye"

This ran in the New York Times, which evidently did not employ fact-checkers in 1992, since Megan Jasper made the entire thing up; no such slang existed, the words meant nothing, she was making it up as she went along.

When the New York Times runs an article on a musical genre (that none of its practitioners ever acknowledged, by the way, as none of them really sounded much like one another - but that's a different discussion), it is dead. When a snooty newspaper gets totally taken by a 25-year-old record label sales rep, it's a complete triumph for youth, a totally punk thing to do, and the final nail in the coffin of that nonexistent thing called "grunge".

Swingin' on the flippity-flop, indeed.

Pearl-Jam-as-classic-rock is nothing short of revisionist history. Aside from Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder was the singer most responsible for the entire campus at school deciding to wear flannel. They were grunge all right.

While PJ had more of a classic rock tone to it, the song structures and progressions were fresh. Sure, they didn't have the ultradistorted grunge with their guitar playing, but they had other fresh elements.

Ooh, I get to disagree with Tom!

IMO, Pearl Jam was about as "grunge" as REM.

"Grunge" had nothing to do with the kind of clothes you have to wear every day in order to keep warm in Seattle. "Grunge" was a word used to describe the sludgy, dirgy, ultra-distorted guitars of Green River, Mudhoney, Skinyard, Soundgarden and The Melvins, along with non-seattle bands like Bitch Magnet and some of the bands on the Amphetamine Reptile label in Minnesota.

The key were the Sub Pop and C/Z record labels, which kept spitting out bands from Seattle, and as those bands broke up and reformed as Mother Love Bone, Mookie Blaylock and eventually Pearl Jam, the term stuck with those bands even though the musical styles were nothing like their ancestors'. Nirvana became the figurehead "grunge" band despite being a punk-influenced pop band, and all the more commercially accepted bands from the area hit it big, most of the original bands disintigrated.

All I know is that when I was in my late teens buying Bitch Magnet records, "grunge" was a word I was comfortable using when describing a musical style.

But the summer of 1991, I guess, when the top 40 charts were cluttered with Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Temple of the Dog, and Alice in Chains, well, it reminded me of the summer of 1985, when the charts were cluttered with Phil Collins, Genesis, and Peter Gabriel. In other words, once-great music that had been processed so much by the record industry that only a tiny bit of what was left even remotely resembled what it originated as.

By the way:

Bearded Tom = Grunge
Smooth Tom = Top 40

-Al

There's always the guy who comes in with the "I was there before Corporate America corrupted it" schpiel... ;-)

"Grunge" doesn't just describe the flannel. It doesn't describe just the distorted guitars. To me, it also speaks to getting away from the hair metal formula that dominated when Grunge (the mainstream movement, not the indie movement Al describes) rose to prominence.

Take PJ's "Alive," for instance. How many hair metal songs used a suspended 9th in the bassline? I hadn't heard it to date. It was like a breath of fresh air at the time.

That I was there before corporate America got hold of it doesn't mean I'm COOL, it means I'm OLD. :)

This is not to say that PJ isn't a good band - I think they are. I actually can't think of any other bands that got started in the early 90s that are still commercially viable. Are there any? But I do think that they took an unfair hit by being called "grunge", because when the grunge backlash happened, they suffered. But really, if you compare PJ to those other bands, aside from loud guitars, the only things they really have in common are clothes and geography. PJ focused much more on songwriting, musicianship and lyrics than most of them.

I still like a lot of those bands. I don't think PJ were the BEST band to come out of that era - I'd give that nod to Screaming Trees or Skinyard. But those are two uncommonly good bands. PJ were certainly better than most of the rest, though.