Fortunes rained down and the media ordained them rock stars. Like their punk forbearers who railed against the status quo and the trappings of success incurred through the mass appeal of their art, Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and the rest of the grunge cohort often wrestled with the momentum of their success. Grunge set off new fashion trends in favor of dressing down and sporting the latest in second-hand, thrift store apparel, ripping away the Reagan-era starched white-collared working-class aesthetic of the 1980’s corporate culture. Grunge artists wrote emotionally-laden songs that spoke to a particular generation of youth who identified with lyrics about isolation, anger, and death. The grunge sound drew from the nihilism of punk and the head banging gospel of heavy metal, tinged with the swagger of 1970s FM rock running counter to the sleek production of pop radio and hair metal bands. As a subculture, grunge rallied around a set of attitudes and values that set the movement apart from mainstream (Latysheva). So, when I took notice of grunge music in the fall of 1991, it was love at first listen.Īs a pop cultural phenomenon, grunge ruptured the music and fashion industries caught off guard by its sudden commercial appeal while the media struggled to galvanize its relevance. Rhythm and melody play out like characters in my life, colluding to make me feel something apart from the mundane, moving me from within. I rely on music to relocate my sense of self.

I picked up my first guitar when John Lennon died on the eve of my eleventh birthday and have played for the past 37 years. I ran with friends who shared this love of music, often turning me on to new bands or suggesting some obscure song from the past to track down. The music spoke to my being in the world more than the promise of any college degree. I didn’t just listen to music, I devoured stories about the musicians, their often hedonistic lifestyles their processes and epiphanies. I grew up listening to The Beatles and Prince Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis David Bowie and Willie Nelson, along with a litany of other artists and musicians crafting the kind of meaningful music I responded to. When grunge first exploded on the pop culture scene, I was a college student flailing around in pursuit of an English degree I had less passion for than I did for music.

Wood’s untimely death at the age of 24, only days before his band’s debut album release, shook the close-knit Seattle music scene and remained a source of angst and inspiration for a genre of music that shaped youth culture of the 1990s.

I thought about when Cornell and Staley said goodbye to their friend Andy Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone, after he overdosed on heroine in 1990. Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley died in 2002 at the age of 35, and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 had resonated around the globe. I remember thinking, there’s only one left, referring to Eddie Vedder, lead singer for Pearl Jam, and lone survivor of the four seminal grunge bands that rose to fame in the early 1990s whose lead singers passed away much too soon. As the lead singer of Soundgarden and a pioneer of early 1990s grunge music, his voice revealed an unbridled pain and joy backed up by the raw, guitar-driven rock emanating from the Seattle, Washington music scene. The death of Chris Cornell in the spring of 2017 shook me.

Guitar with grunge overlay