Grungemetalwhatever

Last month's issue of Classic Rock had a cover story on twenty years of Guns' Use Your Illusion with a related feature on how Grunge killed 'party hair metal' around that time. (Nirvana's Nevermind was released around the same time). Like most stuff on Classic Rock , it's a great read. (love the mag. It's expensive but it's such value !)

Thing i like about that period is it's one the very few in my listening life when i was checking into contemporary music of the time. To be sure , it was bang in the middle of my hippie music-only phase (ouch !) and i was one of those insufferable bores not uncommon to my generation in India at that time that always went "yeah-but- if- it's-not-from-the-sixties/seventies -i'm- not- listening- to- it". But i was listening to a fairish bit if current music too , especially the hard rock and metal stuff. GNR i loved,still do actually.

Nirvana i didn't get into then though , just heard a couple of tracks. In fact i remember this morning sometime in '92 or so at my University bus stop , this guy's raving about a band called Nirvana he'd watched the previous night and i thought he was talking about a local Delhi band and gig he'd been to. Then he tells me it was on MTV or Channel V or something and that was the first i heard of Nirvana - beat that ! I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit covered by a local band. It was good ! But i thought for the longest time that it was by Pearl Jam !

History is always afterwards , right ? At that time , i don't think too many people were differentiating along those lines. I mean , at least for me Nirvana and Pearl Jam were just new hard rock bands with a different sound (low-guitar-solo aspect of which i didn't like too much !) They were being called "Alternative" i knew. But that aside i don't recall if people were actually calling it ''grunge' at that point. Or setting them off against other hard rock / metal acts. It wasn't until after reading this CR piece that i saw the bigger picture of how that played out and how it all but killed off the whole LA glam metal thing.

And not knowing was natural because it wasn't relevant to my context. See the playing field is always out there in the US / UK / the West somewhere . India's obviously too nascent - even now - to be that dynamic. Several genres can very comfortably coexist as favourites with the Indian rock lover. As i said , kids were still discovering the Beatles or the Stones around that time when Satellite TV and music television was first coming in.Their parents - same generation as Lennon or Jagger - possibly hadn't even heard of the stuff. And in all likelihood , thousands of kids even 20 years later today are possibly going through the whole process. It's still a very small place but for sure it's growing larger by the day. A critical mass will no doubt arrive. But certainly back then , you wouldn't be drawing too many lines through what you listened to. Separating it clearly out from the bubble gum pop your kid sister danced to was line enough.

The other thing personally for me was i never did get into the whole glam metal thing. NWOBHM was where it was at for me and my metal buddies. Maiden and Priest ruled. Metallica. GNR , hell yes. But we couldn't be too arsed about bands like Motley Crue or Poison. Found it ordinary. And i hated that make-up-on look. Yucks. So for me it didn't need Grunge or anything to kill that scene , it never lived in the first place far as i was concerned !

The same CR issue also has a piece on a band i hadn't ever heard of ."German experimentalists" called Can. Intrigued , i checked them out on You Tube. Trippy,very !