THe GRuNGe WoRLD (PoeM)

Torn faded blue jeans,
With shirts,
Long straight hair,
With a little beards,
Wearing canvas shoes,
With an I Pod in ears,
Walk alone accompany by the music,
The Sounds of Seattle we call,
Don’t care of the surrounding,
On how people look at us,
On how people label us,
Whatever...................
Nevermind.........................
Cause it is just perception,
Given to us by others,
We know who we are,
Better than others,
We are not punkers,
We are not posers,
We don’t like attention,
Like the boy band does,
This is us,
Leaving in our own world,
Far away from the fame,
Far away from the attention,
It is not our necessity,
Cause we are simple,
We love our musics,
Our style and images,
Some might call it sloppy,
But for us it is gorgeous,
This is our world,
Our Grunge world,
Can you accept and understand,
If you are not one of us?

WoRK iN PRoGReSS

I guess it is time for me to take a break from the Grunge fever. But this is just temporary. Need some time to search for materials. I had spent most of my time this week to search for info on my writing (can I called it my writing when most of the time I just surf, copy and paste most of the articles).

I was still looking for something to write and quite stuck on the limited topics I had in mind. Then, I went online and chat with some of my friends while promoting my blog. Suddenly, one of my friends asked me the reason why I want to create my own blog.

I think I had provided my friends with a wrong reason on why I become blogger. At first, my intention to create my own blog is for me to release the things I could not say or things that bugging me (the place for me to release my feeling towards my life). But once I started, I realized that I could not keep my blog as secret (hide it from friends). I love to see people visiting and reading my blog. Therefore, I change my cause of writing the blogs. From something personal, to something public and commercialize (kind like nirvana or other Grunge (some of underground band too) bands-at first they don’t want to commercialize their music, but at the end, they signed up with recording company and become mainstream). I use my blog to improve my English writing skills (am having problems with my past, present and future tense and also to identified and differentiate singular and plurals). It would give me advantages in my work if I can master the skills. There are lot of my friends giving me compliments on my English. Some say that my English is quite good compare to others. But frankly speaking, I don’t think I have good command in English for communication or writing. This are the things that I would like to improve in the near future. Hopefully I can achieve my goals by writing my blog in English.

I have lost ideas to write. It is best for me to end my writing now. To those who come to my blogs for the Grunge articles, you don’t have to be worried. I am going to update on articles related to Grunge and Grunge bands, update on the albums (previous albums and future projects-still in progress), mp3 songs and lyrics and so on. I would also write on thoughts and my own poems (kind of funny when blog related to Grunge music do have this kind of subjects) and few other categories/ labels in the future.

Thanks for all those who support my blog and to all my friends who have commented on it. I would take your comments seriously as this might help me to improve my blog. Do enjoy yourself here and till we meet again in my next writing.

GRuNGe BaND : MuDHoNeY

Introduction

Nirvana may have been the band that put an entire generation in flannel, and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden both sold a lot more records, but Mudhoney was truly the band who made the '90s grunge rock movement possible. Mudhoney was the first real success story for Sub Pop Records; their indie-scene success laid the groundwork for the movement that would (briefly) make Seattle, WA, the new capital of the rock & roll universe; and they took the sweat-soaked and beer-fueled mixture of heavy metal muscle, punk attitude, and garage rock primitivism that would become known as "grunge" to the hipster audience for the first time, who would in turn sell it to a mass audience ready for something new. Though Mudhoney never scored the big payday some of their old-running buddies did, their importance on the Seattle scene cannot be underestimated, and their body of work -- big, loud, purposefully sloppy, a little bit menacing, and even more funny -- has stood the test of time better than their well-known colleagues. (Sources from http://www.mudhoney.net/)

Mudhoney is an American grunge band. Formed in Seattle, Washington in 1988 following the demise of Green River, Mudhoney has for the most of its recording career consisted of Mark Arm (vocals, rhythm guitar), Steve Turner (lead guitar), Matt Lukin (bass) and Dan Peters (drums). Mudhoney's early releases on Sub Pop—the "Touch Me I'm Sick" single and the Superfuzz Bigmuff EP—were very influential in the Seattle music scene, and helped inspire the dirty, high-distortion sound that would characterize grunge. They have inspired notable Grunge and Alternative Rock musicians, most notably Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. (Sources from wikipedia online ensyclopedia)



History

Mudhoney's time line begins in 1980, when teenaged Mark McLaughlin (who would soon adopt the punk handle Mark Arm) formed the band Mr. Epp and the Calculations with some high-school friends from the Seattle suburb of Bellevue; none of whom actually knew how to play at the time. More interested in goofing off, breaking things, and posting flyers for shows that were never scheduled than actually making music, Mr. Epp didn't get around to playing a show until late 1981, opening for a band called Student Nurse. Despite their legendary ineptitude (they were described as "the worst band in the world" on more than one occasion), Mr. Epp began to develop a following, and released a 7" EP in 1982. In 1983, in a bid to sound more like a real band, the group added a second guitarist, Steve Turner, who had previously played in a garage band called the Ducky Boys. That same year they released their Live As All Get Out cassette, but things began to peter out for the group, and they played their final show in February 1984. In 1981, Arm and Turner, who'd become fast friends, also began playing in another joke-punk band, the Limp Richerds, and briefly placed their focus on that group until the Richerds also broke up near the end of 1984.

Green River (1984-1987)

Green River was formed in 1984 when Mark Arm and Steve Turner recruited Alex Vincent as drummer, who had previously played with Turner in the short-lived Spluii Numa. Bassist Jeff Ament joined the band after arriving in Seattle with his band Deranged Diction. Stone Gossard, another of Turner's former bandmates, was recruited as second guitarist. Green River recorded their debut EP, Come on Down, in 1985, and it is often regarded as the first true "grunge" record. Steve Turner left the band after its release due to his distaste of the band's heavy metal leanings. He was replaced by another Derranged Diction member, Bruce Fairweather. After recording another EP (Dry As a Bone) and a full-length album (Rehab Doll), the band decided to call it quits in late 1987. Gossard, Ament, and Fairweather went on to join Mother Love Bone. Following lead singer, Andrew Wood's death, Gossard and Ament went on to form Pearl Jam, and Fairweather joined Love Battery. In January 1988, Arm reunited with Turner to form Mudhoney.

Sub Pop (1988-1991)

Arm and Turner, meanwhile, had formed a side project while in Green River called the Thrown Ups, featuring graphic artist Ed Fotheringham on vocals. Essentially a more extreme example of the sort of goofy onslaught Arm and Turner had let loose with Mr. Epp, the Thrown Ups brought the two friends back together again, but Turner expressed a desire to form a new band that actually rehearsed songs before they played them in front of an audience. In his spare time, Turner began working up new material with Arm and drummer Dan Peters, who had played in Bundle of Hiss and Feast. Needing a bassist, the three hooked up with Matt Lukin, who had recently left the Melvins shortly before they left Washington for California. Naming themselves Mudhoney, after a Russ Meyer film none of them had actually seen, the new foursome took the punk metal formula of Green River and the Melvins, added a dollop of '60s garage rock swagger and a large portion of Fun House-era Stooges, and ran it all through the cheap stomp boxes Arm and Turner so cherished. Turner initially expected the band to last about six month.

In 1988, Sub Pop released the band's first single, "Touch Me I'm Sick" b/w "Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More", with the EP Superfuzz Bigmuff following a few months later. The timing proved fortuitous. The indie circuit success of the Replacements and Big Black had created a demand at college radio and the underground club circuit for harder and heavier bands, and Sub Pop's homegrown-but-earnest media blitz was helping to make "the Seattle Sound" -- soon to be dubbed "grunge" -- the next big thing, with Mudhoney the chief beneficiary. While the band's first american tour was nothing to write home about, the Sub Pop hype machine had already begun to take hold overseas, and the band scored a European tour -- mostly dates in Germany -- in early 1989. A few months later, Sonic Youth, who'd been big fans of Green River, invited Turner and Arm's new band to join them for a British tour, and soon Mudhoney found themselves the talk of the U.K. rock press. Superfuzz Bigmuff landed on the British indie charts and stayed there for the better part of a year, and the band wasted no time returning for a headlining tour, complete with massive press coverage and riotous shows. Word of Mudhoney's rep in Europe quickly crossed the pond, and the band was the new heroes of underground rock by the time their first full-length album, simply called Mudhoney, came out in late 1989.

Reprise (1992-1999)

In the wake of Mudhoney's success, a number of other Sub Pop acts began making big noise on college radio and the indie club circuit, including Soundgarden, Tad, the Fluid, and a trio of Melvins fans from Aberdeen, WA, called Nirvana. However, while Sub Pop was doing a fine job of creating the Next Big Thing, they weren't making much money at it just yet; and the label's financial problems were one reason Mudhoney's second full-length album, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge -- which found the band upping the garage punk quotient in their formula -- didn't hit stores until 1991. By the end of the year, Mudhoney was shopping for a new label, and they could have hardly chosen a better time; Nirvana had already taken the major-label bait in 1990, and by December of 1991, Nevermind had made them the biggest and most talked about rock band in America. Soon, seemingly every band in Seattle was being offered a major label contract, and Mudhoney signed a deal with Reprise/Warner Bros. Their first major-label album, Piece of Cake, made it clear that the band's new corporate sponsorship wasn't going to change their musical approach; but their presence on a major label seemed to alienate old fans, while the mass audience who had embraced Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam (featuring Arm and Turner's old Green River bandmates Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament) found Mudhoney's work too eccentric for comfort. While Mudhoney remained a potent live draw, their record sales during their tenure with Reprise were disappointing, though they recorded two of their finest albums for the label: My Brother the Cow and Tomorrow Hit Today.

After Matt Lukin (2000-present)

In 1999, after an extensive tour supporting Tomorrow Hit Today, Reprise announced that they had dropped Mudhoney from their roster, and shortly after that, the band announced that Matt Lukin had turned in his resignation, citing his dislike of touring. With the release of March to Fuzz, a comprehensive career-retrospective compilation, many observers assumed that Mudhoney had called it a day, but in 2001 the band began playing a few live dates around the Northwest, with Steve Dukich (formerly with Steel Wool) sitting in on bass. The shows went well enough that Mudhoney decided to take another stab at their career, and Guy Maddison -- who'd been a member of Bloodloss, one of Arm's many part-time bands -- signed on as Mudhoney's new official bassist. Arm and Turner also found time to record and tour with a side project, the garage blues band Monkeywrench. When they came back together, they recorded Since We've Become Translucent and released it in the summer of 2002.






Resources: Wikipedia Online Enscylopedia & http://www.mudhoney.net/

THe GRuNGE WoRLD (Part 3 - FiNaLe)



Early Development

A seminal release in the development of grunge was 1986's Deep Six compilation, released by C/Z Records (later reissued on A&M). The record featured multiple tracks by six bands: Green River, Soundgarden, The Melvins, Malfunkshun, Skin Yard, and The U-Men. For many of them it was their first appearance on record. The artists had "a mostly heavy, aggressive sound that melded the slower tempos of heavy metal with the intensity of hardcore." As Jack Endino recalled, "People just said, 'Well, what kind of music is this? This isn't metal, it's not punk, What is it?' People went 'Eureka! These bands all have something in common.'"

Later that year Bruce Pavitt released the Sub Pop 100 compilation and Green River's Dry As a Bone EP as part of his new label, Sub Pop. An early Sub Pop catalog described the Green River EP as "ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation." Sub Pop's Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman, inspired by other regional music scenes in music history, worked to ensure that their label projected a "Seattle sound," reinforced by a similar style of production and album packaging. While music writer Michael Azerrad acknowledged that early grunge bands like Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and Tad had disparate sounds, he noted "to the objective observer, there were some distinct similarities." Early grunge concerts were sparsely attended (many by fewer than a dozen people) but Sub Pop photographer Charles Peterson's pictures helped create the impression that such concerts were major events. Mudhoney, which was formed by former members of Green River, served as the flagship band of Sub Pop during their entire time with the label and spearheaded the Seattle grunge movement. Other record labels in the Pacific Northwest that helped promote grunge included C/Z Records, Estrus Records, EMpTy Records and PopLlama Records.

Grunge attracted media attention in the United Kingdom after Pavitt and Poneman asked journalist Everett True from the British magazine Melody Maker to write an article on the local music scene. This exposure helped to make grunge known outside of the local area during the late 1980s and drew more people to local shows. The appeal of grunge to the music press was that it "promised the return to a notion of a regional, authorial vision for American rock." Grunge's popularity in the underground music scene was such that bands began to move to Seattle and approximate the look and sound of the original grunge bands. Mudhoney's Steve Turner said, "It was really bad. Pretend bands were popping up here, things weren't coming from where we were coming from." As a reaction, many grunge bands diversified their sound, with Nirvana and Tad in particular creating more melodic songs. Heather Dawn of the Seattle fanzine Backlash recalled that by 1990 many locals had tired of the hype surrounding the Seattle scene and hoped that media exposure had dissipated.

Mainstream Success

Grunge bands had made inroads to the musical mainstream in the late 1980s. Soundgarden was the first grunge band to sign to a major label when they joined the roster of A&M Records in 1989. Soundgarden, along with other major label signings Alice in Chains and Screaming Trees, performed "okay" with their initial major label releases, according to Jack Endino. Nirvana, originally from Aberdeen, Washington, was also courted by major labels, finally signing with Geffen Records in 1990. In September 1991, the band released its major label debut, Nevermind. The album was at best hoped to be a minor success on par with Sonic Youth's Goo, which Geffen had released a year previous. It was the release of the album's first single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that "marked the instigation of the grunge music phenomenon". Due to constant airplay of the song's music video on MTV, Nevermind was selling 400,000 copies a week by Christmas 1991. In January 1992, Nevermind replaced pop superstar Michael Jackson's Dangerous at number one on the Billboard 200.

The success of Nevermind surprised the music industry. Nevermind not only popularized grunge, but also established "the cultural and commercial viability of alternative rock in general." Michael Azerrad asserted that Nevermind symbolized "a sea-change in rock music" in which the glam metal that had dominated rock music at that time fell out of favor in the face of music that was authentic and culturally relevant. Other grunge bands subsequently replicated Nirvana's success. Pearl Jam, which featured former Mother Love Bone members Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, had released its debut album Ten in August 1991, a month before Nevermind, but album sales only picked up a year later. By the second half of 1992 Ten became a breakthrough success, being certified gold and reaching number two on the Billboard charts. Soundgarden's album Badmotorfinger and Alice in Chains' Dirt, along with the Temple of the Dog album collaboration featuring members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, were also among the 100 top selling albumsof 1992. The popular breakthrough of these grunge bands prompted Rolling Stone to nickname Seattle "the new Liverpool." Major record labels signed most of the prominent grunge bands in Seattle, while a second influx of bands moved to the city in hopes of success.

The popularity of grunge resulted in a large interest in the Seattle music scene's perceived cultural traits. While the Seattle music scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s in actuality consisted of various styles and genres of music, its representation in the media "served to depict Seattle as a music 'community' in which the focus was upon the ongoing exploration of one musical idiom, namely grunge." The fashion industry marketed "grunge fashion" to consumers, charging premium prices for items such as knit ski hats. Critics asserted that advertising was co-opting elements of grunge and turning it into a fad. Entertainment Weekly commented in a 1993 article, "There hasn't been this kind of exploitation of a subculture since the media discovered hippies in the '60s" The New York Times compared the "grunging of America" to the mass-marketing of punk rock, disco, and hip hop in previous years. Ironically the New York Times was tricked into printing a fake list of slang terms that were supposedly used in the grunge scene; often referred to as the grunge speak hoax. This media hype surrounding grunge was documented in the 1996 documentary Hype!

A backlash against grunge began to develop in Seattle; in 1993 Bruce Pavitt said that in the city, "All things grunge are treated with the utmost cynicism and amusement. Because the whole thing is a fabricated movement and always has been." Many grunge artists were uncomfortable with their success and the resulting attention it brought. Nirvana's Kurt Cobain told Michael Azerrad, "Famous is the last thing I wanted to be." Pearl Jam also felt the burden of success, with much of the attention falling on frontman Eddie Vedder. Nirvana's follow-up album In Utero (1993) was an intentionally abrasive album that Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic described as a "wild aggressive sound, a true alternative record." Nevertheless, upon its release in September 1993 In Utero topped the Billboard charts. Pearl Jam also continued to perform well commercially with its second album, Vs. (1993). The album sold a record 950,378 copies in its first week of release, topped the Billboard charts, and outperformed all other entries in the top ten that week combined.

Decline Of Mainstream Popularity

A number of factors contributed to grunge's decline in prominence. During the latter half of the 1990s, grunge was supplanted by post-grunge, which remained commercially viable into the start of the 21st century. Post-grunge bands such as Candlebox and Bush emerged soon after grunge's breakthrough. These artists lacked the underground roots of grunge and were largely influenced by what grunge had become, namely "a wildly popular form of inward-looking, serious-minded hard rock." Post-grunge was a more commercially viable genre that tempered the distorted guitars of grunge with polished, radio-ready production.

Conversely, another alternative rock genre, Britpop, emerged in part as a reaction against the dominance of grunge in the United Kingdom. In contrast to the dourness of grunge, Britpop was defined by "youthful exuberance and desire for recognition." Britpop artists were vocal about their disdain for grunge. In a 1993 NME interview, Damon Albarn of Britpop band Blur agreed with interviewer John Harris' assertion that Blur was an "anti-grunge band," and said, "Well, that's good. If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm getting rid of grunge." Noel Gallagher of Oasis, while a fan of Nirvana, wrote music that refuted the pessimistic nature of grunge. Gallagher noted in 2006 that the 1994 Oasis single "Live Forever" "was written in the middle of grunge and all that, and I remember Nirvana had a tune called 'I Hate Myself and I Want to Die,' and I was like . . . 'Well, I'm not fucking having that.' As much as I fucking like him [Cobain] and all that shit, I'm not having that. I can't have people like thatcoming over here, on smack, fucking saying that they hate themselves and they wanna die. That's fucking rubbish."

During the mid-1990s many grunge bands broke up or became less visible. Kurt Cobain, labeled by Time as "the John Lennon of the swinging Northwest," appeared "unusually tortured by success" and struggled with an addiction to heroin. Rumors surfaced in early 1994 that Cobain suffered a drug overdose and that Nirvana was breaking up. On April 8, 1994, Cobain was found dead in his Seattle home from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound; Nirvana summarily disbanded. That same year Pearl Jam canceled its summer tour in protest of what it charged as ticket vendor Ticketmaster's unfair business practices. Pearl Jam then began a boycott of the company; however, Pearl Jam's initiative to play only at non-Ticketmaster venues effectively, with a few exceptions, prevented the band from playing shows in the United States for the next three years. In 1996, Alice in Chains gave their final performances with their ailing estranged lead singer, Layne Staley, who subsequently died from a heroin overdose in 2002. That same year Soundgarden and Screaming Trees released their final studio albums, Down on the Upside and Dust, respectively. Soundgarden broke up the following year.

Some grunge bands have continued recording and touring with more limited success, including, most significantly, Pearl Jam. While in 2006 Rolling Stone writer Brian Hiatt described Pearl Jam as having "spent much of the past decade deliberately tearing apart their own fame," he noted the band developed a loyal concert following akin to that of the Grateful Dead. Despite Nirvana's demise, the band has continued to be successful posthumously. Due to the high sales for Kurt Cobain's Journals and the band's best-of compilation Nirvana upon their releases in 2002, The New York Times argued Nirvana "are having more success now than at any point since Mr. Cobain's suicide in 1994." In April 2009, a book titled Grunge is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music was released (written by author Greg Prato), which explores the history of grunge in great detail, and features all-new interviews with many of the grunge movement's biggest names.


Resources: Wikipedia Online Enscylopedia

THe GRuNGE WoRLD (Part 2)

Grunge Fashion

Grunge concerts were known for being straightforward, high-energy performances. Grunge bands rejected the complex and high budget presentations of many musical genres, including the use of complex light arrays, pyrotechnics, and other visual effects unrelated to playing the music. Stage acting was generally avoided. Instead the bands presented themselves as no different from a minor local band. Jack Endino said in the 1996 documentary Hype! that Seattle bands were inconsistent live performers, since their primary objective was not to be entertainers, but simply to "rock out." However, concerts did involve a level of interactivity; fans and musicians alike would participate in stage diving, crowd surfing, headbanging, pogoing, and moshing.

Clothing commonly worn by grunge musicians in Washington consisted of thrift store items and the typical outdoor clothing (most notably flannel shirts) of the region, as well as a general unkempt appearance. The style did not evolve out of a conscious attempt to create an appealing fashion; music journalist Charles R. Cross said, "Kurt Cobain was just too lazy to shampoo," and Sub Pop's Jonathan Poneman said, "This [clothing] is cheap, it's durable, and it's kind of timeless. It also runs against the grain of the whole flashy aesthetic that existed in the 80's."

History

Grunge's sound partly results from Seattle's isolation from other music scenes. As Sub Pop's Jonathan Poneman noted, "Seattle was a perfect example of a secondary city with an active music scene that was completely ignored by an American media fixated on Los Angeles and New York." Mark Arm claimed that the isolation meant, "this one corner of the map was being really inbred and ripping off each other's ideas." Grunge evolved from the local punk rock scene, and was inspired by bands such as The Fartz, The U-Men, 10 Minute Warning, The Accüsed and the Fastbacks. Additionally, the slow, heavy, and sludgy style of The Melvins was a significant influence on the grunge sound.

Outside the Pacific Northwest, a number of artists and music scenes influenced grunge. Alternative rock bands from the Northeastern United States, including Sonic Youth, Pixies, and Dinosaur Jr., are important influences on the genre. Through their patronage of Seattle bands, Sonic Youth "inadvertently nurtured" the grunge scene, and reinforced the fiercely independent attitudes of its musicians. The influence of the Pixies on Nirvana was noted by Kurt Cobain, who commented in a Rolling Stone interview that he "connected with the band so heavily that I should be in that band." Nirvana's use of the Pixies' "soft verse, hard chorus" popularized this stylistic approach in both grunge and other alternative rock subgenres.

Aside from the genre's punk and alternative rock roots, many grunge bands were equally influenced by heavy metal of the early 1970s. Clinton Heylin, author of Babylon's Burning: From Punk to Grunge, cited Black Sabbath as "perhaps the most ubiquitous pre-punk influence on the northwest scene." Black Sabbath undeniably played a role in shaping the grunge sound, whether with their own records or the records they inspired. The influence of Led Zeppelin is also evident, particularly in the work of Soundgarden, whom Q magazine noted were "in thrall to '70s rock, but contemptuous of the genre's overt sexism and machismo." The Los Angeles hardcore punk band Black Flag's 1984 record My War, where the band combined heavy metal with their traditional sound, made a strong impact in Seattle. Mudhoney's Steve Turner commented, "A lot of other people around the country hated the fact that Black Flag slowed down ... but up here it was really great ... we were like 'Yay!' They were weird and fucked-up sounding." Turner explained grunge's integration of metal influences, noting, "Hard rock and metal was never that much of an enemy of punk like it was for other scenes. Here, it was like, 'There's only twenty people here, you can't really find a group to hate.'" Bands began to mix metal and punk in the Seattle music scene around 1984, with much of the credit for this fusion going to The U-Men.

The raw, distorted and feedback-intensive sound of some noise rock bands had an influence on grunge. Among them are Wisconsin's Killdozer, and most notably San Francisco's Flipper, a band known for its slowed-down and murky "noise punk." The Butthole Surfers' mix of punk, heavy metal and noise rock was a major influence, particularly on the early work of Soundgarden. Soundgarden and other early grunge bands were influenced by British post-punk bands such as Gang of Four and Bauhaus, which were popular in the early 1980s Seattle scene. After Neil Young played a few concerts with Pearl Jam and recorded the album Mirror Ball with them, some members of the media gave Young the title "Godfather of Grunge." This was grounded on his work with his band Crazy Horse and his regular use of distorted guitar, most notably on the album Rust Never Sleeps. A similarly influential, yet often overlooked, album is Neurotica by Redd Kross, about which the co-founder of Sub Pop said, "Neurotica was a life changer for me and for a lot of people in the Seattle music community."

THe GRuNGE WoRLD (Part 1)

Grunge Music Genre

Grunge music is defined as a hybrid of heavy metal and punk, with the introduction of heavy distorted electrical guitars, contrasting song dynamics and apethetic or angst-filled lyrics. Though the guitars were straight from early 70's metal, the aesthetic of grunge was far from metal. Both the lyrical approach and musical attack of grunge were adopted from punk, particularly the independent ideals of early 80's American hardcore. Grunge were also sometimes referred to as the Seattle Sound, which is a subgenre of alternative rock that emerged in the American state of Washington, particularly in the Seattle area. The grunge aesthetic is stripped-down compared to other forms of rock music and many grunge musicians were noted for their unkempt appearance and rejection of theatrics.

The first wave of grunge bands such as Green River, Mudhoney, Soundgarden were heavier than the second, which began with Nirvana. Nirvana was more melodic than their predecessors and they also had signature stop-start dynamics, which became a genre convention nearly as recognizable as fuzzy, distorted guitars. After Nirvana crossed over into the mainstream, grunge lost many of its independent and punk connections and became the most popular style of hard rock in the '90s.

Grunge became commercially successful in the first half of the 1990s, due mainly to the release of Nirvana's Nevermind and Pearl Jam's Ten. The success of these bands boosted the popularity of alternative rock and made grunge the most popular form of hard rock music at the time. However, many grunge bands were uncomfortable with this popularity. Although most grunge bands had disbanded or faded from view by the late 1990s, their influence continues to impact modern rock music.

Origin Of The Terms

The word grunge is believed to be a back-formation from the US slang adjective grungy, which originated in about 1965 as a slang term for "dirty" or "filthy." Mark Arm, the vocalist for the Seattle band Green River—and later Mudhoney—is generally credited as being the first to use the term grunge to describe this sort of music. Arm first used the term in 1981, when he wrote a letter under his given name Mark McLaughlin to the Seattle zine, Desperate Times, criticizing his band Mr. Epp and the Calculations as "Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure shit!" Clark Humphrey, editor of Desperate Times, cites this as the earliest use of the term to refer to a Seattle band, and mentions that Bruce Pavitt of Sub Pop popularized the term as a musical label in 1987–88, using it on several occasions to describe Green River. Arm used grunge as a descriptive term rather than a genre term, but it eventually came to describe the punk/metal hybrid sound of the Seattle music scene.

Characteristics

Grunge is generally characterized by a sludgy guitar sound that uses a high level of distortion, fuzz and feedback effects. Grunge fuses elements of hardcore punk and heavy metal, although some bands performed with more emphasis on one or the other. The music shares with punk a raw sound and similar lyrical concerns. However, it also involves much slower tempos, dissonant harmonies, and more complex instrumentation – which is reminiscent of heavy metal. Some individuals associated with the development of grunge, including Sub Pop producer Jack Endino and The Melvins, explained grunge's incorporation of heavy rock influences such as Kiss as "musical provocation." Grunge artists considered these bands "cheesy" but nonetheless enjoyed them; Buzz Osborne of The Melvins described it as an attempt to see what ridiculous things bands could do and get away with. In the early 1990s, Nirvana's signature "stop-start" song format became a genre convention.

Themes

Lyrics are typically angst-filled, often addressing themes such as social alienation, apathy, confinement, and a desire for freedom. A number of factors influenced the focus on such subject matter. Many grunge musicians displayed a general disenchantment with the state of society, as well as a discomfort with social prejudices. Such themes bear similarities to those addressed by punk rock musicians and the perceptions of Generation X. Music critic Simon Reynolds said in 1992 that "there's a feeling of burnout in the culture at large. Kids are depressed about the future." However, not all grunge songs dealt with these issues. Nirvana's satirical "In Bloom" is a notable example of more humorous writing. Several other grunge songs are filled with either a dark or fun sense of humor—Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick" or Tad's "Stumblin' Man"—though this often went unnoticed by the general public at the time. Humor in grunge often satirized glam metal—for example, Soundgarden's "Big Dumb Sex"—and other forms of popular rock music during the 1980s.

ReD FeRRaRi



One of the most dreamed car by men. Why? Perhaps because of the looks. These damn car, look very beautiful. Some said it look sexy. Do we, men love this car because of the look?

Some would just prefer the power that comes from the engine. Who can deny that this car have a very powerful engine. Just look at the performance of Ferrari F1 team. Then, imagine the technology they transferred to this car.

So, it can be concluded that this car is built for perfection and to perfection. Seldom we can find cars with good performance and elegant looks. They are few others, which cause millions. To name few, Bugatti Veron and Lamborghini Diablo. I have the opportunity to take this car picture and some others during my visit to One Borneo Sabah, October last year. Don't ask me the model of this car, cause I wouldn't really know and care. It is not on my capabilities now. Perhaps in the future I will drive one one this. Who know?