DARK INK INCORPORATED

Aftermath

In the years following Nirvana's disbanding, both surviving members remained musically active. Not long after Cobain's death, Grohl recorded a series of demos that eventually became the debut album for Foo Fighters. Foo Fighters became Grohl's main project, releasing several commercially successful records over the next decade. Beyond Foo Fighters, Grohl also drummed for numerous bands, including Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Mike Watt, Queens of the Stone Age, Tenacious D, Nine Inch Nails, and Killing Joke. He also recorded an album of metal songs featuring many of his favorite early-80s metal singers under the name Probot.

After the end of Nirvana, Novoselic formed Sweet 75. Later, he founded Eyes Adrift with Curt Kirkwood (formerly of the Meat Puppets) and Bud Gaugh (formerly of Sublime). He also performed in a one-off band called the No WTO Combo with Kim Thayil of Soundgarden and Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys that coincided with the WTO Meeting of 1999. In December 2006, Novoselic replaced bass player Bruno DeSmartas in the band Flipper for a UK/Ireland tour and several US shows. Novoselic also became a political activist, founding the political action committee JAMPAC to support musicians' rights. In 2004, he released a book titled Of Grunge and Government: Let's Fix This Broken Democracy, which covered his musical past as well as his political endeavors.

Posthumous Releases

Several Nirvana albums have been released since Cobain's death. The first came in November 1994 with the release of the band's performance for MTV Unplugged, MTV Unplugged in New York. Two weeks after the release of Unplugged in New York, a video compilation of Nirvana performances, titled Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!, was released. Cobain himself had compiled a significant part of the video, which documented much of the Nevermind tour. The original intention was to release the MTV Unplugged set in a double-disc package, along with a second disc of live electric material to balance the acoustic set. However, for the two surviving band members, sorting through Nirvana recordings so soon after Cobain's passing became too emotionally overwhelming. The live disc, a compilation of Nirvana concert recordings, finally saw release in October 1996, titled From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah.

In August 1997, online music news website Wall of Sound reported that Grohl and Novoselic were organizing a box set of Nirvana rarities. Four years later, the band's label announced that the box set was complete and would see release in September to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the release of Nevermind. However, shortly before the release date, Love filed an injunction to stop the box set's release and sued Grohl and Novoselic, claiming that Cobain's former band mates were hijacking Nirvana's legacy for their own personal interests. What followed was a protracted legal battle over the ownership of Nirvana's music that lasted for more than a year.

Much of the legal wrangling centered on a single unreleased song, "You Know You're Right", the band's final studio recording. Grohl and Novoselic wanted to include the song on the box set, essentially releasing all of the rarities at one time. Love, however, argued that the song was more important than just a generic "rarity", and should be included on a single-disc greatest hits compilation. After more than a year of often public and sometimes bizarre legal maneuvering, the parties settled, agreeing on the immediate release of the greatest hits package including "You Know You're Right", titled simply Nirvana. In turn, Love agreed to donate cassette demos recorded by Cobain for use on the box set.

The compilation album, Nirvana, was released on October 29, 2002. On top of "You Know You're Right", the album contained hit singles from their three studio albums as well as several alternate mixes and recordings of familiar Nirvana songs. The box set, With the Lights Out, was finally released in November 2004. The release contained a vast array of early Cobain demos, rough rehearsal recordings, and live tracks recorded throughout the band's history. A best-of-the-box compilation titled Sliver: The Best of the Box was released in late 2005. The CD compiled nineteen tracks from the box set plus three previously unreleased tracks, including a version of the song "Spank Thru" from the 1985 Fecal Matter demo tape. In a 2002 interview with Jim DeRogatis, Love described the countless rehearsal tapes, demos, and bedroom recordings that were left behind after Cobain's death.

In April 2006, Love announced that she had arranged to sell twenty-five percent of her stake in the Nirvana song catalog in a deal estimated at $50 million. The share of Nirvana's publishing was purchased by Primary Wave Music, which was founded by Larry Mestel, a former CEO of Virgin Records. In an accompanying statement, Love sought to assure Nirvana's fanbase that the music would not simply be licensed to the highest bidder, noting, "We are going to remain very tasteful and true to the spirit of Nirvana while taking the music to places it has never been before".

Further releases have since been made. This includes releasing Live! Tonight! Sold Out!! on DVD in 2006. Furthermore, a full uncut DVD version of MTV Unplugged in New York was released in 2007.

In Utero

For 1993's In Utero, the band brought in producer Steve Albini, well-known for his work on the Pixies album Surfer Rosa. As Nevermind had brought in a new audience of listeners who had little or no experience with the alternative, obscure, or experimental bands Nirvana saw as their forebears, bringing in Albini appeared to be a deliberate move on Nirvana's part to give the album a raw, less-polished sound. For example, one song on In Utero featuring long periods of shrill feedback noise was titled, ironically, "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" (in the industry, a "radio-friendly unit shifter" describes an "ideal" album: one capable of heavy radio play and ultimately selling many copies, or "units"). However, Cobain insisted that Albini's sound was simply the one he had always wanted Nirvana to have: a "natural" recording without layers of studio trickery. The sessions with Albini were productive and notably quick, and the album was recorded and mixed in two weeks for a cost of $25,000 at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota.

Several weeks after the completion of the recording sessions, stories ran in the Chicago Tribune and Newsweek that quoted sources claiming DGC considered the album "unreleasable." As a result, fans began to believe that the band's creative vision might be compromised by their label. While the stories about DGC shelving the album were untrue, the band actually was unhappy with certain aspects of Albini's mixes. Specifically, they thought the bass levels were too low, and Cobain felt that "Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies" did not sound "perfect". Longtime R.E.M. producer Scott Litt was called in to help remix those two songs, with Cobain adding additional instrumentation and backing vocals.

In Utero debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 album chart in September 1993. Time's Christopher John Farley wrote in his review of the album, "Despite the fears of some alternative-music fans, Nirvana hasn't gone mainstream, though this potent new album may once again force the mainstream to go Nirvana." Although commercially successful, the album did not achieve the same success as Nevermind. That fall, Nirvana embarked on its first major tour of the United States in two years. For the tour, the band added Pat Smear of the punk rock band Germs as a second guitarist.

Final Months And Cobain's Death

In November 1993, Nirvana performed for MTV Unplugged. The band opted to stay away from their most recognizable songs, playing only two of their hits, "All Apologies" and "Come as You Are". Grohl later related, "We knew we didn't want to do an acoustic version of Teen Spirit. ... That would've been horrendously stupid." The setlist also included a few relatively obscure covers, with members of the Meat Puppets joining the band for covers of three of their songs. While rehearsals for the show had been problematic, MTV Unplugged producer Alex Coletti noted that the actual taping went exceedingly well, with every song performed in one take and with the complete set lasting under an hour, which were both unusual for Unplugged sessions. Following the band's set-ending performance of Lead Belly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night", Coletti tried to convince the band to perform an encore. "Kurt said, 'I can't top that last song.' And when he said that, I backed off. 'Cause I knew he was right." The band's performance debuted on MTV on December 14, 1993.

In early 1994, the band embarked on a European tour. Following a tour stop at Terminal Eins in Munich, Germany, on March 1, Cobain was diagnosed with bronchitis and severe laryngitis. The next night's show, at the same venue, was canceled. In Rome, on the morning of March 4, Love found Cobain unconscious in their hotel room and he was rushed to the hospital. A doctor from the hospital told a press conference that Cobain had reacted to a combination of prescription Rohypnol and alcohol. The rest of the tour was canceled, including a planned leg in the UK.

In the ensuing weeks, Cobain's heroin addiction resurfaced. An intervention was organized, and Cobain was convinced to admit himself into drug rehabilitation. After less than a week in rehabilitation, Cobain climbed over the wall of the facility and took a plane back to Seattle. A week later, on Friday, April 8, 1994, Cobain was found dead of an apparently self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head at his Seattle home, effectively dissolving Nirvana.

Introduction

Nirvana was an American rock band that was formed by singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic in Aberdeen, Washington in 1987. Nirvana went through a succession of drummers, the most notable being Dave Grohl, who joined the band in 1990. With the lead single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from the band's second album Nevermind (1991), Nirvana entered into the mainstream, bringing along with it a subgenre of alternative rock called grunge. Other Seattle grunge bands such as Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden also gained popularity, and as a result, alternative rock became a dominant genre on radio and music television in the United States during the early-to-mid-1990s. As Nirvana's frontman, Kurt Cobain found himself referred to in the media as the "spokesman of a generation", with Nirvana the "flagship band" of Generation X. Cobain was uncomfortable with the attention and placed his focus on the band's music, believing the band's message and artistic vision to have been misinterpreted by the public, challenging the band's audience with its third studio album In Utero (1993).

Nirvana's brief run ended with Cobain's death in April 1994, but the band's popularity continued in the years that followed. In 2002, "You Know You're Right", an unfinished demo from the band's final recording session, topped radio playlists around the world. Since their debut, the band has sold over twenty-five million albums in the US alone, and over fifty million worldwide.

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.

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."

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.