Buzz Osborne recently reckoned that grunge didn’t change how the music industry worked. He argued that bands like Nirvana weren’t less “palatable” to the average listener than ’80s hair/glam bands were.
Following a decade of spandex-wearing guys singing about girls and guitarists trying to outmatch each other in a race of shred, the early ’90s grunge explosion felt liberating for a lot of people.
Several bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden introduced what was perceived as an added depth to their lyrical content, while the free-flowing, groove-driven philosophy of ’70s rock was brought back to the forefront. Well, this made all the more acute by the raw emotions which defined the movement. On a related note, Kim Thayil said Soundgarden were not Grunge.
Buzz Osbourne comments
The grunge era looked like musicians casting down the chains of the commercial churn and the Melvins mastermind suggested in a new interview with Lyndsey Parker that the industry exploited grunge bands the same way it did with hair metal bands beforehand:
“You’ve got to remember… Nirvana and those bands, they just took those bands and plugged them into the same apparatus [through which] they’d sold Mötley Crüe albums prior to that. They didn’t do anything different. It wasn’t like the industry changed at all. It was the music changed, but not how they sold it, not at all.”
Moreover, Buzz noted that the early ’90s Seattle bands weren’t any more demanding for the average listener than their hair predecessors were. He added:
“There were the same radio stations, MTV, the same record people at their labels. So, they already knew how to sell stuff like that. It wasn’t like that music was so obscure and weird that it would be unpalatable to normal people. Not at all. It’s fairly pop music…”
Buzz also suggested that most fans didn’t understand the “attitudes” of their grunge icons. This was more punk than many realized, which included the massive influence Melvins had on other Seattle giants:
“But what was interesting about that was their their attitudes. The guys in Nirvana and Soundgarden, they were much more punk rock and weird than their fans would ever have known. They had eclectic tastes, and they liked weird bands, and they liked our band… The vast majority of their fans would never hear a record of ours and see any connection at all, because their understanding of their rock heroes is minimal.”
“They don’t really have an intimate understanding of what these people think at all. If they did, they would have more faith in what *they* considered to be good and inspirational, which they don’t… It’s just how it works. And I already understood that; I wasn’t disappointed, because I didn’t set myself up to be disappointed. I just never thought it would work.”
