![]() ![]() (The band famously performed the song live in the 1995 teen Bonnie and Clyde drama, Mad Love, starring Drew Barrymore.) “You better watch out what you’re wishing for,” Vigil-Wilk warns “I will have my cake and I will eat it too just like you!” S.E. ![]() Yet despite its sobering subject matter, ¡Viva Zapata! was not without its playful indulgences: In their most popular song, “The Scratch,” the band set aside their politics for two minutes of catchy, devil-may-care hedonism. “We were thinking in the modes of self-defense,” Agnew later noted: “Wishing we were all fucking ninja bitches.” Backed by the menacing chug of Elizabeth Davis’ bass guitar, frontwoman Selene Vigil-Wilk asks in “M.I.A.,” slam-poet style: “Does society have justice for you? Well if not, I do.”ĭrummer Valerie Agnew would follow through by calling community grief meetings - which would evolve into self-defense trainings - and eventually become the anti-violence non-profit, Home Alive. ![]() Both events would trigger their Jack Endino–produced sophomore LP, ¡Viva Zapata!: an unflinching tribute to the luminaries they lost. Less than a year later, the band’s muse and mentor, Gits frontwoman Mia Zapata, was found strangled to death outside a beloved music venue. Not quite grunge and not quite riot grrrl, the band suffused the local punk scene with righteous rage in feminist revenge fantasies “Dead Men Don’t Rape” and “Gun.” But in 1992, on the eve of their debut release Sick ‘Em, real life horror struck: Guitarist Stephanie Sargent died suddenly, presumably from a fatal cocktail of alcohol and heroin. So snuggle into your best thrift-store sweater, lace up your Doc Martens and let your hair hit your shoulders, so you can properly enjoy the 50 Greatest Grunge Albums.īy 1990, very few rock bands had driven home the true precariousness of womanhood as militantly as Seattle four-piece 7 Year Bitch. And we’ve left off a few records that were once huge, by Bush, Candlebox and Silverchair, for instance, that just haven’t stood the test of time. To capture the breadth of the genre and prove that the music never became passé, our editors have selected records by bands that topped the charts, as well as ones by unsung heroes like Paw, the Gits and the U-Men, and even the odd grunge forefather. And younger acts like Bully, Metz and Speedy Ortiz and even Juice Wrld continue the genre’s traditions of brittle guitar riffs and throat-shredding honesty.īecause 1994 was the last time grunge dominated the mainstream - it was the year that Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana and Pearl Jam all had Number One LPs, and, tragically, it was also the year that Kurt Cobain died by suicide - we’ve decided to mark the 25th anniversary of that year by reflecting on the best albums of the era. The genre’s influence still resounds in hip-hop (Jay-Z appropriated the chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for his 2013 song “Holy Grail”) and magazines like InStyle are reporting on a resurgence of grunge fashion. That’s not to say that grunge died, since scene standouts like Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, Alice in Chains and Melvins still release critically acclaimed and/or commercially successful albums, but it has become a part of America’s cultural fabric. But within a few years of reaching critical mass, it all seemed to fade away quickly, as nu-metal became rock’s shiny new object. Soon, bands from all over the world were getting widespread recognition after years of duking it out on indie labels. Their music was a hybrid of hard rock, metal and punk (with a sprinkle of Neil Young here and there), which gave them a wide enough swath of flannel for each band to have its own unique snarl. They pinned their hearts to their sleeves in their lyrics, they created an inclusive environment for women and others marginalized by the poofy-haired rock mainstream of the Eighties, and - taking a cue from punk rock - they did away with the artifice of rock stardom. In less than a decade, Nirvana and a handful of bands from the Seattle area had crawled out of obscurity and commandeered pop culture, rebuilding it in their own image. That’s because, whether the bands liked the term or not, grunge was a movement. It’s going to be passé.”Īt the time, Eddie Vedder was on the cover of Time, fashion designer Marc Jacobs was dressing models in flannel and even The New York Times was questioning, “How did a five-letter word meaning dirt, filth, trash become synonymous with a musical genre, a fashion statement, a pop phenomenon?” Although the word has fallen out of vogue, the music from the time remains vital. “Grunge is as potent a term as new wave,” he told Rolling Stone. Over 25 years ago, Kurt Cobain predicted that grunge would become corny. ![]()
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