Grunge: Music and Memory
by Catherine Strong
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2011)
Reviewer: Brian Wright, University of Nevada, Reno
Discussing the historical legacy of grunge is a difficult endeavor. Unlike work on other recent genres (hip-hop and EDM, for example), grunge scholarship has to contend with the hegemonic narrative of rock criticism that views traceable influence, formal complexity, or political awareness as a prerequisite for scholarly worth. Furthermore, with only twenty years since the genre first achieved mainstream success, grunge scholarship has to grapple with the complexities of recent memory without the luxury of historical distance and perspective. Catherine Strong’s Grunge: Music and Memory attempts to remedy this situation by addressing these complexities head-on.
As part of Ashgate’s “Popular and Folk Music Series,” and one of the first academic books written on grunge, Grunge examines how the memory of the genre has evolved over the past two decades. Strong, a Lecturer in Sociology at Charles Stuart University, Australia, does a remarkable job of historically contextualizing grunge and investigating how it is understood today. Primarily utilizing interviews with Australian respondents who experienced grunge firsthand as part of what she calls a “mass-mediated, global cultural event” (p.7), Strong explores multiple discrepancies between her respondents’ recollection and the genre’s initial depiction in international media. Instead of attempting to piece together an insider discourse through interviews with the genre’s main contributors, Strong focuses her attention on how the genre is remembered by its fans. This has the benefit of allowing for the examination of grunge as a mainstream cultural force, though at times the absence of the musicians’ voices leaves the reader wondering if there may be more to the story.
Strong’s discussion of memory is theoretically grounded in Maurice Halbwachs’ work on collective memory. By invoking Halbwachs’ theories of the social nature of memory, Strong shows how the shared memory of grunge helps individuals “create a common understanding of the world, or particular aspects of the world” (p.34). However, Strong is also quick to challenge the hierarchical assumptions of Halbwach’s theory; instead of assuming that memory formation is based on a rigid set of power relations, Strong’s approach emphasizes the complexities of memory by pointing out the diverse web of interactions involved in that formation. She further notes that memory itself is not fixed, but rather adapts to fit the needs of an individual’s changing identity. This is particularly evident in her fifth chapter, “The Memory of Kurt Cobain,” in which she details how the memory of the Nirvana frontman has been engineered by various groups to further their own agendas.
Given her background as a sociologist, it makes sense that Strong’s most valuable contribution is her exploration of grunge as a social phenomenon. In her third chapter, “Defining Grunge in the Media,” Strong draws upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of habitus and cultural capital to describe the parallel between the rise of grunge’s mainstream success and the ensuing complication of identity for both its musicians and fans. Strong argues that as the music industry exploited grunge’s perceived authenticity for commercial gain, the genre’s cultural capital was thus devalued as the music became increasingly accessible. As she states, “In a movement such as grunge, where authenticity and autonomy are closely aligned, gaining commercial success causes problems, and the tension and contradictions that commercial success brought for the movement signaled the beginnings of its demise” (p.49). The eventual dissolution of grunge can therefore be understood as part of a wider cycle of co-optation of insular musical subcultures by the mainstream. Through her attempt to draw a parallel between grunge and wider social structures, Strong provides a functional understanding of the context behind the portrayal of grunge as a “musical revolution” but goes on to state that any challenge (or perhaps better, any “alternative”) that grunge may have originally posed to a hegemonic power structure has “been defused through memory” (p.37). “Grunge found the success that it did at a specific point in time,” she states, “when it represented new, oppositional ideas to those prevalent in music during the time preceding its rise” (p.82). However, in her final chapter, she shows that her respondents ultimately associate the genre with their youth and that this has caused the music’s “oppositional” status to be “defused by the portrayal of youth as a time that should not be taken seriously” (p.151).
Furthermore, although Strong does not specifically address the merchandising wave that coincided with the genre’s 20th anniversary, her argument regarding the mainstream subjugation of the genre is bolstered by the recent groundswell of grunge-related memorializations, career retrospectives, and deluxe-edition box sets. The music’s increasing age, as well as its recent fossilization in “definitive” anniversary-related merchandise, has thus made grunge appear less like a musical revolution and more like another dead commodity consistently being resold to a nostalgic public. This presents a difficulty for grunge scholarship because the genre’s original “anti-establishment” rhetoric appears to have been somewhat counteracted by the music’s commercial appropriation over the last twenty years. Nevertheless, Strong concludes that some of the challenges grunge posed to the dominant power structure remain in the memory of her respondents. She states that:
[Even though] memory has removed the threat that grunge may have posed to existing power relations… respondents have not entirely forgotten the questions which grunge asked about commercialization and the way that it made explicit, even for a short period of time, the struggle in society over what it means to be ‘successful’ (p.155).
Strong’s interviews reveal that, despite the
music’s
increasing commodification over the last twenty years, pieces of the
movement’s ideology still exist in the minds of
grunge’s
original fans.
The real standout moment of the book, however, is Strong’s
penultimate chapter on “Gender and Grunge,” in
which she
demonstrates that even though women played an important role in the
development of grunge they are largely omitted from her
respondents’ recollections of the genre. As she states:
The woman who is most often remembered, Courtney Love, is used to reinscribe traditional gender relations through a condemnation of her rejection of them. The other women musicians from the time of grunge and the challenge they made to gender stereotypes (along with male musicians of grunge who were also committed to gender equality) have been either forgotten or re-labelled as ‘Riot Grrrls’. This re-labeling allows the threat being posed to patriarchal relations to be compartmentalized and contained, while the ‘grunge’ label is reinscribed as a form of ‘masculine’ rock. (p.105)
Strong goes on to discuss the historiographical dilemma posed by this
gender purging and concludes that “the women who were
celebrated
as an important part of the movement have either been mostly forgotten
or have been vilified” (p.128). Although Strong sees this
“forgetting of women” as part of a “trend
within
contemporary society for women to become invisible and be forgotten
when the past becomes ‘history’” (p.
106), it seems
especially strange for a movement like grunge which held gender
equality as a primary tenet. Through her interviews, Strong found that
when respondents were asked to give the names of bands they considered
to be grunge, only three female bands were included (Hole, L7, and
Babes in Toyland) and that many respondents required prompting to
recall them. She ends the chapter with a discussion of how the threat
of Courtney Love’s continual transgressions against
traditional
gender roles have caused her to become “an object of dislike
and
criticism for journalists and audiences” (p.117).
Strong’s
examination of how women are either denigrated or excluded from the
canon is fascinating and opens up avenues for further research into the
displacement of women not only in grunge, but also in rock music more
generally.
Although Strong’s focus does not include a close reading of
relevant musical examples, Grunge opens up real possibilities for
musicologists to actively engage with the music itself. While her scope
is limited solely to a sociological discussion of the culture that
popularized grunge internationally, Strong’s historical
contextualization of the genre (both in its original time and today)
provides a useful hermeneutic window for musical analysis. Those hoping
for an in-depth examination of the genre’s pinnacle songs
(e.g.
Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or
Pearl
Jam’s “Alive”) should look elsewhere;
however, for
those scholars who are looking for a book that attempts to situate
grunge historically while also discussing its remnants in modern
consciousness, Grunge is an exceptional foray into the genre.
Strong attributes the current lack of grunge scholarship to the
academy’s shortsighted perception that the genre was merely a
commodified version of punk. The author suggests that,
“Grunge
was considered an overly commercialized, debased form of the rock music
academic’s genre of choice, punk, and as such was dismissed
as
unworthy of consideration” (p.3). However, it seems that now,
with slightly more than two decades since the genre’s
inception,
the path has finally been cleared to reexamine this music. For its
discussion of the inconsistencies between the original portrayal of
grunge and how it is now remembered, especially in regards to questions
of gender and identity, Grunge: Music and Memory is a thought-provoking
read and an important early step towards establishing
grunge’s
place in academic discourse.