THE GUITARIST’S GUIDE TO GRUNGE
If you want to feel old, remind you rself that 2021 marks 30 years since grunge went overground and, led by Nirvana, a score of revolutionary bands became household names and inspired millions to pick up the guitar and play it in a way that was altogether more ang ular and noisy than what had come before. By way of comparison, go back 30 years from 1991 and The Beat les had yet to sign a record deal, the Stones hadn’t even for med a nd Britain’s biggest guitar hero was Hank Marvin. Talk about “too much fuck ing perspective”…
But even with so much dista nce between now and then, gr unge remains a truly important and signif icant moment in the history of our in strument. The brazen shena nigans of Britpop may have spawned an epidemic of young men in Adidas Gazelles reach ing for Sheratons but it fa mously never really travelled well beyond these shores. There’s an a rgument, therefore, that grunge was the last truly global phenomenon in guitar culture.
Grunge changed music, fashion, guitar aesthetics, gear trends – and these are all changes that still reverberate to this day. Check out the many bright you ng things of 2021 who are drawn to the offset guitars that grunge players used primarily because they were, at the time, unpopular enough to of fer excellent bang for buck. Gr unge didn’t come out of nowhere, of course. Change from the predominant 1980s trends – hair metal, winsome indie, slick virt uoso twiddling – had been com ing for a while. But no-one perhaps expected such a shift for the new so-called Generation X.
But in our enthusia sm to canonise and in some cases pigeonhole a genre, it’s all too easy to focus on the big bands and forget that a nother important facet of grunge was its diversit y. It was a ‘movement’ of often strange bedfellows united by little more than geography or the desire to do somet hing different with the guitar. Even if only a select few would become megast ars, all had their impact on what would come afterward, leading to a family tree that stretches furt her and wider than anyone could have anticipated.
Many of those bands
