Pardon me if I beg to differ on this point, but Grunge isn't as bad as you make it to be. At least not the early form of the genre in respects to bands linked closely to music scene in Seattle during the late 80s and early 90s or bands who music was influence by early Grunge. One mistake people often make is to place all Alternative Rock during the 90s under the epithet of Grunge. I'm not sure if you're victim of this misunderstanding, I hope you're not. It just seems you despise Grunge because of the more derivative forms that followed, and hence making your disdain for it retro-active. I think if your somewhat familiar with Rock music and it's many sub-genres that preceded (e.g. Hard Rock, Punk, Heavy Metal etc and bands like The Beatles etc) you could form some small appreciation for Grunge bands like Nirvana, and Pearl Jam.

Fixed.

Nirvana were more just as punk as a any punk band.

Certainly true with the Bleach album, before David Geffin applied his polish to Nevermid.

And Alice In Chains Dirt album is IMO one of the 50 best albums ever made. Has nothing to do with punk, has everything to do with musical expression. And heroin. Just because a topic is unpleasant doesn't mean it can't be brilliantly expressed.

Thank you for your assistance.

It's not grunge I hate so much as the idiotic reaction to it. A-ssholes acted like they'd never heard music in their lives. They couldn't get enough of it and it put a lot of bands out of work that had been doing well. Suddenly, places wouldn't hire you if you couldn't play grunge s-hit. The problem for me was that it wasn't very musical. Punk generally wasn't either but it wasn't trying to be. Punk was conceived as anti-music. Grunge was just plain un-musical. Kurt Cobain was a hack. Couldn't play guitar to save his life and people think he's this great, tortured genius. S-hit, his guitar-playing and singing tortured me. Yet he became a musical hero to a generation who couldn't know decent playing if they heard it because, if they listened to Nirvana, they couldn't have heard it because Cobain blew. I wasn't going to play that junk. That was the end of my band days because you had to play grunge to get a gig and I wasn't having it. Grunge killed more scenes than it could ever have created what it did create was musically untalented.

One of my buddies loves Cobain and learned guitar from listening to him. All he knows are power barre chords--nothing else. Like Cobain, he can't play a lead riff. Listen to Nirvana, there's no leads not because they were against them but because Cobain couldn't play. When they did start putting leads into the songs, it was another guitarist they hired in.

To LL, maybe this will help.

Thurston Moore never ripped any awesome leads, still one of the greatest guitarists of all time. I bet Cobain took a lot of influence from him.

Tommy Niemeyer very seldom played leads either (at least with the Accused) and he's outstanding

Who is Thurston Moore? Cobain liked the Meat Puppets and that's fine--I liked them too. But he was no Curt Kirkwood.


Maybe he is (never heard of him) but does that mean Cobain is by extension?