with your choices, i just can't decide which is the best. for me all of them are just great! okay okay..I'll pick Nirvana.. after all they are my first favorite..=D

i like temple of the dog. soundgarden and pearl jam together.

That, they were, but yeah, they were definitely not a grunge band. For one they came from California and started up in the mid-eighties.

Mudhoney were definitely the most underrrated of the seattle grunge scene, and Early Soundgarden even though they preceded the movement by about 10 yrs.

i always love it when some people try to claim that sonic youth were grunge

Sonic Youth were very much proto-grunge. They were a huge inspiration for Mudhoney and Nirvana in the early days.

Grunge was a movement. Not a sound. That bands like Nirvana got ideas from Sonic Youth means absolutely nothing, except just that. They also got ideas from Pixies, and other American Indie/College Rock bands. Does that make them all "proto grunge"? Just the term "proto grunge" seeks to indicate that the grunge movement was more significant than college rock and the American underground. It wasn't. It's the other way around. Grunge was an offshoot of those genres. They were not precursors to grunge.

More importantly, SY had nothing in common with the grunge culture, and the majority of bands (maybe the whole lot) sounded nothing like them at all.

Why stop at Sonic Youth

Why not call all No Wave 'proto grunge'?

Why not call loggers in flannel proto-grunge?

i have the chance to go so them at the house of blues in may. what do ya think of them? ever seen them live? i am going to be in dallas at the time and am looking for a good show to go see.