Grunge Rock

Drawing on queer of color critique, this paper uses mixed methods including participant observation, interviews, visual and textual analysis, and photovoice to interrogate sex workers’ queer creative practices. Building upon the larger oeuvre of sex working artists, contemporary sex working artists in Los Angeles utilizes queer creativity to thwart hegemonic readings of sex work. Performances at two activist fundraisers drew on the themes and esthetics of sex work to counter mainstream nar- ratives about sex work and workers, and to interrupt their objectification. The cover and graphics of a sex worker zine push back against dominant narratives about sex workers and the power structures that suppress sex worker self-representa- tion. Photovoice methodology allowed sex workers to counter- act objectification by telling their own stories. In their creative products, sex workers show how “queer” is a praxis of sex and gender disruption, rather than a simple identity category sig- naling non-heterosexuality, challenging homonormativity in addition to heteronormativity.

L’autore racconta la nascita e la parabola della scena musicale di Seattle e del Northwest, mettendo in evidenza le relazioni umane e artistiche che hanno portato un angolo sperduto d’America alla ribalta internazionale.
Lo fa con il contributo di numerose testimonianze inedite, a partire da quella di Scott Ledgerwood, bassista dei Bam Bam e autore di due capitoli di questo volume.
Per rendere il grunge pop(ular) e mainstream, così come oggi lo conosciamo, fondamentale è stato il ruolo giocato da fotografi, registi, fumettisti, editori indipendenti e giornalisti, senza dimenticare il contributo del fashion system.
Accanto ai noti e più illustri protagonisti della scena grunge, troverete anche due rilevanti figure femminili: Tina Bell, cantante dei Bam Bam e unica “Madrina del Grunge”, e Susan Silver, l’abile manager dei Soundgarden e degli Alice in Chains, due donne che si sono guadagnate un posto di tutto rispetto in questa storia.
Un ritratto ruvido, impressionista e graffiante. Grunge, appunto.

In the context of popular music studies, live performance represents a widely discussed theme which is enriched by further problematics when it deals with audiovisual media. The concept of liveness can be a relevant component of a community's musical identity, such as in the case of the Seattle grunge scene. The live dimension is therefore a grunge audiovisual topic. An example full of implications is MTV Unplugged, which hosted the participation of three different Seattle bands between 1992 and 1996: Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Alice in Chains. After Kurt Cobain's and Layne Staley's death, these performances have been wrapped around a mythical halo, as they have become fans' main tool to elaborate their loss. By analyzing the audiovisual characteristics of the three televised concerts, the article wants to demonstrate how MTV Unplugged promoted the development of an elegiac interpretation of grunge. This affected not only the bands involved in these acoustic setlists, but the entire musical phenomenon too. Authenticity, for which liveness should act as a warrantor, collides with posthumous processes of memory, related to the inter-mundanity of the performance.

This thesis investigates the political activism, motifs, and ideology of the 1990s Pacific Northwest movement in the United States. The aim of the thesis is to examine the movement through the perspective of sociomusicology with particular focus on melancholic music and its relation to society. As well as using the methodology of sociomusicology, the music of the movement is investigated as a reflection of Generation X and American society of the 1990s. This study investigates the socioeconomic situation in Seattle in the 1980s, prior to the mainstream recognition of the scene. The socioeconomic aspect is evaluated as the social fabric behind melancholic music from Seattle. Through the methodology of sociomusicology and the socio-economic investigation, this study argues that the movement was politically motivated and involved. It is a political movement against Republicanism, particularly against the 1980s Republican Party and Former U.S President Ronald Reagan. The significance of this study lies in the way that it outlines how the movement maintained its political agenda and protests in its mainstream format and how supportive of democratic policy and ideologies the scene was. The majority of scholarship regarding the subject does not acknowledge the political aspect of the movement. It is overshadowed by a consensus that the scene was self-absorbed with drug culture and focused on depression. This study investigates the opposite and highlights how important melancholic aspects of music were for the scene in Seattle. The focus on such elements camouflaged and downplayed the importance of Democrat support for the movement, allowing for the movement to maintain and progress in a mainstream format.

This is a  final paper for a master's course titled, "On Keeping a Notebook". The course was designed as an introduction to creative methods and suggested theories on how we might keep notebooks for research purposes, personal journaling, and an interrogation of the complexities of the human experience.

This reading response attempts to critically examine the journals of Kurt Cobain while attending to the issues of care surrounding interpretation and analysis of posthumous publications.

I grandi concerti, i festival e i live club sono nutrimento fondamentale per l’arte, la cultura, l’aggregazione e il divertimento. Dopo tre anni in cui i live sono stati rinchiusi nella gabbia della pandemia, il ritorno della musica dal vivo è linfa vitale per anima e corpo. In questo volume collettivo, scrittori e scrittrici hanno deciso di unire le forze per contribuire al rilancio della musica live. Ognuno di loro ha ideato una storia basata su un concerto. A volte il concerto è l’ambientazione, dove i personaggi si muovono e trovano la propria strada, altre volte è il protagonista del racconto, il fulcro su cui ruota tutto. Altre ancora è l’obiettivo da raggiungere, motivo di vita o di morte. I racconti di Live! si basano sulle emozioni concrete vissute in un concerto e vogliono trasmetterle al lettore, con parole che esprimono ricordi, immagini, sensazioni, desideri, vissuti, amori, energia, risate e lacrime legati alla musica dal vivo. Sono spesso racconti autobiografici ma anche no, e nell’insieme esprimono ricordi e riflessioni su concerti recenti e passati, di ogni genere musicale.

This paper examines women’s self-determination within patriarchal discursive regimes, specifically in the cultural texts produced by the fashion industry. In westernized capitalist consumer societies, women’s gender identity is structured according to oppressive patriarchal figurations of femininity that dominate popular culture. Endorsing aesthetic dissonance as a political practice, women can reclaim their voices by producing a counter-discourse based on alternative fashion practices and disruptive self-imaginings. This is enacted by the unconventional fashion blogger Courtney Trop.

This article begins by situating Kurt Cobain's Journals within the so-called crisis of white masculinity, which is deemed to characterize contemporary masculinities in North America. The article then identifies the central entry in the text as the one which all of the other entries either anticipate or reiterate to some degree. The autobiographic text is read, by way of a nuanced textual analysis of this particular entry, as an unconscious phantasy (as defined by Melanie Klein). That is, the article demonstrates how the writing in Journals seems to mimic the complex mental processes wherein meaning is generated; it demonstrates how the text stages and then attempts to mitigate an acute anxiety about the integrity and the consequences of a white, heterosexual, masculine identification. The emerging scholarship on or that includes Kurt Cobain and his band Nirvana attests to the significance of his contributions to popular music and his status in American and European popular culture in general (e.g., Carr and George 2008; Strong 2011). To varying degrees and to various ends, Cobain's

Acht Wochen zuvor hatte ein Ereignis weltweit die Rockmusik revolutioniert. Am 24. September, zwei Wochen nach der ersten Single-Auskopplung »Smells Like Teen Spirit«, erschien das Album »Nevermind« der US-amerikanischen Grunge-Band Nirvana. Die Tragik von Grunge und seiner Kommerzialisierung verdichtet sich in einer Anekdote: Der Titel »Smells Like Teen Spirit« war Ergebnis einer zügellosen Party im linksalternativen Olympia im Bundesstaat Washington, auf der Kathleen Hanna, Sängerin der Riot-Grrrl-Punkband Bikini Kill, »Kurt smells like teen spirit« an die Schlafzimmerwand des Nirvana-Sängers Kurt Cobain gesprüht hatte. Weil auch ein Cobain unbekanntes Deodorant mit demselben Namen existierte, kurbelte Nirvanas Erfolg später dessen Verkauf ganz erheblich an. War Nirvanas Debütalbum »Bleach« von 1989 noch auf dem kleinen Indielabel Sub Pop erschienen, war »Nevermind« ihr erstes auf einem Majorlabel: Geffen. Eingefädelt hatte das Kim Gordon, Bassistin und Sängerin der New Yorker Band Sonic Youth, deren Album »Goo« am 26. Juni 1990 daselbst erschienen war und sich 250.000mal verkauft hatte. Das Label hoffte, »Nevermind« würde sich durch eine gemeinsame Tour mit Sonic Youth ähnlich gut absetzen lassen.

This essay seeks to investigate the peculiar and undoubtedly intense relationship between Dante's Inferno and Kurt Cobain, lead songwriter to Grunge arguably most famous band, Nirvana, and main spokesman of the so-called «Generation X» at the beginning of the 90s in the Western Culture. Clues leading to Dante›s first Cantica could be surprisingly found within all the records published by Nirvana, from Bleach (1989) to In Utero (1993), revealing an interesting cross section about the interpretation and the adaptation of Dante›s imaginarium in the United States and both a definitely enhanced picture of Kurt Cobain›s artistic legacy and an exploration of the reading of the poem by the Western youth at the end of the last Century. Precise and fatal references to the XIIIth Canto concludes the survey, donating all the human depth beyond this intersection between Grunge era and Italian Middle Ages.

C'est en poursuivant ma démarche qui consistait à chercher les manifestations des images archétypiques dans notre culture moderne que j'ai découvert le texte de Dustin Eaton « Grounding Icarus ». Il m'a toujours semblé important de compléter les imageries intemporelles des archétypes que sont les contes et mythes classiques par leurs actualisations contemporaines: les premières risquant, seules, de donner un goût passéiste au modèle jungien et les images du présent, faute d'être reliées à la mémoire mythique, faisant courir le risque de l'inflation personnelle et collective. En ce sens, le livre « Perpetual Adolescence: Jungian Analyses of American Media, Literature, and Pop Culture » duquel est extrait le chapitre de D. Eaton, nous sensibilise à une forme nouvelle que prend l'image du puer. Ce livre, duquel est tiré le chapitre traduit ici, est une étude transdisciplinaire (psychanalytique, sociologique, culturelle, littéraire) qui décrit les manifestations de l'archétype du Puer dans la culture américaine contemporaine vue comme prisonnière de l'énergie destructrice et régressive de cet archétype. On y lit entre autres les essais de Sally Porterfield qui explore le puer comme nouveau héros américain, Anodea Judith qui imagine recevoir un patient appelé « Civilisation Occidentale », Keith Polette observant le senex et le puer dans la salle de classe. Rinda West met pour sa part en évidence d'un côté le puer narcissique idéaliste en la personne de l'activiste écologiste Timothy Treadwell dont Werner Herzog (1) a dressé le portrait dans un documentaire poignant, et de l'autre le puer cynique et tire-au-flanc, le « Slacker » devenu depuis les années 90 une image culturelle populaire. Et Eaton pour sa part illustre, à travers le destin tragique de Kurt Cobain, la difficulté de dépasser en la transformant l'énergie de l'archétype du puer aeternus qui mène alors très souvent au suicide. Le choix de Kurt Cobain comme illustration de la figure archétypale était bienvenu dans la mesure où ce personnage fut et reste une image idéalisée de millions de jeunes en quête identitaire (2). Or il est préoccupant de constater que les images identificatrices de certaines générations terminent leur course dans un destin si tragique. Il est ainsi salutaire de replacer Kurt Cobain à sa juste place, sans dévaluer ses talents artistiques. En outre, il s'agit de donner aux cliniciens des pistes de lecture quand ils sont face à certains jeunes. Je remercie les éditions SUNY Press pour l'aimable autorisation de publier sur le site de la SBPA de larges extraits de cette traduction. Le texte intégral pourra être lu en anglais dans ce livre : A propos de cette traduction : pour des raisons de droits d'auteur, il ne m'est pas possible de publier le texte dans son intégralité, j'ai donc choisi de rédiger quelques lignes-écrites dans des encadrés-résumant les parties absentes lorsque cela me paraissait nécessaire pour la bonne compréhension du texte. Christian Poelmans 1

A comienzos de 1991, el mánager musical Danny Goldberg aceptó hacerse cargo de Nirvana, uno de los muchos grupos de rock de la escena musical "underground" de Seattle. En ese momento, Danny no tenía ni idea de que el líder de la banda, Kurt Cobain, se convertiría en un icono de la cultura popular con un legado a la altura del de John Lennon o Elvis Presley. Danny trabajó con Kurt entre 1990 y 1994, los últimos cuatro años de vida del cantante. Fue testigo del éxito estratosférico de "Nevermind", que convirtió a Nirvana en la banda de rock más célebre del momento; asistió al encuentro y posterior boda de Kurt con la inestable pero brillante Courtney Love; al nacimiento de su hija, Frances Bean y, finalmente, a la lucha de Kurt contra la adicción a la heroína, que acabó en un devastador suicidio. Danny Goldberg ofrece en "Recordando a Kurt Cobain" un retrato del líder de Nirvana único e incomparable, solo al alcance de alguien que lo trató como productor, compañero y amigo íntimo. Goldberg resucita recuerdos no publicados hasta la fecha, indaga en sus archivos personales y recupera entrevistas a familiares, amigos y compañeros de banda, para explorar la inmensa creatividad y brillantez que Kurt Cobain proyectó sobre su música, la increíble mezcla de compasión, rebeldía, feminismo y ambición que reunía, y el legado que forjó con su particular visión del punk-rock.

ISBN: 978-84-9181-843-4

This paper deals with the situation of tall poppy syndrome and its effects upon business growth in smaller communities.  Viewed through the lens of first-hand account, the paper tracks the business case, challenges, and ultimately the failure of the Kurt Cobain Days festival in Aberdeen, Washington.

Within it the author poses the questions: Does tall poppy syndrome contribute to business challenges in smaller urban environments?  How does that impact possibility effect initiatives towards tourism and urban revitalisation efforts?  Finally, how can leaders address this challenge head on?

It is needless to say that the 80's were the beginning of an age of image. The faces, styles, colours of video clip artists came alive on MTV, somewhat obstructing singing talent from then on. This was the era of consumerism; shiny, glittery, fun objects and places survived. Musical visions are fast paced; at the same time tell a story in approximately 4 minutes. This kind of art at that time even effected TV series. The way an artist dressed effected fashion; so it is only natural that interiors changed becoming flashy and intriguing.

The history of grunge and the meaning of its musical expression has suffered as a result of its early categorization as a hyper-masculinized and hetero-sexualized rock genre. This unfortunate classification at the hands of rock journalism and music media
outlets misinterpreted the artists’ cultural criticisms as simply anti-authority and generation X angst, when in fact, many artists posed serious challenges to late 20th-century conventions of gender, sexuality, and feminism. These male and female artists rebelled  against binary gender conventions by performing queered and camped identities, that were commercially misinterpreted, packaged as “grunge”, and sold to the masses. Consequently, in spite of commercial praise and success for their music, the
many gender provocateurs in grunge have been widely overlooked by scholarship and activism. The female grunge artists have had it the worst; lacking the recognition as both gender-fucking performers and as serious contributors to a unique music
movement that saw more female-led bands with mainstream airplay, high album sales, and more concert tickets sold, than ever before in rock history. This thesis, in order to exhume the untold history of grunge, discards the old categories and cultural trappings created for the genre and instead explores the performative value of its abstractions, contradictions, and abjections as feministic expressions. To begin to disinter the
marginalized female grunge artists, it is necessary to begin with unequivocally, the most marginalized and chastised female of all, Courtney Love. Love’s legacy has been so distorted that her counter-culture feministic expressions have been subsumed. This
thesis aims to illuminate the physical and lyrical hypertext deployed by Love to create her personal evolution of her punk feminism, grunge, into a new queered feministic expression examined through her albums Pretty on the Inside (1991) and Live Through This (1994).

The 'Grunge' phenomena of the late eighties and early nineties has often been depicted as a product of socio-economic troubles in the American Northwest, and viewed in the context of a globalising society (Larsen 2008). Many of the principal commentators (such as Michael Azerrad) have been principal players within the 'scene', and this paper seeks to capture the mood of what 'grunge' meant in Washington before the distorting lens of commercialism that followed from the success of Nirvana's Nevermind in 1991, and look beyond an overly mythologized movement. I wish to frame this counterculture within the wider context of US society of the time, in particular the 'culture wars' of the early 1990s, and look at how humour formed an integral and often overlooked part of how 'grunge' presented itself as an alternative movement. This thesis focuses on the Seattle label Sub Pop, which important bands like Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden and TAD were affiliated with, and looks at how the label used humour to market itself. The mainstream success of such bands received during this period means we can see how these players responded to fame, and how humour was used before and after 1991 to protest against the US culture industry and the commercial values of American society. Contemporary sources both written and visual are of particular value to this study, publications such as the NME and Rolling Stone and the photography of Charles Peterson showing how such humour was perceived by contemporaries as well as by later critics.

Information in this article, originally published October 17, was corrected October 31. A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Leslie Fried as the ex-wife of the late poet Steven Jesse Bernstein. Fried and Bernstein were still a couple at the time of his death in 1991. The story also implied that nothing had been done with Bernstein's work until the recent opening of an Experience Music Project exhibit. Several collections of his work have been published since 1991, and other book and film projects are forthcoming.