Rock: Seattle 1990s Overview

If it was the worldwide reaction to the suicide of Nirvana’s driving force, Kurt Cobain, in 1994 that confirmed Seattle’s status as a major influence on early 1990s popular music, its arrival was announced by the band’s hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991)—a forceful but melodic record that caught the angst-ridden tone of a generation. The Seattle of the 1980s, in which Nirvana came to life, was a rainy city of lakes, rusty bridges, and more than a few disaffected (often drug-using) teenagers, a city whose image had yet to be shaped by the unlikely combination of Microsoft founder Bill Gates; Frasier, the popular television situation comedy set in Seattle; and gourmet coffee culture. Jimi Hendrix had grown up in the city in the 1950s but had to go to London to get noticed, and not much happened of note musically in Seattle until Nirvana formed in 1987 in nearby Aberdeen (save the contributions of the instrumental group the Ventures in the late ’50s and early ’60s and the outbreak of garage rock in the Northwest in the ’60s that gave rise to the Kingsmen and Paul Revere and the Raiders in Portland, Oregon).

Nirvana’s first records were for Sub Pop, Seattle’s preeminent independent label, which created what came to be seen as the sound of Generation X with such groups as Tad, the Los Angeles-based latter-day girl group L7, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and, eventually, Hole, the band formed by Cobain’s future wife, Courtney Love. It was a vibrant if despair-ridden scene, well suited to Nirvana’s debut, Bleach (1989), a clear statement of the music that became known as grunge, a self-conscious antithesis to the cold professional lustre of much of 1980s pop. Pearl Jam, a more traditional rock band, also emerged in the city about the same time (Cobain, however, sneeringly dismissed them as “corporate”). There were those who felt that grunge’s heyday had come and gone by the time Nirvana signed with major label Geffen Records and reached number one with Nevermind (1991), the album that would lead to mainstream acceptance of grunge and alternative rock in general.