punk’s first generation,
grunge most certainly earned its place on rock’s historical timeline, the perfect antidote to the cliche-ridden joke
hardcore became fairly quickly: Everyone attempting to run the 100-yard dash in two seconds? Why not take a nice, leisurely stroll, instead? Most know that meat turns out better when you cook it low ‘n’ slow, anyway. Why not give Fender Jazzmasters the same treatment?
The roots of grunge are fairly easily traceable. San Francisco’s
Flipper ran the opposite direction from hardcore’s ascendant “
Faster! Louder!” ethos in 1979. How can one listen to such Flipper classics as “Sex Bomb” or “Ha Ha Ha” traveling at a funereal pace, coated with Ted Falconi’s sludge-o-matic guitar and not hear proto-grunge?
The feminist punk movement in the Pacific Northwest was catalyzed by a Latina.
Mia Zapata, a Mexican-American punk rocker living in Seattle in the early 1990s, played a key role in shaping the nascent grunge movement with her band, The Gits. Known for their aggressive live performances and their straightforward, melodic punk music, the band, fronted by Zapata, quickly became popular among the feminist echelons of the Seattle punk movement. Their debut studio album, âFrenching the Bully,â was met with widespread support from the music community, and for the rest of their short-lived tenure, The Gits were musical mainstays in the punk and grunge scenes in Seattle.