I'm back. After taking a ferry south out of Victoria, the capitol of BC, I arrive in the grungy decrepit town of Port Angeles, Washington in the good ol' US of A.
The city is in a state of decay and my fellow motorcyclist from BC takes notice.
As we're filling up at a gas station in town, I notice it's the first time I'm able to look at the prices per gallon and confidently know how much it'll hit my wallet.
"Port Angeles has seen better days..." he says, noting the decaying motel across the street. It's marred with graffiti and surrounded by rusting make-shift chain-link fences.
When I said Grungy, I meant it in every sense of the word.
"It's towns like this that gave us Grunge in the 90s, though!" I mentioned. And it's true. After the logging industry declined into the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest, towns here fell on hard times financially. Crime rose, addiction flourished, and the futures of the children raised in this environment grew dim. The city had not diversified it's economy, and "it put all of its eggs in one basket" with logging, so to speak.
Seattle in the 80s and early 90s was also a port city with little promise. These were the days before Microsoft and Starbucks.
Out of the ashes of this region arose a new kind of music, one that would Spartan-kick 80s glam metal into the grave and take center stage, moving the artistic capitol of America's music scene to the PNW. Grunge had come to America: a fusion of metal and punk that seemed to mirror the dark sentiments of the hopeless youth in decaying towns of Washington's Cascadian rainforests. Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and the headliner, Nirvana-- they all came from Washington and shot out of Seattle like a cannon the day's into the public's pop music consciousness.
The lyrics were dark, almost hopeless, and they yearned for freedom and escape. Many of the youth of Washington, and in turn the nation, felt the same. Gone were the sex and drug-fueled lyrics of the ACDCs and Guns and Roses of the 80s, Grunge ushered in teenage angst, cries of oppression, and borderline suicidal ideation.
The Baby Boomer generation's hold on pop culture had finally been eclipsed, Gen X finally had their say in the public sphere and they had a lot to say-- and none of it was rosy.
You can see it in their style: the Grunge look had your token long-hair rebellious notes, but it came donned in flannel- just the kind of look you'd see loggers wear from this corner of the country. You'd also see them wearing cut-off jean shorts and Doc Marten boots.
I grew up too young to see this change in trends- My music tastes formed during the NuMetal movement in the late 90s and 2000s with Deftones and Linkin Park- bands that took grunge metal sounds, added hip-hop and DJ-mixing, dropped the Grunge groaning and "singing" style, but kept the lyrical angst.
I ended up taking a huge interest in Grunge once I hit my 20s in the 20-teens, just as Gen X has now started to take over the media scene from the top down- rather than the bottom-up like they were doing with the 90s Grunge movement.
With most things in the past, we tend to romanticize them or look at them through rose-colored glasses. Things are always 'more simple' or just 'more understood' when looking through the rear-view mirror. Looking back at Grunge, however, we can see that times were getting harder. They were right. Reaganomics and the conservative revolution of the 1980s saw both major parties of the US begin a trend of neoliberalization, where unions were crushed, jobs were shipped overseas, taxes on the wealthy were slashed, economic safety nets were cut, punishments for criminals were harshened, and income disparity had gotten nothing but worse.
Generations living and working after the Boomers have a worse economy, make less, have lived through more frequent economic crashes, and have less wealth than those that came before them. Boomers aren't immune to the decline either, fewer younger folks have the capital to buy Boomer homes, and Boomer life expectancy has been dropping for several straight years pandemic aside!
Maybe Grunge was the first to reflect the raw feelings of being left behind. Maybe Grunge was the canary in the coal mine. Gen X thought: We may not know everything, or what's going on, but we'll be damned if we won't make a stink about it. The raw unfettered stench of Teen Spirit.
JT
10/4/2022