Abstract
You were a teenager, and you had reached that point where you felt no one understood you and the world you lived in was pitted against you. At this point, you discovered grunge, as did all the others who had been feeling isolated and alienated from the ordinary humdrum daily round. That is roughly how the author of this book responded to the arrival of grunge: ‘the realisation that there were other people who thought the same things was a revelation and a validation of my feelings’ (p. 2). As has other music before and since, grunge became a cultural resource for generational identity. But then what seems in some ways to be the inevitable happened. This ‘alternative music’ was obviously a fine prospect as a money-spinner; the global music industry took over, market values prevailed and the whole thing was commercially exploited, with some successful bands being peremptorily dismissed as ‘sell-outs’. What had seemed ‘4 real’ proved to be amenable to being incorporated and tamed, or at least it did in some cases. If that was clear enough, it could perhaps also conceal an inverted snobbery involved in cleaving to bands that remained obscure and outside the charts. What’s cool about a band with mass appeal?
Catherine Strong now looks back on her adolescent delight in grunge and her varying responses to it as it emerged and developed. As with anyone else of her generation, thinking about grunge means thinking about her own selfhood, or rather an earlier stage of her evolving, maturing selfhood at that time, as she remembers it now. The realization that in researching grunge she would have to take into consideration the lapse in time gave to Strong her key focus: music and memory. This led to two, maybe three major research questions: What is the relationship between popular culture, memory and power? Does a form of popular culture such as grunge present a challenge to the power structures in society, and if so, what is the outcome of this challenge? (p. 4)
Strong begins by situating her work at the intersection of popular music studies and memory studies. She challenges the common assumption that grunge was an apolitical ‘poor cousin’ to punk, and moves on to consider the making of value judgements about music, particularly in relation to how it is remembered and how it is structured by views ‘then’ and ‘now’ of what is authentic and what is commercial. Strong resists any easy opposition between them, along with the tendency in popular music studies necessarily to equate marginality and cultural value. The ‘mainstream’ and what it involves is more complex than its stereotypical construction often assumes, or denies for quite definite rhetorical purposes which, often enough, work in favour of an argument for the efficacy of resistant identities or the force of ‘real’ music.
Strong compares current recollections of grunge with media reports and understandings of the music at the time it was most popular in order to see if the meanings associated with the music have remained constant over time. The value of this is extended in the next chapter of the book, which shows the particular shared forms in which grunge is remembered, these being at least in part shaped by the media accounts already examined. What becomes clear is that there are lines of both continuity and change in the ways in which, over time, grunge is (re)interpreted and (re)evaluated. Along with this, the accounts of fans have, again over time, in certain ways diverged from media accounts. Such variations are highlighted in the chapter devoted to Kurt Cobain and how he is remembered by both fans and media since his death. They derive from the different ways in which he has been used symbolically by different groups with different agendas.
There is an interesting chapter on gender and grunge which brings a further set of power relations into the discussion. Strong looks at the contributions female musicians made to grunge and how these have been remembered, or more often, forgotten, despite the value placed on gender equality within the movement. Courtney Love is the single, vilified exception. Memory here is clearly operating in supporting asymmetries of power, and that this becomes so evident relates to a major strength in Strong’s research, for much of her analysis is based on her fieldwork, involving 43 semi-structured interviews with respondents who self-identified as being grunge fans in the 1990s. In conducting these she adopted the active interview approach and this helped her in negotiating the question of lapse of time, with the narratives being offered by respondents not needing to be considered in terms of error or distortion, but rather as accounts ‘specifically crafted for the time the questions were being asked and the way that they were being asked’ (p. 11).
The main value of the book moves beyond its methodological virtues, even though they clearly support it. Most studies in popular music either focus on music in its recent occurrence or offer a longer-term perspective that does not take the recollections of fans into account. This study does. And it is there that its advance on music genre studies and music fan studies is most marked. The book would perhaps have been more commendable if it had taken a more critical stance on both Halbwachs and Bourdieu, both of whom are important reference points for Strong because of their focal attention on her key coordinates of memory and power. It is nevertheless an absorbing account of how music which presents a challenge to power relations in society can be defused, and of how music fans use popular cultural items and media narrative forms in convergent patterns of remembering even though divergences in remembering are also clearly evident. In showing how popular music can sometimes serve to reproduce rather than change the status quo, Strong provides a salutary counter to the more prevalent focus on subcultural rebellion or music with a more direct political edge. Just as importantly, basing the book on retrospection offers a welcome alternative to present-centred studies which ‘are done when a movement is at its height and ideals are yet to be tempered by time’ (p. 155).