Grunge Lexicon: How Seattle Got Revenge On The New York Times & The World

Lexicon of Grunge: How Seattle got revenge on the dumb media.

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#grunge #subpop #mudhoney #nirvana

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This is perhaps one of my favourite stories especially considering in this day and age public opinion of the media is at an all-time low. I always find it hilarious when the media gets upset about being pranked. The most similar comparison I have to today’s story is when captain janks who used to be a frequent caller to the howard stern show would prank call CNN during breaking news and the network would get upset.. Since news is in the business of making money and getting the first scoop sometimes fact checking or vetting their sources falls by the wayside as you can see here when comedian bob hope passed away in 2003. CNN interviewed what they thought was one of his former writers and then hilarity ensued.
But today we go back to 1992 when Seattle was in the media spotlight. Record labels and the news media descended on the City to cover the music scene and find out what made t his part of America responsible for so many of the biggest bands at the time.
MTV even sent reporter Tabitha Soren to the City in 1992 to cover the music scene, but according o the book Everybody Loves Our Town Soren only wanted to meet and i quote “cute boys like Chris Cornell” and was disgusted by the band Tad after seeing them live, despite the fact that Tad was an important part of the music scene. MTV even refused to play Tad’s video for the song wood goblins because and i quote “it was too ugly”. It came as no surprise that soon enough people in Seattle became suspicious of the media. But one thing that may surprise you is that the media was already descending on seattle before Pearl Jam broke big. Remember, their debut album Ten took almost half a year to take off. In an interview with Jennie boody a former publicist for subpop in the smae book she would reveal
“Every local paper would call up like they had some unique idea. Oh i want to do a story on this hot topic, the seattle scene. I’d tell them not to, that it’s ben done too much already. What a great publicist. Nobody wanted to talk about it anymore. That was before pearl jamhit and it was already tiresome.
One of the local seattle record labesl Sub Pop, which i need to do a video on. The whole operation of that label is truly fascinating. Sub pop was fielding a lot of inquiries from reporters across the countries about the seattle music scene. One reporter from the new york times called the office one day requesting an interview. One of the label’s co-founders Johnathan Poneman was tired of giving interviews about the seattle music scene and referred the reporter to a former employee Megan Jasper who had just lost her job as a receptionist. At the time Jasper was working from home for a different label Caroline Records as a sales rep. Jasper would remember drinking nearly an entire pot of coffee before the interview and revealed she had a good buzz going according to the ringer.com
The interview took place in late 1992 so of course the big four bands from seattle including Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden had huge selling albums at the time and were all over MTV and radio. Then the phone rang on the other end of the line was new york times reporter Rick Marin who was writing a story for the Styles section about how the so called grunge movement was becoming more mainstream. It was a story that had been reported previously, to the point that it was all really just tired. To many in the city the word “grunge” was a bad word. To them it wasn’t representative of what was going on in seattle and many of the musicians from the city associated grunge with stuff you’d fin in your kitchen sink because in retrospect there was no Seattle sound, the bands that came out of the city didn’t really sound that similar. Author Charles R Cross who used to be an editor for the local seattle newspaper the rocket would tell Ringer.com . “It was an overhyped, inflated word that doesn’t have actual meaning in Seattle,” “It’s a time marker more than a description of music.” Soon enough hollywood came knocking making the 1992 film Singles focusing on the city’s music scene and even fashion designer like Marc Jacobs started selling ove

Written by Rock N' Roll True Stories