Who invented the grunge genre?

It’s easy to talk about music in the most general of terms, applying a basic label to the many genres of music you enjoy listening to for the sake of conversational convenience. Many of the main umbrella terms that are used to describe the differences between styles have existed since music became more commercially available, dividing into broad categorisations such as pop, rock, jazz and folk. For the most part, that’s not a bad thing, and it’s a perfectly serviceable method of separating disparate movements in musical history.

Every now and then, however, new movements will emerge where something sounds a little different from the usual confines of a broader genre term, and this leaves someone with the rather fun task of deciding how to coin a new name for this slight reinvention. In more recent years, this has become even more prominent, as neologisms for genre definitions seem to pop up at least once a week to the point that it’s hard to keep up on whether people are listening to rage or drill, or what the difference even is for those who care.

All pedantry aside, sometimes a line of definition needs to be drawn, and when new genres that become so culturally impactful begin their rise to the forefront of people’s attention, they need a way to be differentiated from the rest of the crowd so people aren’t getting confused between the fine lines of margin.

This was definitely the case with grunge—a genre too gnarly to simply be rock and far too late to have been lumped in with a punk scene that was on its way out of fashion. Emerging largely from the Pacific Northwest in cities like Seattle during the mid-80s, a new wave of bands distorted their guitars and had a bratty sense of angst that was different from every other counter-cultural movement around them.

People will often remember the most significant acts of the genre as being the likes of Nirvana and Alice in Chains, with both artists having the most mainstream success in the genre through albums like Nevermind and Dirt respectively. At the same time, there were countless other acts emerging that caused a stir in the underground, and have since acquired a cult following through their ties to the grunge movement.

Where exactly the term came from is often debated, but the first usage of the word actually came about as something of a joke from Mark Arm, who fronted seminal grunge acts Green River and Mudhoney. In a letter where he described a short-lived band he was in called Mr Epp and the Calculations, he referred to the band’s sound as ‘grunge’, and when Sub Pop label head Bruce Pavitt used it later on to describe a Mudhoney release, the term finally began to catch on.

So, what was the first grunge album?

While the earliest grunge releases have only had the label applied to them retrospectively, certain Seattle acts associated with the grunge movement, such as Melvins and Screaming Trees, both released albums in 1986 that fall very close to having been the first of their kind, but neither of them can truly claim to have been the first bands to release a ‘grunge’ album.

There were also compilations that year that brought together tracks from various bands in the Seattle area that were pioneering this new sound, such as Deep Six and Sub Pop 100, but the first true grunge record had actually arrived in 1985, courtesy of the Mark Arm-fronted act Green River.

Fittingly, the man who coined the term can lay claim to having released the genre’s first record, and his band’s debut EP Come on Down (which is only seven songs but lasts 34 minutes, which I think counts) certainly fits the brief of sludgy and angst-driven rock. It might be a little on the primitive side, and the musicianship is loose even by the genre’s quite flexible standards, but shades of what Arm and bandmate Steve Turner would go on to achieve with Mudhoney are there to be heard.

Other members of Green River would go on to greater things and have success with bands such as Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone and Temple of the Dog, but every great movement has to start somewhere, and with grunge, that genesis happened with Green River’s Come on Down.

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