When you hear or read the word “Grunge,” the music of Seattle probably comes to mind. But, what did musicians from that subset of rock think of that term?
Loudwire compiled a list of Grunge artists and their thoughts on the word “Grunge.”
“I actually like the tag now because it puts a name on something that I only sort of marginally understood,” Chris Cornell said in 2015. “What I understood was before Nirvana was a band or Pearl Jam was a band or Alice In Chains or Tad or Mudhoney… none of those, none of them existed yet.”
Late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain once said in an interview, “If someone wouldn’t have come up with grunge, it would’ve been called something else. I think it described what kind of guitar rock we were playing at the time pretty well. I thought it was an OK word.”
“Before that word, it was referred to as the ‘Seattle Sound’, and I liked that because, although we were all unique, there was definitely a kind of ethos, a bunch of kids making noise and playing bars and parties,” said Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell in a 2020 interview. “All the Seattle bands shared that, because it was such a small town and we all went to each other’s gigs and hung out with each other.”