Re-Calling Grunge: Seattle, Anniversary Journalism, and Changing Narratives of a Genre

While grunge has come to be regarded as a music genre almost exclusively associated with the city of Seattle, this characterisation has not always been stable. This chapter will use anniversary journalism on grunge to demonstrate the changing usage of the label. While for a brief time in the 1990s, as grunge became a worldwide phenomenon, bands from many locations were admitted into the genre, over time the label ‘grunge’ has been increasingly reserved for Seattle bands only. This serves to help recreate the image of grunge as being based in an organic scene, and erases the global and mass-produced nature of the movement in a way that reinscribes ideas about authenticity and ‘purity’.