Introducing Gay4Grunge
I'm excited to announce a new series of articles for The Dougystyle Club which will be called Gay4Grunge. For those who've known me for a long time they are very aware of just how important Grunge & 90s Alternative is for me. Since I've become a music fan Grunge and Alternative Rock have played an integral role in my development as a music fan as well as soundtrack my journey of being deep in the closet to being an out married gay man. After my initial pop diva obsession of the late 90s petered out in the early 00s, but before the rise queer pop in the late 2010s, Grunge & Alternative Rock were my favorite genre/era of music and it's affected my life in ways both big and small.
When I started off this blog I did write about Grunge as a whole and did a detailed look at each year of 90s Alternative, but I kind of left it at that so I could focus more on queer artists as well as other genres of music. Still because Grunge has meant so much to me for so long there's a lot for me to write about in even more depth and detail. First off, I know these bands like the back of my hand. I can tell you so much about these bands it's kind of ridiculous. On top of that the stories I have attached to these bands and their music is practically endless and it tracks my coming out journey pretty well too.
While I already had a liking for Alternative Rock when I was in middle school in the late 90s, it was during the early 00s when I was in high school that Grunge truly took hold and changed me as a person. My family moved to another state in the middle of my 8th grade and ever since then I never really felt like I fit in anymore or had really close friends. On top of that I was understanding more and more that I was gay and not attracted to girls, but I was determined to hide it as best I could. Most people who know me now think of me as an extrovert, but in high school I became an introvert by default, since I was deep in the closet and kept my peers at a safe distance. I felt like I couldn't relate to anyone around me because of my gayness.
In a lot of ways this had started in 5th grade when I had my first inklings that I was gay and I was made fun of for being too girly. In fact, I had a purple backpack that year and I was made fun of mercilessly for having it. I was made fun a lot when I moved from California to Rhode Island in 8th grade as well to the point that even when my peers backed off in high school I never truly felt comfortable around them and I never let any of them get to close to me, because I felt like I could never trust them. Middle school was probably worse, but high school is where I truly felt the most isolated and it felt like something to endure and get through more than anything else.
As I closed off those around me I also felt detached from modern youth culture at the time too. The teen pop bubble burst around 2001/2002 and I found myself less interested in the wave of pop stars that were set to replace acts like Britney Spears and the boy bands. Rock meanwhile was just coming off the Nu Metal years where toxic masculinity had become the norm again in rock and I found I did not relate to most of the newer rock bands coming out at that time. Plus this is when MTV moved even further away from music videos and more into reality TV, which I did not like at the time. So with MTV pretty much gone as a music outlet, I turned to the radio even more. This is also when I started moving away from top 40 radio as well and I began listening to more classic rock and alternative rock radio stations. I was still obsessed with music and I was on the lookout for more music to discover and that's when Grunge enters the story.
Now from the beginning of my music fandom in the late 90s I dug Alternative Rock and the remnants of Grunge, such The Smashing Pumpkins and Hole, but I really only listened to their newer music at the time. It wouldn't be until I saw the music video for Sour Girl by Stone Temple Pilots in the summer of 2000 that things began to change. I soon discovered that they had other singles that I actually recognized too such as Plush, Vasoline & Interstate Love Song. Then as I turned more to rock radio, I started hearing Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Collective Soul and more. That's also around the time Layne Staley of Alice in Chains was found dead too so I remember being more aware of Alice in Chains after that along with other Grunge bands.
The summer of 2002 is really when my Grunge obsession took hold and took over. I remember getting up early one morning near the start of my summer vacation to use the computer because we had dial up internet and my goal that morning was to learn more about Grunge. I intended to learn more about Grunge through the review website epinions. Before social media, YouTube, streaming & high-speed internet there were not as many options for discovering music and so sites like epinions are where I used to go a lot of the time in order to read other people's thoughts about music. I remember reading about all the major Grunge bands and seeing what the general consensus was with these bands and what their best music was.
That summer I also got my first real job as a bus boy at a restaurant in the Newport Marriott. This is the first time I was making money on my own and had disposable income. I used to commute into work with my Dad since he was the Food and Beverage Director at the Newport Marriott as well. So, while waiting for him after my shift ended I used to listen to the radio in my Dad's office or go to the music box store in Newport and buy CDs and DVDs. A lot of the CDs & DVDs I bought around that time were Grunge related including the music video DVDs for both Alice in Chains and The Smashing Pumpkins, which I would watch parts of before school every morning when I returned for my junior year of high school. Plus, at my job I would be back in the kitchen a lot and they always had the radio on so I would hear lots of rock music all day at work and even discover songs and bands while I was working.
By junior year of high school Grunge was now my everything. Grunge was new enough to not belong to the boomers, but old enough to not belong to all my peers who I felt detached from. Grunge was also masculine without being toxic which was a win/win for me at the time. These bands seemed much more open and accepting than most of the bands on rock radio at the time, but it was still masculine enough to not be seen as too girly or suspect for a teenage boy like me to be listening to. Sure, not everyone liked Grunge, but I wouldn't be made fun of for being too gay or girly for listening to it. Basically, I would be left alone, which is all I wanted at that point.
Grunge music itself also spoke to the loneliness I felt at the time and deep sense of sadness I was feeling for being gay and in the closet. I became emotionally attached to this music in a way I hadn't really beforehand. Grunge became both my security blanket and shield from the world at large. Soon after I was discovering the online music review community, which would help expos me to even more music, Grunge or otherwise, from sites like Alternative Rock Review, Music Junkies Anonymous, Brad's Completely Useless Record Reviews & Scott Floman's music review site, the latter of which became my favorite. I pretty much read these web sites and others like them on a daily basis for years. I also started making timeline mix tapes, which were a series of cassette tapes that would capture the rise and fall of Grunge and Alternative Rock chronologically from the 90s to the present. I ended up doing 3 separate series of timeline tapes during my last 2 years of high school and each was longer & more detailed than the last.
As I entered college a lot of life changes occurred, the biggest being that I finally came out of the closet and with that I started making real life long friends in a way I hadn't for years. I joined the school newspaper and internet radio station as well and that's where I made a lot of my closest friends. On top of that I started weight lifting with a personal trainer at that time and I started packing on muscle. As a result, my clothes started becoming less baggy and tighter as I started showing off my upper body.
Coming out was truly life changing in a lot of ways, but it had been easier to come out in college than high school for a few reasons. One of the biggest reasons for that was that no one knew me from high school and I had built up a certain persona by the time I got to college as well. I remember seeing the viral tweet from a few years ago where someone said that as queer people we grow up as a very specific version of ourselves and our adult life is about discovering which parts of ourselves are truly us and which we built up as a shield from the world. This hit me when I read it a few years ago, because that's what happened when I came out. Sure, I now admitted I was gay but I was doing everything I could to not be seen as gay acting. I was buff, listened to rock music, didn't care too much about fashion and I did all I could to make straight people comfortable around me. I got a lot of people at the time telling me I wasn't like other gay people they knew, which at the time felt good to hear, but in retrospect was damaging to my self-esteem over the long haul.
Still, I now had a radio show called Alternagold where I played lots of 90s Alternative and gave myself the DJ name Dougystyle, which as you can tell is a nickname that stuck around long after college. I was writing lots of reviews for the paper and would try to write about Grunge whenever I could from Pearl Jam's 2004 Greatest Hits to reviewing Collective Soul's concert at Cornell University in 2005. I was the gay who liked Grunge and rock and that's exactly how I wanted to be perceived at the time. I also did lots of internships with radio stations at that time and attended many concerts as well from Pearl Jam to Chris Cornell to The Foo Fighters.
After college I started my own online radio station called Dougystyle's Alternative, which was Alternative Rock from 1989-1999 which ran for 5 years. I also met my future husband as well and that Halloween he had a party and I remember going as Grunger for my costume. I also continued to be a devoted Alternative Rock radio listener and I started discovering new bands like Silversun Pickups and Cage the Elephant, who felt influenced by 90s Alternative and Grunge, but in more appealing ways than many of the post Grunge bands of the early to mid-00s. I also attended even more concerts including the reunion shows for Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots and Alice in Chains. I also started seeing 90s cover bands too around the DC area in the 2010s. Even when I first transitioned to Spotify in 2016, I was still following modern rock playlists and thought of rock as my favorite genre and the one that defined me.
Then Queer Pop arrived and changed everything for me in a way that hadn't happened since Grunge. That's when I started drifting away more and more from both modern rock and classic rock. I even thought I would drift away from Grunge too, but that didn't quite happen. For you see Grunge is so deeply embedded within me and intertwined with my life for the last 2 decades that I couldn't turn my back on it. In fact, Grunge and Post Grunge has become some of the only rock music I still listen to regularly, which also means it's the only music to break up all the queer pop and pop divas that I now listen to constantly.
I also realized that when I feel sad or detached Grunge is still the music I turn to. That said, I do feel detached from a lot of Grunge fandom online. Over the years I've joined many Grunge and Grunge related groups and pages on social media, but I found myself ostracized from many Grunge fans who seemed pretty close minded about a lot of things, including social causes like #metoo & queer rights despite many of those 90s Grunge bands always being very liberal. While I knew more about Grunge than most, I felt silenced a lot as a gay man within the Grunge community. These fans didn't want to hear about why Grunge was socially liberal nor did they want to hear why I connected to it as a queer person. It was a reminder that people will accept you as queer as long as you don't make them uncomfortable or talk about the things that make you unique as a queer person.
That brings us back to the subject at hand and why I've decided to start Gay4Grunge. I know so much about this music that it feels like a waste for me to not write about these bands in more depth. Yet, at the same time this will be the first time I'm gonna cover Grunge through the lens of my own queerness and why it was so important to me as a queer person. This music made a deep impact on me at a very important period of my life as a queer person, which means I not only have a lot to say about the bands & their music, but I will be going a lot more in depth with my own personal journey as a queer person. A lot of this stuff I've never really talked about with others & these articles will also be a lot for me to process as I peel back the layers of my own psyche. I may even have to confront some uncomfortable truths inside myself and Grunge music itself. On the flip side I'm also hoping to build a space for queer people who do like Grunge to speak freely and safely about their fandom and maybe change some hearts & minds of non queer fans of Grunge as well.
Now Grunge of course, like most sub genres of music, is very subjective. When talking about Grunge the thing you're most likely to hear from fans is that this isn't Grunge. Of course, being the Grunge fanatic I am I've been guilty of this in the past too, but overall I'm more likely to count a band as Grunge or influenced by Grunge because then that band is part of a heritage and legacy that I'm deeply obsessed with. I honestly stretch the definition of Grunge to the breaking point and there's a lot of ground I want to cover on Gay4Grunge besides just the few core bands from the early 90s. Therefore, I've come up with a detailed breakdown of seven categories for the timeline of Grunge where I'm gonna list the various different bands from the 80s to the present and explain why I think they are interconnected to Grunge in some way. I'm gonna go over this now to give you all a good idea of what bands I will be covering in the future for Gay4Grunge and why I'll be covering them. It probably won’t stop people from saying this isn't Grunge in the comments but hey I tried.
Pre-Grunge (1980s)
Black Flag/Henry Rollins
Sonic Youth
Husker Du/Bob Mould/Sugar
The Replacements
The Jesus & Mary Chain
Dinosaur Jr
The Pixies
Jane's Addiction/Porno for Pyros
Green River
Now with the exception of Green River, most people would not classify these bands as Grunge, but there's no denying that these bands were hugely influential on many of the first & second generation Grunge bands. While some of these bands like Jane's Addiction and The Pixies get credit for laying the foundation for Grunge, some of these bands have been forgotten such as The Replacements & Husker Du. Some of these bands managed to stay together long enough to benefit from the popularity of Grunge, such as Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth and those bands were seen as the elder statesmen of Grunge during the 90s. Grunge and Alternative Rock's explosion in the 90s didn't happen in a vacuum or come out of nowhere like many people think. There was an entire generation of bands from the 80s who built the genre of Alternative Rock and while I probably won't be covering these bands first in my coverage, I definitely will get to most of them eventually.
Seattle Grunge: The Big 4 (Late 80s/early 90s)
Soundgarden
Nirvana
Alice in Chains
Pearl Jam
While trying to figure out who is Grunge and who isn't can be a never-ending battle, I think most people would agree that when you say the word Grunge, you're most likely going to think of these 4 bands first. These 4 bands, who all originated in Seattle at various points, would be the first Grunge bands to truly breakthrough to MTV & rock radio and become multi-platinum stars. All 4 of these bands would also be the most influential bands on Alternative Rock Radio going forward along with Green Day and Radiohead. The number of bands who were inspired by just these 4 Grunge bands alone is practically uncountable. While Alternative Rock radio in recent years has moved away from Post-Grunge to much poppier music, Grunge's influence has remained for the most part and you'll see what I mean in the categories to follow. I will definitely be covering all 4 of these bands in great depth soon on Gay4Grunge.
Seattle Grunge: 2nd Tier (Late 80s/early 90s)
Mudhoney
Screaming Trees
Tad
Love Battery
Seaweed
Melvins
Mother Love Bone
Temple of the Dog
Mad Season
Candlebox
Presidents of The United States of America
While Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains became the poster boys for Seattle Grunge in the early 90s, there were many other Grunge bands in Seattle all hoping to breakthrough as well. For many devoted fans of the genre, bands like Mudhoney, Tad and The Melvins are the real deal when it comes Grunge and deserved much more success than they garnered. Still, it's easy to see why those bands didn't breakthrough either, because their lead singers were less conventionally attractive than Chris Cornell or Layne Staley plus their music was a lot less accessible too. Many later day Grunge fans tend to overlook these bands too, which I did for a long time as well, but hopefully through Gay4Grunge I can correct that and make a few new converts to these bands while I’m at it. It's also worth mentioning that many of these bands are actually still together. Mudhoney and The Melvins still make albums and tour regularly to a small but passionate fan base. You might not be able to see Soundgarden or Nirvana live anymore, but you can still see The Melvins and Mudhoney. I've also got the Grunge supergroups like Mad Season and Temple of the Dog here who both only had 1 album each, but deserve some coverage because of how important those albums are. Candlebox and Presidents of the United States of America could probably be listed under Post-Grunge and were both a lot more successful than most of the other bands in this category, but they were both from Seattle and were connected deeply to the scene so they belong here as far as I'm concerned.
Grunge By Proxy (Early to mid-90s)
Stone Temple Pilots
The Smashing Pumpkins
Hole
Garbage
L7
Cracker
The Foo Fighters
In the immediate aftermath of Grunge's mainstream breakthrough, many Alternative Rock bands outside of Seattle started getting lumped into Grunge, much to the dismay of many. Yet, there's no denying that all these bands did benefit from Grunge in one way or another and they all became pretty successful too. Along with the big 4 of Seattle Grunge, these bands are pretty beloved by Grunge and Alternative Rock fans alike and these bands continued to have success and a strong presence on rock radio in the years that followed. Most of them ended up with good critical reputations in the long run too, even if it took years for some critics to come around to Stone Temple Pilots. Many of my favorite bands for both Grunge and Rock music as a whole are found in this category as well, so along with the Big 4 expect lots of in-depth coverage early on for these bands on Gay4Grunge.
Post-Grunge 1st Wave (Mid-90s)
Live
Brother Cane
Collective Soul
Bush
Silverchair
Our Lady Peace
Sponge
Toadies
Veruca Salt
Hum
Local H
Better Than Ezra
Days of the New
Now these bands started showing up on MTV and Rock radio around 1994 & 1995, which is right around the time Kurt Cobain killed himself, Pearl Jam stopped making music videos & took Ticketmaster to court and Alice in Chains & Soundgarden were on their last legs releasing their final albums in 95 & 96 before both bands broke up in 1997. This has to be noted, because it demonstrates that by the mid 90s most of the original Grungers started falling by the wayside so a new generation of "Grunge" bands rose up to fill this gap in the market. Grunge was still popular, but radio & MTV needed more bands to meet the market demand hence why we get the first wave of Post-Grungers in the mid-90s. What I find fascinating about these bands is that the original Grungers did not set out to make Grunge music, they just got labelled as Grunge by the media and music industry hype machine. These first wave Post-Grungers though did set out to make Grunge music so what you get is music that has all the signifiers of Grunge boiled down to a digestible package for mainstream consumption that sounds more Grunge than the original Grungers in some ways. Also, while none of these bands are gonna win awards for originality they were all mostly genuine fans of the bands that came right before them and they would all admit that outright. These bands were just as big a fans of Grunge as someone like myself and I can't help but find that endearing. Plus, while most of these bands didn't have albums as strong as the earlier Grungers, they did have great rock radio singles that have stood the test of time and still sound great today. I won't be getting to these bands first, but I will get to them eventually and when I do, I will probably be passionately defending most of these bands in my Gay4Grunge articles.
Post-Grunge 2nd Wave (Late 90s-late 00s)
Audioslave
Breaking Benjamin
Chevelle
Creed
Godsmack
Lifehouse
Puddle of Mudd
Seether
Shinedown
Staind
Stone Sour
Switchfoot
10 Years
Three Days Grace
3 Doors Down
Velvet Revolver
The Vines
Queens of the Stone Age
This is probably the most controversial category as most of these bands here have zero critical respect and are loathed by most Gen Xers and lots of millennials too (Queens of the Stone Age being the major exception). These bands were definitely influenced by Grunge, but they also wanted success & fame more than their Grunge forefathers did and they were much more willing to play ball with the music industry in order to achieve success. The second wave Post-Grungers managed to leave behind many important facets of Grunge such as its sense of danger, its far left politics and women too for the most part. This made all these Post Grunge bands much easier to market to male rock radio fans after the brief Nu Metal explosion at the turn of the millennium. These 2nd wave Post-Grunge bands were played non-stop on rock radio throughout the ‘00s and as someone who listened to a lot of rock radio in the ‘00s I can tell you that you couldn't escape these bands. Their singles would stay on the charts for months if not years so even if I wasn't paying close attention to who sang what, I knew all these band's hits anyway. I'll admit besides a few exceptions, such as Velvet Revolver, I hated most of these bands at the time. To me they seemed to miss the point of Grunge entirely and benefitted from younger rock fans being oblivious to early 90s Grunge. That said, over the years I have softened my stance on most of these bands and I do enjoy many of these band's hits more now than I did back then. Part of the reason is that I now have nostalgia for these songs, because it brings me back to that decade and reminds me of my journey as both a music fan and as a queer person. Another reason is simply the fact that I love Grunge so much I'll eventually come around to a band if they display enough Grunge signifiers. In all honesty I won't be getting to these bands any time soon in Gay4Grunge, but at some point I probably will. I'll probably lose all credibility at that point with Grunge purists and Gen X as a whole, but I'm actually OK with that since I'm not here to impress those people anyway with my personal taste.
Modern Bands heavily influenced by Grunge (Late ‘00s through the present)
Silversun Pickups
Cage the Elephant
Royal Blood
Highly Suspect
Badflower
Superheaven
Teenage Wrist
Heavenward
These bands are pretty much my favorite Alternative Rock bands of the past 15 years. While many of them sound very different from one another, they all seemed to be influenced by Grunge and 90s Alternative in a way that really grabs me. I'm a big fan of these bands and in some ways these are my favorite rock bands since the 90s. I feel a closer kinship to these bands then most of the second wave Post-Grungers from the turn of the millennium. That said, I've already covered a few of these bands on the blog so I may wait to cover them for a much later date. At the moment though these bands represent the last rock acts I'm still heavily invested in when it comes to releasing new music. I no longer listen to rock radio or follow rock chart playlists on Spotify and that's mostly due to all the queer music I now follow and listen to on a daily basis. These bands are the last rock bands that can still get me excited like the queer artists I Iove right now. I definitely want to write about these bands on Gay4Grunge at some point, but it won’t be soon.
And there you have it. While I might not cover every band on this list, I think this is a pretty solid roadmap of where Gay4Grunge will be going. I'm sure there will be many surprises & detours along the way too and this series will mostly likely change & evolve the further I get into it. What you can definitely expect next though will be two articles covering Stone Temple Pilots, my favorite Rock band of all time, but more on them next time on Gay4Grunge.
