What was the first true grunge album?
No musical genre or subgenre is ever launched with a press release or a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Nor do the vast majority of artists proudly identify themselves as strict adherers to one specific, established style of performance. This is why trying to identify the “originator’ of just about any movement in music will always be more of a fun thought experiment than a piece of scientific research. If you cherry-pick the right bits of “evidence”, just about any claim can start to sound at least mildly intriguing.
Just for fun, as an example, I asked an AI robot a rather leading question: “Why was Sports by Huey Lewis & The News the first grunge album?” The bot, to its credit, was flummoxed at first. I don’t think it had come across this particular inquiry before. Given a chance to collect itself and ransack the internet, though, the bot soon produced a few reasonable arguments for why songs like ‘I Want a New Drug’ and ‘Walking on a Thin Line’ had, perhaps, strains of grunge DNA within them back in 1983, considering Huey’s DIY ethos and his “stripped down attire and unvarnished emotion”.
Therein lies the trouble. Once you trace the influences and roots of any style of rock n’ roll music far enough back, you’re just gonna wind up at the crossroads with Robert Johnson. Trying to hone in on a true demarcation point is nigh impossible.
Take the 50-year-old debate over punk rock and its own originators. The first Ramones album, released in 1976, is often cited as patient zero for punk in its fully realised form, but if you’re more inclined to classify any album with “harder, faster” genetics to be, by definition, also a punk album, then we’d have to look further back. Was it the first Stooges album? Some folks might vote for the early efforts from The Kinks or The Who, or even the Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’.
An identical dilemma appears when you switch the focus back to grunge, a genre that – far more so than punk – is despised by most of the bands who’ve been associated with it. That’s part of the reason the genre had such a short shelf life, as musicians largely rejected it to the point that journalists had to bury it, as well. To our benefit, though, this does make it a little easier to ponder grunge as a complete concept with a middle, an end, and presumably a beginning. We can also zoom in on it geographically in a way that punk doesn’t permit, as grunge was usually linked arm-in-arm with the “Seattle sound” during its early ‘90s years of pop cultural significance.
Did Alice in Chains’ Facelift start the grunge revolution?
Even at street level, though, the view is murky at best. Because of its deep connections to the “family tree” of some of Seattle’s eventual grunge giants, the band Green River and their 1988 album Rehab Doll—released on the Sub Pop label—has become a popular choice for grunge’s big bang. It wasn’t an album that broke the mainstream, by any means, but it helped lay an influential framework, and was even described in 1988 by a newspaper way over in Australia as “something for all lovers of grunge”—meaning, at that time, sleazy hard rock.
With all due respect to Green River, though, I am more inclined to start the timeline at the point where the “G” word officially established its new meaning, as MTV and rock radio began their dramatic pivot away from the hair metal bands of 1989 into the darker sound that would define the next few years. And as a kid living in the American Midwest at the time, that pivot point felt like it aligned with the release of the first Alice in Chains album, 1990’s Facelift, and particularly its lead single, ‘Man in the Box’, which also helped give so-called “grunge” a video aesthetic to match its ugly, churning riffs and tortured, introspective lyrics.
Facelift, while admittedly having a few hair-metalish tracks scattered throughout it, was the first album by one of the quintessential grunge acts to reach the Top 50 in the US charts, pre-dating Pearl Jam’s Ten, Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger, and Nirvana’s Nevermind by a full year. It felt, even at the time, like a trendsetter, in the best spirit of that word.
