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I remember both of these as being terms fanzine reviewers, community radio deejays and general fans used before more mainstream rock journalism outfits picked them up and helped turn them into markets.

Grunge was dirgy, dirty, and noisy Rock. Emo was melodic punk that, for a time in the mid-80s to early nineties, was coming mostly from the east coast and midwest.

Grunge made you feel dirty, emo may have been the shower, but it was still fun to get dirty.

Thing is, those terms were stupid and meaningless when me and the better majority of my friends were using them. Excuse being that we were in our late teens and impressionable, and this was all a long time ago.

So...fuggit...blame rock journalists for any and all reprehensible fashions.

Without getting into the underground roots of either genre, I'm voting based on the broadest mainstream representations of these styles.

Grunge was just as whiny as emo and it was plodding and tuneless and everyone immitated Eddie Vedder, one of the worst singers of all time. Grunge still exists in the form of bands like Nickelback, currently one of the worst bands in existence. The worst grunge bands - Creed, Train - were far worse than the worst emo bands.

At least emo has some hooks, melodies, faster tempos, and some elements of showmanship.

Popular music is for kids, it's mostly irrelevent, and I'm not supporting either of these genres. But if I were a dumbass 14 year-old I think emo would be a more interesting backdrop than grunge was.

John CIV wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbdh0Qm_5A0

Funny/tragic thing: the kids of today have probably no idea who Ian Mackaye is.

For the record, I thought everything that was labeled emo took a major downturn with Sunny Day Real Estate. I always thought they were utter shit, but so many of my friends were into them- and a lot of those friends were two or three years younger- that I just about thought of them as the generation gap.

at least grunge had some non commercial aspirations and only later became corrupted by the wreck-ord companies.

I speak to kids about lots of cool bands very regularly. They will come up with stuff like This Heat which they have found out about on the internet or whatever. There will always be a percentage of that demographic that will be into freakish outrageous shit. And at least that percentage is suitably small right now. It was sad when in the early nineties or whatever every other dumb fuck was wearing a Flipper shirt because Kurdt had said they were a cool thing.

The "kids these days" sentiment: always CRAP.

Also, there is/was nothing freakish or cool about either emo or grunge, it is/was conformist-disguised-as-rebel music for a conformist-disguised-as-rebel crowd. I don't hate either music, it's just teenage stuff, there's nothing more pubescent than getting all hissy over pubescent stuff.

I choose Twee. Bye bye, Twee.

sunlore wrote:I speak to kids about lots of cool bands very regularly. They will come up with stuff like This Heat which they have found out about on the internet or whatever. There will always be a percentage of that demographic that will be into freakish outrageous shit. And at least that percentage is suitably small right now. It was sad when in the early nineties or whatever every other dumb fuck was wearing a Flipper shirt because Kurdt had said they were a cool thing.

The "kids these days" sentiment: always CRAP.

Also, there is/was nothing freakish or cool about either emo or grunge, it is/was conformist-disguised-as-rebel music for a conformist-disguised-as-rebel crowd. I don't hate either music, it's just teenage stuff, there's nothing more pubescent than getting all hissy over pubescent stuff.

I am a kid these days. I found This Heat through the internet. My old band wrote a song called "Voyeurism" that originally began as a rip-off of "Paper Hats" (eventually you would have had to hear the evolution to tell where the song came from).

That being said, most kids these days have awful taste in music. They are essentially clueless, but the worst part is that they think that the Pitchfork/blog culture is completing their educations. Maybe people from all generations are just retarded overall...but I have a feeling the older generations were way cooler/smarter...when there were fanzines as opposed to a hegemonic Pitchfork/blog presence.

I never saw Grunge as a style, theres was nothing new. Anyway, if Grunge is the label for things like Deep Six and Sub Pop 200, In Utero and Superfuzz Bigmuff, so fuck Emo, the Poodle Rock of this decade.

Call Fugazi a Emo band its like call Led Zeppelin a Heavy Metal band.