Grunge from Punk?

If you look up Grunge, or even Alternate-Rock, or the history of pioneering alternative bands like Jane's Addiction, Faith No More, etc. you will find that there origins are linked in with the underground punk-rock scene. Which is surprising because even the 'no effort' ethos of Grunge music has an underlying musicality that defies the central punk dogma (as it appears to me, a non-fan) which is just play hard, play furiously.

When the Sex Pistols came on the scene, there message I can see being important, that in the 60's in order to make a huge peace demonstration at Woodstock you had to be a prodigy on guitars or be blessed with amazing vocals to get up on that stage. Johnny Rotten and crew kind of said 'hey, everyone should have a voice, everyone should have this platform regardless of playing ability'. And thus you had a band that stormed up the charts without knowing any chords, a singer that couldn't hold a note and just generally all around crap band.

But once said, it had been said, the principle was sound but it gave birth to the punk genre, which having heard once I don't see much point to hearing again. Every highschool in the western world has a punk band, that by now you would think has churned out every possible high tempo power chord song in the world and can only be sustained as unique because there are just so many different combinations of english words possible.

There are even the good Punk bands like the Ramones, NOFX and ahhh... you're stretching my knowledge now.

The best punk band in my formative years 7 & 8 of high school was Greenday, with Dookie, but they were like a prize fossil to an evolutionary bioligist, because Greenday achieved their degree of mainstream success thanks mostly to the melodic walking bass lines. Grunge was present when Greenday came out, but when I first heard of them I thought they pretty much had to be the future with their blue and green hair, and well that was pretty much it. They looked like they had hair made by a machine not like the grunge stars that had hair made from years of inactivity.

I had no idea at that age of the 30 year history of punk rock. But I still find it perplexing that Grunge could have emerged from the punk rock scene. In fact there's a new photo book called 'Grunge' that when I picked it up thought 'this will be good' and it is 90% punk rock portraits with the last 3 or so pages featuring 'Pearl Jam' 'Nirvana' and 'Sound Garden' in quick succession.

I just think, maybe it did, maybe all the alt-rock band came from the underground scene of punk rock. But what did punk-rock actually contribute. None of these bands sound vaguely punk rock except in what they don't share with pop rock. Both punk-rock and the (used to be) greater alternate rock scene don't have vocalists that are trained in Gospel Choirs, They both use guitars rather than keyboards, they both have drummers setting the pace. That's about it, so I can concieve of baby Mike Patton's and baby Perry Farrell's and Baby Les Claypools but not baby Lars Ulrich's going out on a friday night in the 70's/ early 80's with their fake ID's and seeing punk rock bands and thinking 'cool, this is not pop music' but at some point they must have gone 'I like the lack of fabrication in punk rock, the lack of packaging and polish, but I want a band that can carry a tune, has some structure to the song that is less predictable than this.'

I can see how the alt-rock scene was derived spiritually from punk, but not literally from punk. Punk always struck me as a devolution from classic rock, you simply dropped the solos, the vocals and just replaced it with rythmic shouting and what not. Alt-rock and grunge seemed to be a return to the R&B genre of the 60's back when it was played by white boys like Cream or a black guy and a bunch of white boys like the Jimi Hendrix Experience. All the guitar magazines of the 90's seemed to merge these two periods as well with nary a mention of the Ramones at all.

So I guess I have to watch that documentary featuring Henry Rollins to understand whether I really should be grateful to punk at all. Even if I don't like it, at least it has provided a consistent counterpoint to Pop for generation after generation of teenagers with little imagination.