Grungerpunk.

I understand why people like genres, or rather, why people like to apply genre labels onto things. There’s a value in having a common set of expectations, a common language, even the shared baggage that comes with defining art by genre. The problem is that they’re not actually very useful. They’re mutable, they change over time, they break down and end up being somewhere between quaint and wildly inaccurate.

Which brings me to grunge and cyberpunk, which, I discovered last night well past my bedtime after finishing a re-read of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, are basically the same thing. At least, so far as genre and influence go.

Stick with me while I try to form this into something that might make sense outside of my own, slightly sleep-addled mind.

Both cyberpunk and grunge are ex post facto genres, I say that because it makes me sound super-smart. It also happens to be true, neither genres came about out of any sort of deliberate agenda, neither genre actually existed until people decided after the fact and applied those labels after the fact (BOOM, ex post facto, bitches.) One can even argue that neither grunge nor cyberpunk are really genres, which is a stance I’m sympathetic towards.

Look at grunge to start with. The four bands I immediately associate with ‘grunge’ are Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains. While there are superficial similarities among the four, it would be hard to say that they sound anything the hell alike at all. None of them, to my knowledge, ever referred to themselves as being ‘grunge’ and indeed I’ve seen footage of members of three of the four bands scoff at the label (I feel confident there’s footage of the guys from Alice In Chains doing so as well.) Now, once grunge became A Thing, plenty of bands did set out to make grunge albums. I can’t think of any though. Because they almost certainly sucked (though I hold a certain affection for Soul Asylum.) When you get right down to it, grunge never existed. It’s not a musical style in the least, it was sort of a fashion statement, an affectation really.

Cyberpunk isn’t as clear-cut in that respect, but I think that’s just a fundamental difference between literature and music; music happens way faster than writing. I could produce an incredibly shitty album much more quickly than I could produce an incredibly shitty novel, and I will do both if my demands are not met. William Gibson didn’t set out to create cyberpunk when he wrote Neuromancer, though according to my Page-A-Day calendar (May 11, 2011) the word “cyberpunk” predates the publication of Neuromancer by two years. This adds nothing to my central argument but it’s an interesting factoid and I kept the damn page, so I might as well use it. Cyberpunk exists on a more solid footing within science fiction than grunge does in music, and again, I suspect that’s the in nature of the written word. Cyberpunk has some concrete reference points; mirrorshades, cybernetics, leather jackets, hackers, mega-corporations/governments and the visual-virtual rendering of cyberspace, et al, ad nauseum, what have you. There’s a lot of room to work in there, Neuromancer and Snow Crash are the two beacons of cyberpunk, the Pearl Jam and Nirvana (yes, I know it should be the other way around but I’m not in the grunge section anymore) if you will, and they are doing two very different things. Hell, cyberpunk can even withstand being merged Dungeons and Dragons (sorta.)

Here’s my finale. For as brief and passing as the two were, for as not actually genres as they may be, they both accomplished something rare and impressive; they altered the cultural DNA. They were mutagens, digging deep and shifting things permanently, irrevocably. Those Seattle bands caused mainstream music to turn on a dime, Eddie Vedder’s voice accidentally created the template by which any number of current, fucking awful bands use to excrete their hunger dunger dang music. Neuromancer’s influence is perhaps more subtle but even more pervasive, it’s seen in the shape the internet has taken, in the growth in augmented reality, every time someone on the internet makes a reference to ‘hacking the Gibson’ and of course, every 13 weeks when Keanu Reeves gets a residual check for Johnny Mnemonic.

They were moments, hard to pin down or define but they were important. They were vital. We would live in a fundamentally different world were it not for those genres, or movements, or whatever the hell you want to call them. We’re better off for having had them and with any luck I’ve been just coherent enough to make that point.