I'm just not that into it

Something I hear a lot when discussing music with people is "oh, I'm just not into..." followed by whatever genre of music I've been talking about, whether it be hip hop, metal, reggae, or just good old New Zealand music. It's always a little disappointing to find someone who wants to talk about music, or at least wants to listen to me talk about music, and then find that they've closed their mind off to whole pieces of the musical world.

I have excellent news for the world. There's no such thing as grunge.

It's the 20th anniversary today of the release of Nirvana's Nevermind and that's got me thinking about the whole "grunge" phenomenon of the 90's.  I've already been into why Nevermind was such a defining album in the 90's so I won't rehash that here.  Head over here to read that post.

I think that the way Nirvana exploded took the music industry, particularly the marketing side of it, by surprise.  Nobody expected it to happen and the prevailing trend in music at the time was definitely pop.  Suddenly, here were these punk kids making a lot of noise, selling a lot of records, and someone needed to capitalize on it.