II: Nirvana
I feel the need to separate Nirvana from the rest of the grunge movement. Grunge really solidified into a marketable sound and image after Nirvana, but Nirvana didn't really...fit in with that. I mean, don't get me wrong they definitely birthed it in many ways, but they were definitely their own band.
Doesn't save them in my eyes. They still made muddy depressing fucking music, and I still didn't like it. I grew up when Nirvana hit it big. I didn't like what came before, the glam metal of the 80's was certainly not glam (Bowie, NY Dolls, T-Rex), and it (I'm assuming the metal heads out there will agree) certainly wasn't metal. It really took the dumbest elements of both glam and metal, left out the good elements of either, and made something just plain bad. So you'd think that I'd appreciate what Nirvana did then, right? I think it's a testament to how much I dislike Nirvana and the sound they birthed into the mainstream that I don't. I appreciate some of the precursors to Nirvana oddly enough, I'm actually a big Pixies fan.
But Nirvana were such a fucking downer. They're music sounded muddy, dirty. The amount of distortion...ugh. I would've welcomed almost anything else to come along and kill glam metal, but Nirvana and the grunge thing they brought with them was just as bad. Just on the polar opposite end of the spectrum. If glam metal was an unintentional parody of celebration, sex drugs and alcohol, Nirvana was an unintentional parody of Woe is me bullshit.
It also really didn't lose any of the machismo from the previous generation. It was still "Guy" music. The modern "Indie" movement (god I hate the term for a genre, but what are ya gonna do), despite what some may say, is a great thing. It doesn't have any of these macho hangups that we've been plagued with for the last thirty years of music.