UC San Diego

This dissertation traces the distinct identity of grunge as a unique subculture, a signifying practice and a genre of hard rock music from its temporal and geographical locations in the Pacific Northwest. In outlining three integrands of grunge, the project also defines The Seattle Sound within the grunge genre through textual and sonic mappings of a specific cultural geography affected by the urban cartography of Seattle and the dynamic meteorology of the surrounding Puget Sound. A soundscape of Seattle grunge is defined in this project through a small interconnected community of artists in the mid 1980s through the early 1990s situating its heavy sound as uniquely connected to place and communal practice.The terrains of style, artistic praxis, and vibrational acoustics are continually examined within this work paying careful attention to economies of noise that are affectual foundations of place. Urban improvement projects, commercial aerospace industries, and marine commerce are just a few examples of poignant soundmarks found in grunge, that allow the listener to experience a new hard rock genre formation and hear the lived-experience of the artists. In formatting this project in the sonic and performative domain, this dissertation aims to add to the growing field of Geomusicology which understands genre formation as a dynamic cartography of socio-historical analysis, political economy, cultural studies, geographical analysis, and Sound Studies. Ultimately, this dissertation claims a space for grunge as a comparative tool in interrogating multiple forms of displacement, including gender, social, cultural, racial, and biopolitical dislocation in late 20th-century American history.