There was a special time once…

A time of angst and apathy. A time of resignation. A time peopled by the jilted generation, a generation of slackers. The residue left over after everything had been tried and found wanting.

Every decade had a personality. The 60s was free love, the 70s was Style, the 80s was excess.

The 90s had nothing. And from that nothingness came out a form of music with a startling purity of purpose. And the purpose was to – not venerate – but just to externalise the deep disengagement of its youth.

Grunge was never pretty. There was no groove or gravitas.  It was the middle child of rock. Grunge had meaning though. It didn’t care. And it was the music for people who didn’t care. The slackers, the shoe gazers, the fashionably sensitive but too cool to care (jewel, wink). The misfits that followed the 80s mercenaries and the 60s  missionaries.

Grunge didn’t have idols. Its frontmen didn’t ask you to squeeze metaphorical lemons. It had honest voices. Voices that connected the delinquent with the dextrous.

They were perhaps the architects of their own destruction. Most grunge voices​ did go silent by suicide or surplus.

All of them dead, Layne Stanley, Shannon Hoon, Kurt Cobain, the guy from sublime, Chris Cornell and now Dolores R’dan. A couple remain. Eddie vedder and billy corgan for two (put your helmets on please).

Scott Weiland from stone temple pilots is gone too. And in going left behind perhaps the biggest ‘what ifs’ of grunge legacy.

Velvet Revolver was a supergroup formed from the  ashes of grunge and hard rock. Stone temple pilots and guns n roses coming together. For a brief moment it was beautiful.

A product of that beautiful accident is the song attached. It’s not grunge. Not that it wants to be. But in being realised it celebrates the hopelessness of a certain emotion. It was the final full stop to a generation that had got used to hopelessness​.

A love song for the jilted; exuding passion but not embracing it. I have been listening to it all day. I blame my bathroom acoustics for hitting the wrong octaves.