90's Best Rock and Grunge Songs

90s Alternative Rock and Grunge Songs

The 90s produced what is quite possibly the best rock music since the beginning of the genre. I can understand an argument can be made that the 50s, 60s and 70s were each great in their own right. They each took rock music and basically invented and re-invented it. For those rockers in the 60 and 70s there was really nothing to copy. The 80s were a decade of utter crap. Synth pop and heavy metal hair band garbage. It seemed as though rock had killed itself with nothing new...until grunge and alternative rock.

Alt rock crept up into the scene in the 80s. College radio played stuff that mainstream radio would never put on their playlist. It was hit or miss but fun to discover new bands. But then a breakout occurred with the so-called "Seattle sound". It was a different kind of rock. Guitar solos came to an end following the gratuitous hair band metal sound. It was glorious.

The sound was heavy and sludgy. Think Alice in Chains and Soundgarden just before Nirvana exploded onto the scene. Then "Smells Like Teen Spirit" changed everything that was rock for a decade. When else has that ever occurred? Has a sound ever crossed into mainstream from college radio to rock stations to pop. Grunge and alt rock was radio in the 90s.

The 2000s have so far been a lost decade for rock. Pop and hip-hop has dominated the airwaves and mainstream for a long time unfortunately. Rock is dead in the 00s, but there is great music to discover from the 90s some of which I am going to splash onto this lens.