(Credits: Far Out / Spotify)
Trying to explain how the grunge scene became the most important musical movement of the 1990s feels like an impossible task. No one in the Pacific Northwest expected their small community to become the biggest thing in the world, and looking at how most of them reacted to being treated like musical gods, it’s not like they were exactly ready for it, either. But what it lacked in good PR, it made up for in boatloads of sincerity, and Bono could always see the merit in that above anything else.
Because before grunge, there was punk, and that was something the U2 frontman was on the ground floor to witness. He bowed at the altar of people like Joe Strummer, and when listening to many of the biggest bands coming out of Seattle, it was refreshing to see them taking those same ideals to heart by giving a swift middle finger to any business that told them how they should live their lives.
Out of all the bands in town, though, Nirvana was the only one that seemed to scan properly as a punk act. Kurt Cobain didn’t exactly write punk songs, but many of the best moments in their discography have come from them embracing those punk ideals and putting tuneful melodies behind them like ‘In Bloom’ and ‘Heart Shaped Box’. It was something new for the 1990s, but Cobain wasn’t willing to take the deep dive with U2 yet.
Despite U2 offering many different slots on the ZooTV tour for alternative acts, Cobain was never going to feel comfortable playing to stadiums of people. He always envisioned himself being in a massive band, but he never thought he needed to have as many headaches as the ones he had later down the line, especially towards the end of his life when his personal matters became a media circus.
And while much of that circus revolved around his relationship with Courtney Love, it wasn’t like she was the Yoko of the band, dragging them down. She had her own separate agenda half the time, and despite many people trying to look through the songs of Live Through This like tea leaves and somehow connect them to Cobain’s death, all the tunes that Love wrote for the record are some of the most biting tracks of the 1990s.
Most people might have instantly distanced themselves from it through the sheer fact that it was an outspoken woman, but Bono knew that there was something powerful there that was enough to rival Nirvana’s best moments, saying, “[She has] advanced guitar sounds, a sense of pop to match her man’s but a better album than In Utero, up there with Nevermind. Both women give a lesson in how to hold an electric guitar.”
While In Utero has become a much better record in retrospect, it’s easy to see where Bono was coming from in terms of the power behind the tunes. ‘Doll Parts’ and ‘Miss World’ may not have been the easiest thing to digest right after Cobain was found dead, but hearing her lash out in pain is the same thing that every other grunge rocker was doing, only this time with a much more biting edge to it, especially on a track like ‘Violet’ where she talks about someone taking everything they can from her.
Although Bono would eventually get the idea to leave rock behind in favour of making random noises into a MIDI synthesiser on a good chunk of Pop, he knew that Live Through This stood as a grand statement right as grunge was about to fade. There was a lot of anger behind the Seattle scene, and while many people were yelling at the biggest names to lighten up, there was a lot more than unbridled rage there.
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