Guns'n Roses, Grunge
La fine degli anni 80 e l'inizio dell'era Grunge

We are at the end of the '80s, and the exhaustion of that era devoted to aesthetics, good living, electronic dreams, discos, branded clothes, in short, that forcefully optimistic attitude that characterized the entire decade is beginning to cause deadly boredom.
Who knows; maybe it's just a desire to return to simpler, truer, more human things, less plasticized and packaged, which characterized the just-ended decade.
This philosophy, this simplicity of feelings, as natural and as least artificial as possible, begins to make its way at the end of the '80s.
The world was tired of the old fashion but a new one had not yet been born to replace it.
The place where this happens is Seattle, a city that will also be a novelty as an artistic hub and will take away the primacy from the ever-competing and rival New York and Los Angeles.
One thing I must preface, musically, as much as Kurt Cobain also despised the stardom of Guns'n Roses and Axl in particular, it was the latter, at least in the early Guns, by adding that Punk air, that Punk nihilism to hard rock that makes GnR somewhat the forerunners of the Grunge movement.
The GNR, unlike the other hard rock and hair metal bands in vogue at the time, have neither the hedonism of the former nor the stardom of the latter.
From them, it is said, the entire street metal scene derives, which is a more violent, transgressive, angry, and mean Rock compared to the standards of the genre.
Axl and company in the first album put all the anger and frustration of their lives, the lyrics are all centered on their stray and violent life in the great metropolitan jungle that was Los Angeles in the '80s.
Defiant, poor, reckless, and transgressive to the limit of self-destruction (not surprisingly the album's title is "Appetite for Destruction"), they will be the greatest rock band of the late '80s.
We can say that from '87 to '92 they were the champions of rock.
But already in '91, with the release of their second double album, despite having improved musically and matured in the lyrics and sincerely coherent with themselves and their way of living, many fans, especially the more critical ones, noticed how much they have changed, how perhaps money, maybe the showbiz in general, has civilized them (just to make a comparison with the Good Stallone and his Rocky III who went through the same thing).
Axl Rose becomes a spoiled and hysterical star and starts fighting with the rest of the band, claiming to be the only true leader.
More than one concert is canceled due to his behavior, now the band has keyboardists, back-up singers, saxophonists, and a whole staff working for them. Of course, for a world-famous band, all this is inevitable, but it should not affect the spirit, which in my opinion happened to GnR.
Personally, I consider the double Use Your Illusion an album not bad, the sound embraces various styles, and the lyrics and music are very refined and well arranged, perhaps much better than the previous Appetite for Destruction, but the problem is that it is simply a nice record, perhaps a musical masterpiece, but it's the generational spirit that it lacks, it is perhaps already far from the fashion that like an oil stain is spreading from Seattle: Grunge, precisely.
And I do not deny that I did all this preamble to say that even Seattle certainly was influenced by the dirty and stray fashion of the street-hard rock of early Guns. Grunge means shabby, dirty, but it wants to express a return to simplicity, to feelings, in contrast with the luxurious splendor of the '80s.
All this is reflected especially in music, but not only.
Now the grunge fashion has arrived on several fronts, in the way of dressing, with worn and ripped jeans (the opposite of the '80s paninari, therefore returning to punk), tight shirts with shirts over or very broad and colorful sweaters (very famous and highly fashionable in the early '90s the checkered shirt), tennis shoes or snakers in general, in contrast with the very expensive hair metal and heavy boots; in the way of socializing, no more discos, but many times real garages that become clubs, where you drink, make friends, play and listen to music.
The '90s are the years in which the first self-managed spaces are born, the so-called social centers, which in turn start a wave of new groups that are born precisely from these.
Musically there's a return to the 3 essential instruments of rock, that is, guitar, bass, and drums and nothing more.
The song structure is often formed by the verse, to which bass and drums serve as a sound carpet, or the guitar which however is played more restrained only to explode in all its power and distortion in the chorus-noise.
Grunge lyrics talk about simplicity, complain about a discomfort of living, but at the same time accept it, snub the system a bit, even if many young people manage to reconcile their work activity despite being of grunge philosophy, but unlike their elder cousins yuppies whose slogan was "make a career and fast", often settle for a decent and dignified job without desiring anything more, their ego is perhaps already filled by the affection and solidarity of the people they love to surround themselves with.
But grunge is also rage, an irrational desire to explode, perhaps dictated by incommunicability, by feeling inside something that explodes but not even knowing what it is or what it is due to, explosions of rage that we find in music with the return of punk screams.
In my opinion, young grunge people were much less clear than the latter, let's say that if the punk slogan is "no!", the grunge one is "I don't know, but maybe it's okay".
It is that I don't know that worries, a fundamental incoherence perhaps, while accepting everything and everyone, suddenly there are bursts of rage at first glance irrational.
In this context, heroin is seen to come back into fashion after being ignored by many in the second half of the '80s, it's a return to loneliness, the only damned satisfaction dictated by heroin when the world does not offer us anything beautiful... and more than a youthful icon of those years fell victim to it.
In the '80s it was used to transgress, also as a chic fact, until many young people, especially in the second half, abandoned its use after becoming aware of its devastating effects on life and health.
From grunge, many groups and musical styles derived, which united various sounds to this genre contaminating it in every way.
I would say that already in '97 grunge was dead, leaving room for new musical waves, in that specific year, the breat.
But as we know, music like the world never stands still; and in addition, we have the returns to the past contaminated with the present, and here in 2000 and onwards there will be an '80s revival and the re-explosion of electronics, of the new new wave I would call it, contaminated with rock, thousands of fashions and musical genres and so forth, supported especially by what is the revolution of the 2000s, the internet accessible to everyone.

But this is another story....