The groundbreaking rock band Nirvana—and the so-called grunge revolution it heralded—redefined music, celebrity, and U.S. culture as we know it. Nearly three decades after the release of the band’s seminal album Nevermind, the MLA will convene in Seattle, the city indelibly associated with grunge music, fashion, and social politics. Interest in the movement’s histories and ongoing impact remains strong. In addition to a booming industry of trade books, grunge remains the subject of scholarship in fields including cultural studies, media studies, musicology, American studies, and suicidology. Relevant academic books include: Catherine Strong, Grunge: Music and Memory (Ashgate, 2011); Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, Fandom, Image and Authenticity: Joy Devotion and the Second Lives of Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis (Palgrave, 2014); Catherine Strong and Barbara Lebrun (eds.), Death and the Rock Star (Routledge, 2015); and James Rovira (ed.), Rock and Romanticism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). This year also marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s suicide, which has renewed mainstream media coverage of the band, the era it defined, and the city that hosted its movement.

Seizing on the serendipitous confluence of timing and geography, this session revisits the cultural contexts that informed and were reflected by grunge. It emphasizes especially how grunge’s transformation(s) continue to impact the cultures within and against which we undertake our intellectual work today. In celebration of the fact that grunge defies traditionally-set boundaries, we bring together speakers from across subfields, representing a range of professional positions within and beyond the academy: graduate student, professor, independent scholar, and an editor at Rolling Stone. Together, we aim to examine the lasting impact of an era that shaped, in fundamental ways, the scholarly, pedagogical, and political praxes of many who now work within or in proximity to the North American academy.

Douglas Dowland’s “From Grunge to Public Radio: Pedagogies of Authenticity in the Nineties” situates the grunge revolution within the cultural contexts of the 1990s and traces its evolution into present-day popular and academic ethos. Locating the rhetoric of authenticity at the heart of grunge culture as a response to Reagan-era conformism, Dowland tracks a trajectory by which the era’s subcultural aesthetics have been incorporated back into the bourgeois mainstream such that they now signal, among other things, an “elite” education. This shows not only, as Gerald Graff once wrote, that higher education is popular culture, but also how the rhetoric of authenticity shifts into broader rhetorics of the “woke,” “aware” consumer of liberal ideologies.

Mike Miley and Jill Coste bridge the cultural moment in which grunge emerged with more recent artistic treatments of its legacies. Miley’s “My Own Private Aberdeen: Grunge Celebrity and Gen-X Politics in the Films of Gus Van Sant” reads two films but Gus Van Sant, My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Last Days (2005), as efforts to reckon with grunge as an unstable aesthetic continually in flight from closure. Both films, Miley argues, exhibit fatalism in opting out of existing power structures, ultimately suggesting that there is no way out of neoliberal corporate culture via a grunge ethic apart from death, madness, or a refusal to participate in social politics altogether. Coste’s “Rebel Girls and Grunge Groupies: Feminist Activism in Young Adult Novels” discusses teaching grunge-era feminism through two adaptations of Riot Grrrl politics in Young Adult fiction: Blake Nelson’s Girl (1994) and Jennifer Mathieu’s Moxie (2017). Coste brings these texts, as well as her students’ responses to them, to bear on the evolution of a certain kind of feminist ethos. In so doing, she also articulates contrasts in how Millennials and Generation Xers participate in youth activism.

Closing the panel, Deanna Koretsky’s “Black Lives and Dead White Guys” discusses rapper Denzel Curry’s 2018 music video for his song, “Clout Cobain,” which reads as both a powerful tribute to the late Nirvana singer and a critique of the racial politics of grunge culture and its afterlives. Curry uses the image of his own on-screen suicide to highlight the contradictions inherent in a society that has grown accustomed to the sight of bloodied and dying Black bodies, yet insists on maintaining the romance of a white man’s death. Though Cobain professed support for progressive social agendas, including anti-racism, Curry’s video raises questions about whether grunge and Black Lives Matter could ever reasonably coexist.

Given the broad appeal of this subject and its relationship to the city in which the convention will be held, we anticipate that audience members will be eager to join in the conversation. Thus, while the nature of the presentations described above is somewhat more formal than a roundtable, we have asked speakers to keep their papers to between 10-12 minutes in order to ensure that there is ample time for discussion. As presider, Alexandra Milsom will introduce the panel and ensure that speakers keep to time. We will also be joined by Rolling Stone editor Hank Shteamer, who will give a brief response of no more than 5 minutes before we open the floor for discussion.