Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge by Mark Yarm
This volume could have been a huge, snarky compendium of gossip and score settling from the inhabitants of a claustrophobically insular local music scene. And it is, but in the best possible way — and it's also much, much more. This is the story of an artistic movement that got hijacked halfway through its natural evolution by a huge global marketing machine that damn near killed it, and did kill some of its leading lights; rarely is the damage wrought by capitalism upon culture so vividly and precisely described. Yarm has culled the story of grunge from the people who created it, and their testimony is remarkable for its eloquence and its passion and its fairness and its anger. The music made some people superstars and — capriciously, almost arbitrarily — left others completely behind, to rock on as local celebrities at best, either bitterly or philosophically. Everybody Loves Our Town is in a strange and real way the secret history of the 1990s, and what you learn is that the people who looked as if they were leading the way were as lost as everybody else.