“[T]here really never will be another Silicon Valley,” Margaret O’Mara wrote in 2008, “the Valley remains a truly unique ecosystem for technological innovation, with specialized niches and decades‐old interpersonal networks. However, it’s no longer the only game in town. The people and firms of the Valley are part of a global supply chain in which many places – including Seattle – play an important role.”[1] O’Mara, author of Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley, would know. The University of Washington historian cut her teeth documenting the burgeoning knowledge economy of the mid-to-late twentieth century—a history that came sharply into focus during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

As O’Mara explained, this was not to say Seattle hadn’t demonstrated an attention to technological advancement. “Like the Bay Area and other gold‐ and silver‐rush cities of the American West, it has a long tradition of supporting innovators and iconoclasts,” she reminded readers. Still, obstacles persisted. Though its venture capital pool was maturing, it had not reached the dizzying heights of the Valley. University of Washington was a formidable research institution, but not quite a Stanford of the 1950s; the Emerald City undoubtedly attracted talent, but it did not always produce it, as did its Northern California counterpart. In the end, the reality persisted that Silicon Valley occurred at a specific moment in time, in a particular place, in an economic climate spurred by endless postwar military investment.

When Amazon moved its headquarters to a “multi-block development” in the city’s South Lake Union neighborhood circa 2008, O’Mara noted that this reflected a trend away from the suburbanization of the tech industry; some observers referred to such suburban environs as “technoburbs” and “nerdistans”; advocates preferred Silicon Valley, Silicon Prairie, or even Silicon Forest “but never Silicon City.” To be fair, O’Mara acknowledged that New York City did dub its tech sector, “scattered across Manhattan,” Silicon Alley. Likewise, L.A. alluded to its own west side agglomeration of tech by nicknaming it “Silicon Beach.” Still, O’Mara’s larger point remained essentially correct: “The gradual emergence of an alternative, more urban model for the high‐tech district is a result of the growth and diversification of the technology industry and its workforce.”[2]

Amazon’s recent purchase of Whole Foods suggests that the company’s massive growth will continue. It has been hiring lawyers and other professionals left and right from the East Coast. This influx of young professionals promises to continue reshaping city culture; inevitably some newcomers will chafe at the Pacific Northwest metropolis’s notoriously earnest persona.

Enter Bernadette Fox, the protagonist at the heart of Maria Semple’s second novel, Where’d You Go Bernadette? Fox and her husband Elgin Branch, an IT savant employed at Microsoft (MS), decamped from Los Angeles years ago, gave birth to a child, Bee, and settled into life in the city, living in an the increasingly dilapidated, “Straight Gate,” a former Catholic School for “wayward girls”.

Seattle did not bring out the best in Fox. A former McArthur Grant recipient and gifted architect, she fell off the map upon arrival—creating a sort of ghoulish aura around her. In an email, former mentor and fellow architect Paul Jellinek, warns Fox that a failure to attend to her creative side would result in disaster: “People like you must create. If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.”[3]

Jellinek’s prediction, though not wholly accurate, was not far off. Fox navigates the city sparingly, leaving the home only when ferrying Bee to her school or dinner with Bee’s friend Kennedy. She shops over the internet via a South Asian online assistant, Manjula Kapoor. She rages silently at motorists: “The drivers here are horrible. And by horrible, I mean they don’t realize I have someplace to be.”

Despite her own travails, she is not a source of empathy for the downtrodden. “Seattle. I’ve never seen a city so overrun with runaways, drug addicts, and bums. Pike Place Market: they’re everywhere. Pioneer Square: teeming with them. The flagship Nordstrom: have to step over them on your way in,” she confides to Jellinek. “Seattle is the only city where you step in shit and you pray, ‘Please god, let this be dog shit.’”[4] Fox remains unimpressed by local fashion. Seattle women choose from two hairstyles: “short gray hair and long gray hair. You go into a salon asking for hair color, and they flap their elbows and cluck, ‘Oh Goody, we never get to do color!’”[5] She takes issue with men’s aesthetic choices as well: “fathers only come in one style here, and that’s outdoorsy.”[6]

Her daughter’s school, the Galer Street School, located next to a fish factory, often smells of salmon and the parents reek of the kind of kumbaya sincerity that has earned the city its humorless reputation. After a school fundraising event goes horribly, but hysterically, wrong one parent—a psychiatrist who once worked with residents in post disaster New Orleans and Haiti and now works as a Swedish Medical Center counselor—evaluates students for PTSD. “During the walk to the bus, I was able to listen, express curiosity, and simply ‘be’ with the child,” she relates to parents in an email. “We are still weighing whether or not to have an all-school assembly, a kindergarten only gathering, or a parent forum to collectively process this traumatic event.”[7]

Seattle’s vernacular architecture receives the Fox treatment as well. When shopping for houses, Fox compares house hunting to shopping at IKEA, where “you can’t believe how cheap everything is, and even though you may not need a hundred tea lights, my God they’re only ninety nine cents for the whole bag?” More specifically, Seattle’s famed collection of Craftsman homes gets no love from Fox:

“Everything else is a Craftsman. Turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman. It’s like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won’t matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.” [8]

City planners do not fare much better. Asleep at the wheel for decades, the zoning commissioner must have handed the reins over to the “Soviets,” she argues. Five lane intersections bedevil her waking hours: “whoever laid out this city never met a four way intersection they didn’t turn into a five way intersection.” Elaborating, she says of the non-craftsman apartment buildings: “They never met a beautiful view they didn’t block with a twenty story old folks home with zero architectural integrity. Wait, I think that’s the first time the words “architectural” and “integrity” have ever been used together in a discussion of Seattle.”[9]

Semple, a former television writer for Arrested Development, imbues the story with a healthy sense of humor and based the story on her own struggle with acclimating to Seattle after moving from Los Angeles. “I was in a miserable mind frame, and I found that I was driving around and all I was thinking about were funny things about how awful Seattle was,” she told the New York Times in 2012. “I would do these riffs in my head and I would polish them in my head. It was poisonous and self-pitying.”[10] Clearly, Fox serves as Semple’s exaggerated literary avatar and she tells the story not through a clean straight narrative but rather through what one might describe as a series of primary sources, many from a variety of perspectives: F.B.I. files, diary entries, police and psychiatric reports, letters, emails, report cards, blog posts, newsletters and magazine articles.

Other aspects of life in twenty-first century Seattle emerge in the novel. For decades, Pacific Northwest natives have looked askance at transplants from California. I personally can remember taking the city’s underground tour in the 1990s and baked into the presentation were jokes about Californians driving up real estate prices.

Shane Updike, a school administrator, went to college at Seattle University during the mid-1990s and moved back to the city in 2007 after nearly ten years teaching public high school in New York City. “House prices in Seattle have risen pretty dramatically over the past 4 or 5 years,” he told The Metropole recently. The tech boom, foreign investment by homeowners overseas, and a tight housing stock have all contributed to the sharp increase in housing prices. “Another huge factor is that people are moving to the city from the San Francisco area for tech jobs, and to these people, homes are relatively inexpensive compared to the bay area.  These people have money and help to drive up the cost of housing.”[11]

Though from the Southern limits of the Golden State, Fox and Elgin represent this exact demographic. As one character tells Fox during a heated argument: “Nobody realized you were the people from L.A. who came to Seattle and bought a twelve thousand square foot building in the middle of a charming neighborhood and called it your home.”[12] In the wake of Microsoft, Amazon, and an expanding tech sector, this feeling has only grown. “Seattle, with the tech industry generally and Amazon specifically, is booming economically and people are moving here,” confirms Updike.

The novel also skewers Seattle’s self-image as a “compassionate,” tolerant city. Fox mocks the city for its attempts to address pressing social issues like low riding trousers. “And the mayor said he wanted to get to the root of why kids sag their pants. The fucking mayor. Don’t get me started on Canadians. It’s a whole thing.”[13]

Neither is Fox convinced by claims of metropolitan diversity. Overhearing a conversation in the grocery store about the city’s cosmopolitanism, Fox can’t resist: “Encouraged I asked, ‘Really?’ She said, Sure, Seattle is full of people from all over. ‘Like where?’ Her answer, ‘Alaska. I have a ton of friends from Alaska.’ Whoomp there it is.”[14]

Semple also gets at the vast change in American culture that has unfolded with the spread of technology. People continually comment on Elgin Branch, Fox’s husband and Microsoft “celebrity”, and his famed TED talk regarding one the company’s new cutting-edge products, the Samantha 2; when the F.B.I. gets involved due to Fox’s dangerous internet habits, even the investigating agent, Marcus Strang, references the presentation. “P.S. We all loved your TEDtalk,” he writes. “I’d love to see the latest on Samantha 2 if time permits.”[15] Unsurprisingly, Fox thinks little of Microsoft’s larger ambitions: “Well, on Microsoft’s walls are maps of the world, and in case you’re still unclear about their dominion, under these maps are the words: THE WORLD.”

How did Seattle react to the book? Local alternative websites like The Stranger endorsed it, describing Where’d You Go Bernadette? as “the funniest novel ever written about Seattle,” and nominated it for its 2015 Genius Award in Literature. Some residents, however, remained “miffed” about Semple’s take on the city—particularly about women’s hair, if one bookstore customer is to be believed. In the end, though, all great cities must learn to laugh at themselves, especially at the things that make them notable. “It’s just not a funny place,” Semple told the Times, but apparently it can be.

 

[1] Margaret O’Mara, “We are not ‘the next Silicon Valley’”, crosscut.com, February 18, 2008.

[2] Margaret O’Mara, “Amazon joins a parade of high tech to the urban core”, crosscut.com, December 20, 2007.

[3] Maria Semple, Where’d You Go Bernadette, (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2012), 136.

[4] Semple, Where’d You Go Bernadette, 127-128.

[5] Semple, Where’d You Go Bernadette, 128.

[6] Semple, Where’d You Go Bernadette, 125.

[7] Semple, Where’d You Go Bernadette, 78-79.

[8] Maria Semple, Where’d You Go Bernadette, 25

[9] Semple, Where’d You Go Bernadette?, 126- 127.

[10] Julie Bosman, “A novel asks Seattle to laugh at itself”, New York Times, August 15, 2012.

[11] Shane Updike, interview with author, June 25, 2017.

[12] Semple, Where’d You Go Bernadette?, 86.

[13] Semple, Where’d You Go Bernadette?, 128.

[14] Semple, Where’d You Go Bernadette?, 132.

[15] Semple, Where’d You Go Bernadette?, 170.

Seattle has long been connected to cutting edge technology: Boeing’s aerospace dominance, Seattle’s 1962 World Fair, and more recently the rise of Microsoft and Amazon. The ascent of “digital Seattle” was arguably best captured in two books; Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews on Microsoft in Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in the World (1994) and Brad Stone with The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2014).

That said, Microsoft lacked the sheen of Apple; its steady profits and success felt purely Seattle, steady and unexciting. Films like the Pirates of Silicon Valley portrayed Gates as a savvy businessman, less the innovative, technological guru than his counterpart Steve Jobs. Granted, IT professionals anticipated new Windows offerings, but more often to highlight security flaws in the software than to hail its innovation. Contrast that with the giddy atmosphere of Jobs-era Apple, which Danny Boyle depicted in all Jobs’ maniacal glory in the 2015 film, Steve Jobs. Nonetheless, Microsoft played a critical role in creating the technology and infrastructure that made internet commerce possible and drove the nation toward its online and globalized economic present and future.

As historians have discussed, globalization is hardly new; its political valances might simply have coalesced in more visible ways at the end of the 20^th century. In 1999, Seattle briefly occupied the national consciousness when the World Trade Organization Protests drew the media’s attention. For globalization advocates like Thomas Friedman, protesters represented a “Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions, and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix.” Understandably, demonstrators like Janet Thomas, author of The Battle in Seattle: The Story Behind and Beyond the WTO Demonstrations (2000) disagreed with Friedman’s assertion. Thomas branded the New York Times columnist a cog in the mainstream media machine, accusing both he and the paper of serving as little more than “a voice for corporate interests.”

The film Battle in Seattle awkwardly attempts to depict the event the outcome of 40,000-60,000 protesters descending on the city. Starring an ensemble cast that includes Woody Harrelson, André Benjamin, Charlize Theron, Michelle Rodriguez, and Ray Liotta, it’s a clunky film that strives to present the opposition’s protest in the best light. As critic Stephen Holden correctly asserts, however, characters are often reduced to “rhetorical plot device[s].”[1]

Other works have tried to evaluate the 1999 protests. In addition to Thomas’s book, Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair, and Allen Sekula produced Five Days that Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond in 2000 and Rebecca Solnit published The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle in 2009.

Last year, Sunil Yapa sought to capture the demonstration and its globalized tendrils in his debut novel, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Fist. AS Bishop, the Seattle Chief of Police searches for his estranged son, Victor, while attempting to clear the streets of protesters, he considers the city’s physical landscape and its more iconic elements:

“There was the space needle standing alone. A structure Bishop had always loved despite himself. Erected for the ’62 World’s Fair, some architect’s vision of the future, it looked like a plate balanced on two chopsticks, wavering improbably six hundred feet in the air, something beautiful but faintly ominous about the whole thing.”[2]

Bishop’s is one of several interlocking stories Yapa introduces in an attempt to place Seattle and the WTO meetings at the nexus of globalization.

The novel takes its name from a famous woodcut created during the protests by artist Dalia Sapon-Shevin. Yapa himself resided in Seattle for a short period and provides views of the event and the politics behind the demonstration through several characters: Bishop’s lost son Victor; Kingfisher , an eco-warrior/eco-; Seattle police officer Timothy Park; and his colleague and fellow cop Julia (“originally Guatemalan … via Los Angeles”) referred to as Ju by her colleagues. Like their activist counterparts, the two officers, Park and Ju are no strangers to urban debacles. Park played hero at the Oklahoma City bombings and Ju, worked the 1992 L.A. riots before absconding to the Pacific Northwest. To the book’s credit, characters hail from diverse backgrounds ethnically, racially, geographically, and even ideologically.

Yapa also adds a Sri Lankan delegate to the WTO conference, Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe, as a means to balance the novel’s political message, which leans heavily toward the activist side. The protest impedes Wickramsinghe’s attempts to reach the meeting and secure a trade agreement for his nation, the war-torn and chronically poor South Asian island nation. Initially, the Sri Lankan delegate views the protesters with a studied wariness.

The contrast between his memories of civil war in Sri Lanka and the ethnic violence often attached to the conflict contrasts negatively with protesters.

“What if they knew what a real revolutionary was? How bloody is a real revolution. He looked around suddenly feeling the need to sit, and saw nothing but their faces, their round wet faces staring back at him. What a violence of the spirit to not know the world.”[3]

Later, larger systems at work blunt his attempts at securing a trade agreement and he comes to better understand and respect the motives and animating spirit of demonstrators.

How much does Yapa capture Seattle? It depends on how one thinks about that question. By the late 1990s, the rise of the “Asian Tiger” economies and Seattle’s position on the Pacific Rim helped secure a key place in the increasingly globalized economy. As a site for a WTO meeting it fit the bill the figuratively and metaphorically.

Throughout the novel, characters recount their global journey to Seattle. Seattle native Victor runs away from his step-father, Police Chief Bishop, following the death of his mother, to better experience the world. He returns on the eve of the protest in order to sell a bunch of weed and thereby secure a plane ticket to his next destination. Kingfisher, on the lam since burning down a Vail ski resort, snuck back into the U.S. from Mexico to reengage the movement, but not before playing a role in a separate tragedy. John Henry, “Holy man of the Rust Belt”, comes to the Emerald City with quotes from Mahatma Gandhi tattooed across his chest and an undying belief in non-violent protest.

“John Henry heard their voices and knew this was no ordinary protest, this congregation in the streets. No, this was the new American religion. This desire which leapt continents. The longing of the heart to embrace a stranger and be unashamed.”[4]

Several of the book’s characters do live in the city and provide brief commentary on its economy and landmarks. Police Chief Bishop provides a loose schematic of the city’s more famous locations when peering upon the thousands of protesters gathering below the police vantage point above downtown. “He looked down through the bubble and saw the crowds massing. In the red square at the University of Washington; at Pine and Fourth, and the Seattle Community College on the northeastern corner; Pike Place Market to the west; a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands – all on the move.”[5]

Despite its recent publication, Your Heart feels almost as much a time capsule as the 1992 film Singles. Whatever impact the WTO protests have had or might have had was obscured or subsumed by 9/11. In the context of shootings in Orlando, San Bernadino, and even more recent attacks in Paris, London, and Alexandria, Virginia, the WTO protests remain troubling but not threatening. Then again, protesters sought to disrupt globalization by bringing the conference to a standstill. Even Dr. Wickramsinghe comes to appreciate the demonstrators. While detained by local police aboard a bus with protesters, he engages in conversation with them, discussing corn subsidies, the fate of Mexican farmers, and other ills of globalization. “They were the faces of that part of American character that believed not in American destiny, but in the promise of America itself, that same promise with which they had once welcomed dusty hardworking immigrants to their shores,” he thinks to himself.

Brexit and President Trump’s campaign rhetoric (if not necessarily his policies, whatever they might be) seem to indicate that the radicalism of WTO demonstrators, if not the ideology, has ensconced itself in electoral politics. “That part of the American character” that Wickramsinghe identifies, right now feels drowned out by nativism.

Than again, anti-globalization sentiment – admittedly for different reasons – has captured the attention of Americans of all political leanings and demographics, from the college campuses of Berkeley to the steel towns of the rust belt to the agricultural communities of the South. Yapa channels some of this effectively in his novel, but too often falls into atavistic clichés regarding the left even as he clearly tries to avoid doing so. Seattle is really more the backdrop than the subject of Your Heart is the Muscle the Size of a Fist—much as the WTO demonstrations feel more like a disconcerting example of millennium unrest rather than the thumping existential threat of terrorism.

 

[1] Stephen Holden, “When Worlds Collided by Puget Sound”, New York Times, September 18, 2008.

[2] Sunil Yapa, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2016), 106.

[3] Yapa, Your Heart is a Muscle, 144.

[4] Yapa, Your Heart is a Muscle, 14.

[5] Yapa, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, 107.

In a 2014 interview, indie rock malcontent Stephen Malkmus reflected on 1990s nostalgia. “It’s a time that seems romantic to people now, whereas at the time, it seemed like a cynical era,” he told the magazine. “There were all these worries about selling out and the Man and corporate rock and irony and sincerity. But in retrospect, being cynical just meant that you cared. There was something at stake.”[1]

For those of us who came of age in the 1990s, few cities embodied this awkward combination of cynicism, earnestness, and disdain for “corporatism” described by Malkmus than rain soaked Seattle. Much of this had to do with the rise of “alternative music” and under that umbrella, “grunge.”

Unintentionally, Cameron Crowe’s 1992 film Singles emerged as representative of the city and its music. The film revolves around a loosely defined group of white hipsters played by Matt Dillon, Bridget Fonda, Kyra Sedgwick, and Campbell Scott, among others, who are going through the usual malaise and confusion of their late 20s; these stories are largely told through various vignettes threaded throughout the movie. New York Times film critic Janet Maslin described it as an “utterly charming look at a small sample of Seattle’s young, unmarried population,” cautioning that despite an “irresistible theme song” by the decidedly non-Seattle Paul Westerberg, leaned “too heavily” on its grunge heavy soundtrack.[2]

Having watched Singles again recently, I can assure you it’s not that good–though it does serve as a useful time capsule from the period. Chris Cornell, Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard all make appearances. Soundgarden and Alice in Chains also show up as bands playing in the background. Lesser-known Seattle indie rock stars like Tad Doyle and Sub Pop’s Bruce Pavitt also make cameos, raising the question of whether it’s really a cameo if no one knows who you are outside Seattle?

Did Singles capture the look and feel of Seattle environs? Somewhat, though through Crowe’s lens it’s an entirely white, heterosexual city. To be honest, looking back at his filmography, this is unsurprising, as Aloha, Say Anything, Almost Famous, and Elizabethtown are similarly hetero- and white-normative. In 1990, the city might have been 75 percent white, but it had significant black (10 percent) and Asian populations (11 percent). Maki Smith discussed the intersection of the two communities in a recent blog post for The Metropole. Native Americans, though small demographically (1.4 percent), cast an influential cultural shadow. As evidenced by our interview with historian Gary L. Atkins, the LGBT community was quite prominent as well. All that said, aesthetically one could argue that Gus Van Zandt’s Drugstore Cowboy more effectively conveys the scenery and feel of the Pacific Northwest in his film about drug addicts hashing it out in and around Portland, Oregon.

Crowe has acknowledged he wasn’t super concerned about portraying Seattle in any way, arguing Singles was “not a movie about the birth of the now-hot Seattle scene” but really the disconnected nature of life in one’s twenties. I would even suggest that there are scenes from Say Anything, Crowe’s 1989 romantic comedy(?) which is also set in Seattle, that better depict the city–namely when Lloyd Dobbler and Diane Court drive a drunken party-goer home for the night as the highway beckons, the city’s skyline hovering above them.

Maslin’s dismissal of the film’s soundtrack, which included Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, The Screaming Trees, and other perennial bands from the era (minus the biggest one, Nirvana), highlights how the music matters much more now, 25 years later, than the actual film does in defining the city’s image despite it being known as “Crowe’s grunge movie.” A 25^th anniversary re-issue of the soundtrack comes out this year.

If one really wanted to know about the city and its scene in this period, they would do better to consult the film Hype!. Despite interference by Crowe, who feared the film would damage Singles at the box office, Doug Pray’s documentary on the Seattle music scene came out four years later and became, at least according to Vice Journalist Cam Lindsey, “the definitive film on Seattle in the late ’80s and early ’90s.”

Then there is Mark Yarm’s 2012 oral history of the Seattle scene Everybody Loves Our Town, “basically a flannel-shirted soap opera, where sex, drugs, ego and money (or the lack thereof) wreak such colourful havoc that you wonder how anyone found time to make records, let alone a handful of great ones,” as journalist Dorian Lynskey writes. Arranged in the same fashion as the oral history of punk by Legs McNeill and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me; in Everybody Loves Our Town, Yarm enables the participants to explain the history from their undoubtedly biased viewpoints. In life, there is no history but only histories.

Needless to say, more voices might deepen a history but they do not simplify things. In relation to Seattle being overly earnest, bands in grunge might have been politically sincere, but many let the personal narratives about them range freely. For example, musicians sought to portray themselves as untutored musical wild things, yet more than a few artists had gone to college, played the White House, or were even the progeny of celebrities. Others simply played havoc with the media attention. Locals fed journalists ridiculous stories such when Caroline records representative Megan Jasper famously punked the New York Times by feeding the newspaper fake slang from the scene including “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” (hanging out) and “harsh realm” (bummer) among Arm’s contrived and spurious lingo. Clearly, the media was not discerning. “When you live it and then you see how it’s covered, you’re like, Wow, that’s not accurate, or Oh, the feeling of this was different from how they portrayed it,” a former Sub Pop publicist notes. “It makes you question history.”

In some ways, grunge captured the city. The scene’s fashion—long unkempt hair, Doc Martens with shorts, flannel shirts, stocking caps—was Seattle through and through. Though many of these bands embraced the general grooves of 1970s classic rock, they also imbued their own music with a certain punk ethos. As New York Times music critic Jon Pareles wrote in the wake of Cornell’s death, Soundgarden and others turned their collective rage and doubt inward, much as the long months of rain force residents to do for much of the year.

Earlier this year, Pearl Jam was inducted into the Rock ‘N Roll Hall of Fame. David Letterman introduced them, the band spoke about the usual things bands talk about when discussing their origin story; Eddie Vedder said a bunch of stuff that at once sounded inspirational and vaguely idiotic. Only a few weeks later, Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell committed suicide. Music critic Steven Hyden called Cornell “one of the towering rock figures of that era” and even recorded a 30-minute “emergency podcast” to address Cornell’s demise. The loss of Seattle native Cornell left Vedder as the last remaining frontman from the Grunge era’s big four: Vedder, Layne Staley, Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell.

A quarter of a century later, a city now defined by Microsoft and Amazon remains tethered to arguably one of the most analogue last gasps of traditional rock music. Cities still do serve as incubators for scenes: 1980s Chicago with Ministry and the Wax Trax label,  Washington D.C. with 1980’s predecessors Bad Brains and Minor Threat followed by Fugazi, and Nation of Ulysses on Dischord Records in the 1990s, early aughts Baltimore around Animal Collective and Beachhouse and Brooklyn with Grizzly Bear and TV on the Radio (yes, Animal Collective moved to Williamsburg later, but Charm City was its origin). However, due in part to the fragmentation of popular culture which had reduced the importance of labels, even local ones, the rising costs of gentrification in many urban locals and the increasingly digital, Spotified nature of the music industry, it sometimes feels like Seattle as music mecca might be a vestige of a different era.

Music has changed greatly in 25 years, as has Seattle, yet for better or worse Grunge remains affixed to the city’s identity. Then again, I’m 41, and maybe I’m the one who can’t let go.

 

[1] Rob Sheffield, “Stephen Malkmus on Why Everyone Wants to be a Nineties Kid”, Rolling Stone, January 3, 2014.

[2] Janet Maslin, “Youth, Love and a Place of One’s Own”, New York Times, September 18, 1992.