THE GRUNGE MATCH - Conclusion

This has certainly been a heck of a thing.

Writing this started out as a labor of love to a subgenre of rock and roll that came along at the perfect time for me (both when I was entering middle school in the bottom 5 of the popularity pecking order and when I started buying albums at the impressionable age of 11).  It obviously took a long time to put together: August 29th, 2016 is when I began planning, May 24th is when I wrote the last entry, the wee hours of August 1st, 2017 is when I finished proofreading and uploading the entries to the blog with video links, and here I am typing these words on August 15th.

The elephant in the room is this genre seems to be built on death.  Three of the four frontmen of these bands are dead, one of which occurred during the run of this series.  (Shouts to Alice In Chains bassist Mike Starr as well.  R.I.P.)  On top of that, Pearl Jam only exists because the lead singer of Mother Love Bone died, causing that band to break up.  If you go down the next few rungs, BOTH singers for Stone Temple Pilots are dead (Chester Bennington sang for them in 2013-4, spawning an EP).  That just leaves Billy Corgan and Eddie Vedder out of the top six bands in the genre. 

But there's more to grunge than a cautionary tale or a morbid gallery of tragedies.  Yes, a great deal of songs, especially from Alice In Chains and Soundgarden, were about depression, addiction and death.  But they had cheeky sides as well; sure, they rarely made for good songwriting, but that's not the point.  Nirvana was built on cheeky sarcasm.  Pearl Jam had positive songs mixed in with the introspective and angsty.  And most of the time Soundgarden just wanted to kick ass without needing to mope.  If the music is good, it's good.  And Grunge (at least first big wave Grunge) was good.

So let's get into some stats:

Number of posts: 130 (April Fool's Joke / Statement / Conclusion included)

Total # of words written: 60,924

Longest entry: Match 001 (1,177)

Shortest entry: "Statement" (170)

Shortest Matchup: Match 123 (197)

Avg. # of words per entry: 468

Lead changes: ...It's complicated...

That's one thing I can say about The Grunge Match: WAY more action than The Big Four Song Challenge Series.  Second place was decided on the last entry.  But the lead changes were crazy: Eleven distinct First Place changes along with five ties (so...17?).  And of the three bands that took the lead (sorry Nirvana), each had a distinct epoch, though with different results.

The first three matches saw Alice In Chains and Pearl Jam fight over the lead, but after Match 003, Pearl Jam took off and didn't look back.  They had the longest stretch on top, from 003 to 062 where Alice In Chains finally caught back up with them.  Alice In Chains took sole possession of the lead at 063 and began a contentious campaign, as Soundgarden had come from behind to wrestle for the crown.  Between Match 074 and 091, Soundgarden tied for the lead four times, but couldn't take sole possession.  That changed with 092, but then Alice had one last gasp, taking 093, tying 094, then giving up the ghost at 095.  Soundgarden never looked back.  The breakdown goes like this:

Pearl Jam epoch: 59 (003-062)
Alice In Chains epoch: 32 (063-094)
Soundgarden epoch: 33 (095-127)

So in the end, what have we learned?  It's fun to write about things you enjoy, projects take forFUCKINGever to complete if you want to see them through to the end with any kind of quality to them, and I wish I had a topic of interest I could turn into a real book instead of blogs, but hey.  For now, it'll do.  Hope you all had fun reading this crazy crap.  I had fun writing it and I got to pretend to be productive for a little while.  Peace.

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