Sub Pop and the Unemployment Economy of Grunge

Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman founded Sub Pop Records in nineteen eighty-six in a city that had recently been reminded, for the second time in fifteen years, that its economy was Boeing's to give and Boeing's to take. The early nineteen eighties recession had followed the nineteen seventy-one Boeing Bust; the result was cheap rent in Capitol Hill and the University District, high youth unemployment, long winters, and a lot of time to spend in practice spaces that cost almost nothing per month.

Pavitt and Poneman had no money. They had a mailing list, a Xerox machine, and an ear for music that came from the same place they were standing in. They signed bands that sounded like the Pacific Northwest looked: heavy, wet, claustrophobic, and not particularly interested in what was happening in Los Angeles or New York. Soundgarden. Mudhoney. Screaming Trees. A trio from Aberdeen called Nirvana.

The deliberate packaging of Pacific Northwest geography as aesthetic was not accidental. Sub Pop designed its own mythology: the flannel, the rain, the sense of remove from coastal music-industry centers, the suggestion that something was happening in Seattle precisely because Seattle was far enough away from everywhere else that it had to invent its own thing. This turned out to be true in ways that surprised even the people making it up.

In September of nineteen ninety-one, Nirvana released "Nevermind." By December, Seattle was the center of American music. The album had not been on a major label until just before it came out; Sub Pop had licensed Nirvana to DGC Records earlier that year. The label sold a stake of itself to Warner for twenty million dollars in nineteen ninety-five. By nineteen ninety-four, Kurt Cobain was dead and the commercial moment was over. What remained was the music, the catalog, and the fact that the economics of underemployment and cheap practice space had briefly been the most important conditions for American rock and roll.