When Grunge Was Fake News

Megan Jasper blames coffee. The morning she fooled the most famous newspaper in America began with damn near a whole pot. By the time her phone started ringing, she had a good buzz going. “I was,” Jasper said, “totally overcaffeinated.”

She expected the call. Jonathan Poneman, cofounder of fabled independent record label Sub Pop, had just heard from a reporter. But instead of agreeing to yet another interview, he steered the writer to Jasper, who’d recently been laid off from her job as a receptionist at the indie institution. “I’m having a day where I’m not quick on my feet,” she remembered her friend and former boss telling her. “I knew you’d have fun with this.”

Poneman’s weariness was understandable. It was late 1992, months after Nirvana’s Nevermind hit no. 1 on the Billboard 200. Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden all had made their major-label debuts and were in heavy rotation on MTV. Meanwhile, Seattle’s long-ignored music community was feeling like an ant frying under the national media’s giant magnifying glass. At that point, the 25-year-old Jasper was working as a sales representative for Caroline Records out of her apartment. She was sitting at her desk when all of a sudden The New York Times was on the line.

The reporter’s name was Rick Marin and he was at work on a story for the Styles section about the mainstreaming of so-called grunge culture. The premise was tired. To many in the city of its supposed birth, the phenomenon was a contrivance. By then only outsiders earnestly used the term “grunge” as a noun. “It was an overhyped, inflated word that doesn’t have actual meaning in Seattle,” said Charles R. Cross, former editor and publisher of Pacific Northwest alternative paper The Rocket and author of the Kurt Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven. “It’s a time marker more than a description of music.”

So when Marin explained that he also wanted to put together a grunge lexicon as a companion to his story, Jasper chuckled to herself. She found the idea of codifying the scene’s slang hilarious, mostly because it didn’t exist. When people made such assumptions, there was only one thing to do. “You react by trying to make fun of it,” Jasper said. Earlier that year, British magazine Sky had asked her for a similar glossary. “I gave them a bunch of fake shit,” she said. The nonsense words she suggested ended up in print and caught the eye of members of the band Mudhoney, whose members sprinkled them into a conversation with U.K. music publication Melody Maker.

What a wired Jasper provided Marin was more extensive. She kicked off the list with jokey colloquialisms that had a veneer of authenticity — “lamestain” (uncool person) and “rock on” (a happy goodbye). Soon, she progressed to ridiculous expressions like “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” (hanging out) and “cob nobbler” (loser). “I thought if I said some stuff that sounded kind of believable and some stuff that sounded just outrageous that it would just lead to us laughing about it,” Jasper said. As they spoke, she could hear the sound of Marin typing. Jasper kept waiting for him to ask if she was kidding. He never did.

In the early 1990s, to the initial shock of those involved, Seattle’s music scene exploded. “It hit pretty quickly, like a tidal wave,” said Daniel House, former bassist of Skin Yard, whose original lineup included famed Nirvana producer Jack Endino and future Soundgarden and Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron. “Before you knew it, every publication was basically descending on our town.” At one point House was quoted in Time and Newsweek — in the same week.

This is what happens when something small grows bigger than anyone could’ve imagined. There’s always a rush — by news outlets, the recording industry, even fashion designers — to capitalize. In Hype!, Doug Pray’s 1996 documentary about Seattle rock, Jasper compared her city in that era to the mall on Christmas Eve 15 minutes before closing. “It’s loaded with sub-moronic idiots prancing around buying anything they can get their hands on,” she said. One morning 25 years ago, in her own tiny, snarky way, Jasper fought back. In the process, she inadvertently exposed the absurdity of the grunge craze.

“Everybody wanted a piece of it and yet nobody really wanted to get to know what it really was,” said House, whose band Nirvana used to open for. In reality, grunge was difficult to define. As far back as the 1950s, critics and musicians had employed the word as an adjective. In his book Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain, Cross called what came to be described as grunge “a raw and unpolished sound, with distortion, but usually without any other added studio audio effects.” Cross also pointed to its association with Endino-produced Sub Pop records, which “in that context, meant a mix of garage rock and slowed-down punk.” (Endino’s credits include Nirvana’s debut, Bleach, and Soundgarden’s Screaming Life.)

Mark Arm, the eventual lead singer of Mudhoney, is thought to be the person who introduced the word to Seattle. In 1981, in a letter to fanzine Desperate Times, he mockingly tweaked Mr. Epp and the Calculations — his band — calling them, “Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure shit!” When Green River, another Arm-fronted group, which featured two of the founding members of Pearl Jam, released Dry As a Bone in 1987, the newly formed Sub Pop called the EP “ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation.”

Self-deprecation and silliness were both abundant in Seattle, a place that for years the music world had considered to be a backwater unworthy of tour stops. Cobain was often portrayed as a tortured artist, but like many of his peers he had a sense of humor that often went ignored. Cross reminded me that several of Cobain’s early songs referenced masturbation. “This is not,” the author said, “someone taking himself seriously.” Hype! showcases local bands with names like Supersuckers, Gas Huffer, and 7 Year Bitch. For a while, Jasper was in an all-woman group called Dickless.

It didn’t matter that all these bands sounded completely different from one another. Because of where they were from, they embodied grunge, an annoyingly nebulous concept that was too pervasive to ignore. “We hated it but we had to go with it,” Cross said. (The word still manages to piss people off. Before an interview with an unnamed Seattle musician whom Cross has been covering for 30 years, the writer was instructed by the artist’s publicist to under no circumstances bring up grunge.)

With success came adulation, and not just from MTV and Rolling Stone. Teenagers started dressing like their heroes, who wore flannel not as a fashion statement but because it was cheap and kept them warm. In the summer of 1992, Cross recalled seeing a Washington State Fair booth selling “grunge wear.” Writer-director Cameron Crowe’s Seattle-set romantic comedy Singles, which had a soundtrack stuffed with some of the city’s biggest bands, hit theaters that September. Two months later in New York, designer Marc Jacobs introduced a grunge-themed collection.

The media’s sometimes sloppy Seattle obsession grated on those who lived there. Cross grew tired of seeing articles refer to Cobain’s native Aberdeen, Washington, as a suburb of Seattle, when the two are more than 100 miles apart. One day at The Rocket, Cross received a call from a Canadian reporter. Her wire service, she explained, was hoping to confirm a report that the arrival of hordes of youths in Seattle had caused a public safety crisis. Cross figured he was being pranked until she implored him to look out the window of his office. He checked, but there were no rowdy teenagers to be found.

After talking to Marin, Jasper called Poneman. “We laughed,” she said. “And my life went on.” Then, on November 15, her mother called from Worcester, Massachusetts. “You need to run down to the cawnah and pick up a paypah,” she said in her thick New England accent. Jasper asked why. “You’re in the friggin’ New York Times. Good job.”

Stunned, Jasper walked to a 7-Eleven, bought a copy of the newspaper, rushed home, and opened to the Styles section. The headline stared up at her: “Grunge: A Success Story.” Next to the article, which Marin wrote, was a sidebar titled: “Lexicon of Grunge: Breaking the Code.” And there it was, Jasper’s full list of bogus words. At that moment, she had only one thought: Oh my fucking God.

“It was truly unbelievable,” said Jasper, who as a kid regularly made the 40-plus-mile trek from her hometown of Worcester to Boston on Sundays to see all-ages punk shows. “Everyone in my family is a schoolteacher. For me to be in The New York Times because I fucking lied? You wouldn’t think that they’d feel proud. But they were psyched. My family was so happy. They thought it was hilarious.”

Soon, at a show she attended in Seattle, Jasper spotted people with a clipping of the lexicon pinned to their shirts. “I got a very nice pat on the back,” she said. House, who at the time was running the indie label C/Z Records, liked the gag so much that he had “Lexicon of Grunge” T-shirts printed. Art Chantry, the creator of countless iconic concert posters and album art for bands like Soundgarden, came up with the design. He used an analog copier at The Rocket — “I can’t tell you how many Sub Pop record covers were created on that thing,” Chantry said in an email — to enlarge the Times sidebar. “So by the time it was big enough to be T-shirt typography,” Chantry said, “it looked like it had been left underwater for years.” One version of the shirt read “Lamestain” across the front; the other said “Harsh Realm.” On the back of both was the lexicon and the C/Z logo. The label sold hundreds of T-shirts.

In 2017, Jasper’s prank likely would be debunked shortly after Marin’s article hit the internet. But this was 1992. Snopes wasn’t around yet. Hell, The New York Times was still four years away from launching a website. The grunge lexicon lingered. And then someone decided to let the country in on the joke.

Thomas Frank of The Baffler, a magazine that bills itself as “The Journal That Blunts the Cutting Edge,” was incredulous. He was the first reporter to track down Jasper after the publication of Marin’s story. Right away he asked about the fake glossary. Here’s how Jasper remembered the conversation unfolding:

Frank: “There’s no way this is real, right?”

Jasper: “Of course it’s not real.”

Frank: “Are you on record saying that?”

Jasper: “Well, of course I am.”

Frank’s myth-busting, Times-publisher-tweaking article “Harsh Realm, Mr. Sulzberger!” ran in early 1993. “The Times went looking for some colorful argot from the Seattle rock scene,” wrote Frank, now an author and political commentator who through a publicist declined an interview, “and Ms. Jasper was only too happy to oblige them with some of the most inspired fake slang outside of Monty Python.”

After an item in the New Republic cited Frank’s story in The Baffler as proof that the lexicon was fake, The Times finally snapped to attention. According to a story by Jim Windolf in the New York Observer, Marin and Styles editor Penelope Green called Jasper, who said that she’d never spoken to The Baffler and that the words she gave Marin were real slang. (Jasper later explained to Windolf that she lied to the Times again only because Marin told her that if her glossary were made up, Green might lose her job.) Green then rang the small magazine to determine whether it was the hoaxer. In response, The Baffler faxed over a letter in which it stood by its reporting. The note read, in part, “When The Newspaper of Record goes searching for the Next Big Thing and the Next Big Thing piddles on its leg, we think that’s funny.”

Marin, who went on to author a best seller about life as a bachelor and now works as a television writer, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. And Green doesn’t remember very much about the fallout from the incident. She is quite certain, however, that she never faced termination. Although Marin’s feature fits neatly into the “The New York Times Discovers [Insert Trend]” genre, Green maintains that it was done wryly. “All this has happened before, with the mass-marketing of disco, punk and hip-hop,” Marin wrote. “Now, with the grunging of America, it’s happening again. Pop will eat itself, the axiom goes.”

“His eyebrow is totally raised,” Green said. But, she acknowledged, a story like Marin’s isn’t easy to pull off at such a straightlaced institution. “We were trying to have a bit fun at The New York Times,” she said, “which is always a particularly awkward thing to do.” Green said that she wrote a two-pronged correction — Marin also refers to grunge as a five-letter word when it is in fact six — but it never ran in the paper or online.

In hindsight, Green finds the whole thing hysterical. “It was just fucking funny,” she said. When Windolf, an editor who now works with Green at the Times, reached her for comment about the hoax in 1993, she said, “Our piece was tongue-in-cheek, anyway, so I guess it works. But how irritating.” Naturally, “How irritating” became a Baffler slogan. “It sort of encapsulated our pose of pompous utter certainty,” former editor David Mulcahey wrote in an email. The two-word quote even landed on a subscription envelope that for years was inserted into every copy of the magazine.

If pulled today, Jasper’s prank probably would be perceived differently. After all, the act of deliberately misleading a news organization is a bit more, well, fraught in 2017 than it was a quarter century ago.

“There’s so much talk about ‘fake news,’” said Doug Pray, who delved into Jasper’s joke in Hype! “One of the most memorable scenes in the movie is about a woman just full-on lying to The New York Times. There’s so much anti-media backlash now that it’s not funny anymore.”

In 1992, however, it was a gleefully subversive good deed. “You just look at that shit and there’s no way people talk like that,” Jasper said of her grunge lexicon. “Maybe if you were a cartoon character you could talk like that. But humans don’t talk like that.” For a single illuminating moment at least, she was able to trick the monster threatening to eat her city alive. Jasper couldn’t protect her community alone, but she had to try.

After the prank, something strange happened. “Before too long you heard wannabe grunge rocker copycats walking down the streets of Seattle actually saying things like ‘swingin’ on the flippity-flop’ out loud, thinking they were using real slang that made them cool,” Art Chantry said. “And at that point, the lie became reality.” It was inevitable. Everybody wanted a piece of grunge, even if what they were grabbing was fake.

“It was this really weird, surreal experience to be in the center of something that is hitting a tipping point,” Jasper said. In the early ’90s, Seattle music was inescapable. And for good reason. Despite the title of the definitive documentary about it, the city’s rock scene was more than just hype. “There actually was intense, raw talent,” Pray said. And despite their alleged distrust of the establishment, the bands longed to be heard by the masses. As Cross pointed out, there’s a reason why Nirvana signed with Geffen Records and not an indie label before putting out Nevermind. “They all wanted success,” Cross said. “They had to play it as if they didn’t, though.”

House remembered turning on the radio one afternoon in those days and hearing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” playing on three stations at once. To him, Seattle in the early ’90s incubated America’s last truly distinct regional rock scene. (Let’s not forget the rise of trap music in the South and the post-punk revival in New York.) House doesn’t believe that it could be replicated, not with the internet around to speed up the discovery of new things. “It disallows that organic process,” he said.

Seattle music may remain ubiquitous — Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden still rule what’s left of rock radio — but the community was never the same after April 5, 1994, the day that Cobain took his own life. “He was the pin in the middle of that map,” House said. “It took all the wind out of so many people’s sails.”

In 1998, Jasper returned to Sub Pop. Since then, she’s moved her way up from senior product manager to executive vice president and now to CEO. “I’ve had so many jobs here,” she said. “I’ve loved all of them and I’m not uptight about titles.” Over the past two decades, Jasper has breathed life into a company that by the late ’90s was reportedly in deep financial trouble.

In September, Jasper attended a 21st-anniversary screening of Hype! at Seattle’s Egyptian Theatre. After the movie, Pray’s interview subjects spent a Q&A session lovingly sniping at one another. Before a man in the audience could finish emotionally explaining how listening to the music of the late Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell had saved his life, Mark Arm of Mudhoney grabbed the microphone. “It’s sad that you couldn’t save their lives,” he deadpanned. His response, which induced mostly silence and a few guilty laughs, was predictable. “If you know Mark, he has such a dry sense of humor,” Jasper said. “It was hilarious in this super-fucked-up way.” The world may continue to take the Seattle music phenomenon seriously, but Seattle musicians are still struggling to do the same.