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Originally Posted by jetengine
In the mid to late '80s, around the time I was finishing up secondary and starting uni, there was a whole bunch of bands that were constantly being credited as 'Velvet Underground followers'. Now, that VU comparison might have been exaggerated, but I first read about Sonic Youth in the same context as The Jesus & Mary Chain, Jane's Addiction, The Pixies, Live Skull, Band of Susans, Sons of Freedom, The Plasterscene Replicas (whoa! that's a blast-from-the-past namedrop that just came out of nowhere!), The Spacemen 3, etc. I gradually started listening to all these groups around the same time. The only things I could hear and see that bound them together were sharp distorted notes, hair dangling in their eyes, army surplus jackets, and a penchant for sunglasses; still, these groups were often lumped together as some sort of genre or movement in the late '80s. Once grunge hit, the illusion of a genre seemed to disappear quickly. That's the way I remember it, from my Canadian perspective.
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Yeah, it was rather like that for me too, though it was definitely the mid and not late '80s. Living in Seattle, by the late '80s it was all about mixing the above with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, which resulted in what later got called grunge. I saw a whole lot of that before it "hit" and feel fortunate, because it really was a lot better then. I'll stop typing now before I devolve into another rant about why and how much I hate Pearl Jam...