If you are in your late twenties – and/or older – you surely had the chance to live first hand the grunge explosion, between early Nineties and mid Nineties. It started in the second half on the Eighties and, by 1993, the rock landscape was changed in a permanent way, thanks to bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney and hundreds of others.

It was – indeed – a live, pulsating, exciting season for music, made of new sounds, but also older ideas brought back to life with a different attitude and spirit (both the lessons of early hard rock and punk rock, for instance). But, as soon as Nirvana became huge, the music industry started hunting for the next Nirvana and signed loads of bands – from the best of the underground scene, to the fake ones trying to jump on the bandwagon.
And then things started to get ugly. In a few years grunge was just yesterday’s history: a few of the biggest bands managed to keep on releasing records for major labels, while the others had two options: die or get back to the underground.

Hype! is a documentary by Doug Pray, from 1996, tracing the story of the Seattle music scene from the mid Eighties and portrays the latest moments before the descending curve of the grunge phenomenon – with plenty of interviews with bands and people involved in the making of that scene. And many minor bands and characters too, besides the “obvious suspects” and heavyweights.

Pray says: “We were filming bands who had before then been completely ignored by the mainstream media. Part of that is a practical reality that we couldn’t immediately go up there and film Soundgarden. So we filmed the bands that I knew and that my friends knew. That was one thing that actually confused the heck out of our investors who were like, ‘Who’s Gas Huffer? Why did we just spend ten thousand feet of film filming a band named Gas Huffer?’. To me, I thought it was great. This is really cool, this is the real Seattle scene“.

Enjoy the whole documentary…