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grunge, genre of rock music that flourished in the late 1980s and early ’90s and spawned a particular style of fashion. The term grunge was first used to describe the murky-guitar bands (most notably Nirvana and Pearl Jam) that emerged from Seattle in the late 1980 as a bridge between mainstream 1980s heavy metal–hard rock and postpunk alternative rock. Influenced by punk rock, by the hardcore-punk inheritors of its do-it-yourself ethic such as Hüsker Dü,...