Having lurked on the edge of popular culture for the past few years, grunge nostalgia is now rampant. The 20th anniversary of Nirvana releasing their landmark Nevermind album has ushered in deluxe reissues, rose-coloured reminiscences and praise for all things Seattle; a fresh sighting of flannel on the catwalk and the clock will officially have been turned back to 1991.

There is much to be still grateful for in grunge's sudden ascendance. As the last music movement to overwhelm the mainstream, as opposed to being an easily suborned genre, grunge initially marked a return to raw instrumental power and lyrics that trafficked in self-lacerating angst and alienation. You cannot overstate how bad popular music was in 1990, or how tenuous and ignored the underground was, and as Generation X's dismissal of the baby boomers, grunge changed that.

Nirvana's Kurt Cobain.

But absent from the current hosannas is an acknowledgment that grunge was an American phenomenon that had unforeseen repercussions here. The movement arrived in Australia quickly, with the four months between the release of Nevermind and Nirvana's lone Australian tour a period of revolutionary change (goodbye Phil Collins and A Groovy Kind of Love, hello Kurt Cobain and Lithium), but it lingered for many years.

Grunge was a fundamentalist uprising, an impassioned reaction against a decaying, artistically facile ruling order. Given the fervour it channelled, and its uncompromising attitude, it's not surprising that like other fundamentalist movements, grunge eventually went too far, turning basic tenets into a new kind of dogma. As the film critic Pauline Kael once put it, ''the breaking of one cliche invariably leads to the creation of another''.