(Credits: Far Out / Roger Woolman)
Mon 26 January 2026 4:00, UK
If there’s anyone alive with a reasonable degree of authority on being able to name someone who was a poster child for the entire grunge movement, then you’d probably want to speak to Dave Grohl about this.
Alongside Krist Novoselic, both are as close as one gets to having worked with someone who can rightfully be described as such in Kurt Cobain. With his good looks, charm and impeccable ability to write songs of a heavy nature while interlacing them with pop-inspired melodies, there arguably weren’t many greater advertisements for the grunge movement than the Nirvana frontman.
On their two final albums, Nirvana proved themselves to have grown much bigger than the scene had any right to be, and given how things had only started a few years before with the emergence of acts like Green River and Melvins, it was remarkable that an act from the same scene had managed to infiltrate the mainstream with such ease.
What had begun as just a small movement had grown far beyond its roots in Seattle, and Cobain was being used as the face of a rapidly growing movement, which was understandable considering both the success that the band had and also the fact that they’d started to demonstrate a more significant influence on the next generation of artists.
However, being a poster boy in the eyes of Grohl means something else, and quite often those who are chosen as the face of something have little musical talent there to back up their image and status. While he would go on to become a poster boy for rock music in the years after, when he formed Foo Fighters and continued in the ascendency, there were others, who in Grohl’s eyes, were far less deserving of this acclaim.
Cobain certainly had the talent there, as does Grohl, but during the early years of Foo Fighters’ existence, he was becoming tired of being lazily compared to a handful of other acts who were loosely attempting to latch onto the same style that both he and his previous band had tried to popularise, and who were doing them a great disservice in their half-assed rehashing of ideas.
During an interview with Esquire in 1997, he argued what it meant to simply be a poster boy, and then outlined two of the worst examples of people who have jumped onto the coattails of those who are more talented and somehow used that as a platform to bring themselves greater success.
“You know, Rick Springfield was a rock star, but really he was a poster boy who made music,” the impassioned Grohl argued. “Gavin Rossdale reminds me of that. There are probably eight or nine million Americans who worship Bush. If you really like Guns n’ Roses and John Cougar Mellencamp but now and again you get crazy, you listen to Bush.”
It’s understandable why he would find it so frustrating to be compared to something you don’t see any artistic merit in. Given how, during the late 1990s, Bush was a band who inexplicably garnered a fanbase that was almost at the same level as Grohl’s band but without any of the panache to justify their position, all comparisons between them, the legions of bands they were copying, and Foo Fighters, had Grohl rightfully seething at their sheer mindlessness.
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