title: Grunge

text: Following the tradition in the 1980s US punk subculture of amateur, fan-produced zines, members of the grunge scene also produced DIY publications which were "distributed at gigs or by mail order". The zines were typically photocopied and contained handwritten, "hand-colored pages", "typing errors and grammatical mistakes, misspellings and jumbled pagination", all proof of their amateur nature. "Backlash" was a zine that was published from 1987 to 1991 by Dawn Anderson, covering the "... dirtier, heavier, more underground and rock side of Seattle's music scene", including "... punk, metal, underground rock, grunge before it was called grunge and even some local hip-hop." "Grunge Gerl #1" was one early 1990s grunge zine, was written by and for riot grrrls in the Los Angeles area. It stated that "... we're girls, we're angry, we're powerful."


title: Grunge

text: In 1992, "Rolling Stone" music critic Michael Azerrad called "The Rocket" the Seattle music "scene's [most] respected commentator". "The Rocket" was a free newspaper about the Pacific Northwest music scene which was launched in 1979. Edited by Charles R. Cross, the paper only covered "fairly obscure alternative bands" in the local area, such as the Fartz and others. In the mid-1980s, the paper had stories on Slayer, Wild Dogs, Queensrÿche, and Metal Church. By 1988, the metal scene had faded, and "The Rocket" focus shifted to covering the pre-grunge local alternative rock bands. Dawn Anderson states that in 1988, long before any other publication took notice of them, Soundgarden and Nirvana were "Rocket" cover stars. In 1991, "The Rocket" expanded to include a Portland, Oregon edition.


title: Grunge

text: Grunge lit is an Australian literary genre of fictional or semi-autobiographical writing in the early 1990s about young adults living in an "inner cit[y]" "... world of disintegrating futures where the only relief from ... boredom was through a nihilistic pursuit of sex, violence, drugs and alcohol". Often the central characters are disfranchised, alienated, and lacking drive and determination beyond the desire to satisfy their basic needs. It was typically written by "new, young authors" who examined "gritty, dirty, real existences" of everyday characters. It has been described as both a sub-set of dirty realism and an offshoot of Generation X literature. Stuart Glover states that the term "grunge lit" takes the term "grunge" from the "late '80s and early '90s— ... Seattle [grunge] bands". Glover states that the term "grunge lit" was mainly a marketing term used by publishing companies; he states that most of the authors who have been categorized as "grunge lit" writers reject the label. The Australian fiction authors McGahan, McGregor and Tsiolkas criticized the "homogenizing effect" of conflating such a different group of writers. Tsiolkas called the "grunge lit" term a "media creation".


title: Grunge

text: Many all-female or woman-led bands are associated with grunge including L7, Lunachicks, Dickless, 7 Year Bitch, the Gits, Courtney Love's band Hole, and Babes in Toyland. "VH1" writer Dan Tucker described L7 as an "all-female grunge band [that] emanated from the fertile L.A. underground scene and [which] had strong ties with ... Black Flag and could match any male band in attitude and volume." Grunge was also closely linked with Riot Grrrl, an underground feminist punk movement.


title: Grunge

text: Riot Grrrl pioneer and Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna was the source for the name of Nirvana's 1991 breakthrough single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit", a reference to a deodorant marketed specifically to young women. Notable women instrumentalists include the bassists D'arcy Wretzky and Melissa Auf der Maur from the Smashing Pumpkins, and drummers Patty Schemel of Hole and Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland. The inclusion of women instrumentalists in grunge is notable, because professional women instrumentalists are uncommon in most rock genres.


title: Grunge

text: Bam Bam, formed in Seattle in 1983, was fronted by an African American woman named Tina Bell, breaking the norm of what was predominantly a White dominated scene. Bam Bam also included future Soundgarden and Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron. Kurt Cobain was a roadie for Bam Bam before he was famous and was also a fan of the band. Bell died in 2012. Observers have speculated that the lack of recognition in her lifetime as one of the progenitors of grunge music was due to sexism and racism.


title: Grunge

text: Women also played active non-musician roles in the underground grunge scene, such as riot grrrls who produced zines about grunge bands and indie record labels (e.g., "Grunge Gerl #1") and writer Dawn Anderson of the Seattle fanzine "Backlash" which supported many local bands before they achieved greater fame. Tina Casale was the co-founder of C/Z Records in the 1980s (along with Chris Hanzsek), a Seattle indie label that released the seminal grunge compilation "Deep Six" in 1986.


title: Grunge

text: Susan Silver was the first female manager of the Seattle music scene. She started her career in 1983 and managed several bands such as the U-Men, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and Screaming Trees. In 1991, "The Seattle Times" called Silver "the most powerful figure in local rock management". Silver was also an advisor for Nirvana. Kurt Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic consulted Silver for advice when they were not satisfied with Sub Pop's lack of promotion for their debut album, "Bleach". Silver looked at their contract with the label and told them they needed a lawyer. Silver then introduced them to agent Don Muller and music business attorney Alan Mintz, who started sending out Nirvana's demo tape to major labels looking for deals. The band ended up choosing DGC and the label released their breakthrough album "Nevermind" in 1991. When Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, Novoselic thanked Silver during his speech for "introducing them to the music industry properly".


title: Grunge

text: The term proto-grunge has been used to describe artists as having elements of grunge well before the genre appeared in the mid-late 1980s. Perhaps the earliest proto-grunge album is "Here Are the Sonics", released in 1965 by the Sonics. Neil Young's albums "Rust Never Sleeps" (1979) and "Ragged Glory" (1990) have been proclaimed examples of proto-grunge and grunge music. Additionally, he has been cited as an influence by Pearl Jam, which led to them backing Young for the "Mirror Ball" album, released in 1995. Other acts described as proto-grunge include Wipers and their album "Youth of America" (1981), Elvis Costello and his "Blood & Chocolate" album which Will Birch hailed as "6 or 8 years ahead of its time" (1986), and the Stooges and their album "Fun House" (1970).


title: Grunge

text: Grunge's sound partly resulted from Seattle's isolation from other music scenes. As Sub Pop's Jonathan Poneman noted, "Seattle was a perfect example of a secondary city with an active music scene that was completely ignored by an American media fixated on Los Angeles and New York [City]." Mark Arm claimed that the isolation meant, "this one corner of the map was being really inbred and ripping off each other's ideas". Seattle "... was a remote and provincial city" in the 1980s; Bruce Pavitt states that the city was "... very working class", a place of deprivation, and so the scene's "... whole aesthetic – work clothes, thriftstore truckers' hats, pawnshop guitars" was not just a style, it was done because Seattle "... was very poor." Indeed, when "... "Nevermind" reached number one in the U.S. charts, Cobain was living in a car."


title: Grunge

text: Bands began to mix metal and punk in the Seattle music scene around 1984, with much of the credit for this fusion going to the U-Men. However, some critics have noted that in spite of the U-Men's canonical place as original grunge progenitors, that their sound was less indebted to heavy metal and much more akin to However the idiosyncrasy of the band may have been the bigger inspiration, more than the aesthetics themselves. Soon Seattle had a growing and "varied music scene" and "diverse urban personality" expressed by local "post-punk garage bands". Grunge evolved from the local punk rock scene, and was inspired by bands such as the Fartz, the U-Men, 10 Minute Warning, the Accüsed, and the Fastbacks. Additionally, the slow, heavy, and sludgy style of the Melvins was a significant influence on the grunge sound. Roy Shuker states that grunge's success built on the "foundations ... laid throughout the 1980s by earlier alternative music scenes." Shuker states that music critics "... emphasized the perceived purity and authenticity of the Seattle scene.


title: Grunge

text: Outside the Pacific Northwest, a number of artists and music scenes influenced grunge. Alternative rock bands from the Northeastern United States, including Sonic Youth, Pixies, and Dinosaur Jr., are important influences on the genre. Through their patronage of Seattle bands, Sonic Youth "inadvertently nurtured" the grunge scene, and reinforced the fiercely independent attitudes of its musicians. Nirvana introduced into the Seattle scene the noise-inflected influences of Scratch Acid and the Butthole Surfers.


title: Grunge

text: Several Australian bands, including the Scientists, Cosmic Psychos and Feedtime, are cited as precursors to grunge, their music influencing the Seattle scene through the college radio broadcasts of Sub Pop founder Jonathan Poneman and members of Mudhoney on . The influence of Pixies on Nirvana was noted by Kurt Cobain, who commented in a "Rolling Stone" interview, "I connected with that band so heavily that I should have been in that band—or at least a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard." In August 1997, in an interview with "Guitar World", Dave Grohl said: "From Kurt, Krist [Novoselic] and I liking the Knack, Bay City Rollers, Beatles and Abba just as much as we liked Flipper and Black Flag ... You listen to any Pixies record and it's all over there. Or even Black Sabbath's "War Pigs"—it's there: the power of the dynamic. We just sort of abused it with pop songs and got sick with it."


title: Grunge

text: Aside from the genre's punk and alternative rock roots, many grunge bands were equally influenced by heavy metal of the early 1970s. Clinton Heylin, author of "Babylon's Burning: From Punk to Grunge", cited Black Sabbath as "perhaps the most ubiquitous pre-punk influence on the northwest scene". Black Sabbath played a role in shaping the grunge sound, through their own records and the records they inspired. Musicologist Bob Gulla asserted that Black Sabbath's sound "shows up in virtually all of grunge's most popular bands, including Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains". The influence of Led Zeppelin is also evident, particularly in the work of Soundgarden, whom "Q" magazine noted were "in thrall to '70s rock, but contemptuous of the genre's overt sexism and machismo". Jon Wiederhorn of "Guitar World" wrote: "So what exactly is grunge? ... Picture a supergroup made up of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Black Sabbath and the Stooges, and you're pretty close." Catherine Strong states that grunge's strongest metal influence was thrash metal, which had a tradition of "equality with the audience", based on the notion that "anyone could start a band" (a way of thinking also shared by US hardcore punk, which Strong also cites as an influence on grunge) which was also taken up by grunge bands. Strong states that grunge musicians were opposed to the then-popular "hair metal" bands.


title: Grunge

text: Strong states that "... sections of what was [US] hardcore became known as grunge." Seattle songwriter Jeff Stetson states that "[t]here is no real difference ... between Punk and Grunge." Like punk bands, grunge groups were "embraced as back-to-basics rock 'n' roll bands which reminded the public that the music was supposed to be raw and raunchy", and they were a response to "bloated and over-the-top ... progressive rock ... or "not seriou[s groups] like the hair bands of the '80s." One example of the influence of US hardcore on grunge is the impact that the Los Angeles hardcore punk band Black Flag had on grunge. Black Flag's 1984 record "My War", on which the band combined heavy metal with their traditional sound, made a strong impact in Seattle. Mudhoney's Steve Turner commented, "A lot of other people around the country hated the fact that Black Flag slowed down ... but up here it was really great ... we were like 'Yay!' They were weird and fucked-up sounding." Turner explained grunge's integration of metal influences, noting, "Hard rock and metal was never that much of an enemy of punk like it was for other scenes. Here, it was like, 'There's only twenty people here, you can't really find a group to hate.'" Charles R. Cross states that grunge was the "... culmination of twenty years of punk rock" development. Cross states that the bands most representing the grunge genre were Seattle bands Blood Circus, Tad, and Mudhoney and Sub Pop's Denver band the Fluid; he states that Nirvana, with its pop influences and blend of Sonic Youth and Cheap Trick, was lighter-sounding than bands like Blood Circus.


title: Grunge

text: Neil Young played a few concerts with Pearl Jam and recorded the album "Mirror Ball". This was grounded not only in his work with his band Crazy Horse and his regular use of distorted guitar—most notably on the album "Rust Never Sleeps"—but also his dress and persona. A similarly influential yet often overlooked album is "Neurotica" by Redd Kross, about which Jonathan Poneman said, ""Neurotica" was a life changer for me and for a lot of people in the Seattle music community."


title: Grunge

text: The context for the development of the Seattle grunge scene was a "...golden age of failure, a time when a swath of American youth embraced the ... vices of indolence and lack of motivation". The "... idlers of Generation X [were] trying to forestall the dread day of corporate enrollment" and embrace the "cult of the loser"; indeed Nirvana's 1991 song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" "... opens with Cobain intoning 'It's fun to lose.'"


title: Grunge

text: In 1985, the band Green River released their debut EP "Come on Down", which is cited by many as being the first grunge record. Another seminal release in the development of grunge was the "Deep Six" compilation, released by C/Z Records in 1986. The record featured multiple tracks by six bands: Green River, Soundgarden, Melvins, Malfunkshun, Skin Yard, and the U-Men. For many of them it was their first appearance on record. The artists had "a mostly heavy, aggressive sound that melded the slower tempos of heavy metal with the intensity of hardcore". The recording process was low-budget; each band was given four hours of studio time. As Jack Endino recalled, "People just said, 'Well, what kind of music is this? This isn't metal, it's not punk, What is it?' ... People went 'Eureka! These bands all have something in common.'" Later that year Bruce Pavitt released the "Sub Pop 100" compilation and Green River's "Dry As a Bone" EP as part of his new label, Sub Pop. An early Sub Pop catalog described the Green River EP as "ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation". Sub Pop's Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman, inspired by other regional music scenes in music history, worked to ensure that their label projected a "Seattle sound", reinforced by a similar style of production and album packaging. While music writer Michael Azerrad acknowledged that early grunge bands like Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and Tad had disparate sounds, he noted "to the objective observer, there were some distinct similarities."


title: Grunge

text: Early grunge concerts were sparsely attended (many by fewer than a dozen people) but Sub Pop photographer Charles Peterson's pictures helped create the impression that such concerts were major events. Mudhoney, which was formed by former members of Green River, served as the flagship band of Sub Pop during their entire time with the label and spearheaded the Seattle grunge movement. Other record labels in the Pacific Northwest that helped promote grunge included C/Z Records, Estrus Records, EMpTy Records and PopLlama Records.


title: Grunge

text: Grunge attracted media attention in the United Kingdom after Pavitt and Poneman asked journalist Everett True from the British magazine "Melody Maker" to write an article on the local music scene. This exposure helped to make grunge known outside of the local area during the late 1980s and drew more people to local shows. The appeal of grunge to the music press was that it "promised the return to a notion of a regional, authorial vision for American rock". Grunge's popularity in the underground music scene was such that bands began to move to Seattle and approximate the look and sound of the original grunge bands. Mudhoney's Steve Turner said, "It was really bad. Pretend bands were popping up here, things weren't coming from where we were coming from." As a reaction, many grunge bands diversified their sound, with Nirvana and Tad in particular creating more melodic songs. Dawn Anderson of the Seattle fanzine "Backlash" recalled that by 1990 many locals had tired of the hype surrounding the Seattle scene and hoped that media exposure had dissipated.


title: Grunge

text: Chris Dubrow from "The Guardian" states that in the late 1980s, Australia's "sticky-floored ... alternative pub scene" in seedy inner-city areas produced grunge bands with "raw and awkward energy" such as the Scientists, X, Beasts of Bourbon, feedtime, Cosmic Psychos and Lubricated Goat. Dubrow said "Cobain ... admitted the Australian wave was a big influence" on his music. Everett True states that "[t]here's more of an argument to be had for grunge beginning in Australia with the Scientists and their scrawny punk ilk."


title: Grunge

text: Grunge bands had made inroads to the musical mainstream in the late 1980s. Soundgarden was the first grunge band to sign to a major label when they joined the roster of A&M Records in 1989. Soundgarden, along with other major label signings Alice in Chains and Screaming Trees, performed "okay" with their initial major label releases, according to Jack Endino. Nirvana, originally from Aberdeen, Washington, was also courted by major labels, while releasing its first album "Bleach" in 1989. Nirvana got signed by Geffen Records in 1990.


title: Grunge

text: Alice in Chains signed with Columbia Records in 1989, and their debut album, "Facelift", was released on August 21, 1990. The album's second single, "Man in the Box", was released in January 1991, spent 20 weeks on the Top 20 of Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart and its music video received heavy rotation on MTV. "Facelift" became the first album from the grunge movement to be certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on September 11, 1991, for selling over 500,000 copies.


title: Grunge

text: In September 1991, Nirvana released its major label debut, "Nevermind". The album was at best hoped to be a minor success on par with Sonic Youth's "Goo", which Geffen had released a year earlier. It was the release of the album's first single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that "marked the instigation of the grunge music phenomenon". Due to constant airplay of the song's music video on MTV, "Nevermind" was selling 400,000 copies a week by Christmas 1991, and was certified gold on November 27, 1991. In January 1992, "Nevermind" replaced pop superstar Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" at number one on the "Billboard" 200. "Nevermind" was certified diamond by the RIAA in 1999.


title: Grunge

text: The success of "Nevermind" surprised the music industry. "Nevermind" not only popularized grunge, but also established "the cultural and commercial viability of alternative rock in general." Michael Azerrad asserted that "Nevermind" symbolized "a sea-change in rock music" in which the glam metal that had dominated rock music at that time fell out of favor in the face of music that was perceived as authentic and culturally relevant. Grunge made it possible for genres thought to be of a niche audience, no matter how radical, to prove their marketability and be co-opted by the mainstream, cementing the formation of an individualist, fragmented culture. Other grunge bands subsequently replicated Nirvana's success. Pearl Jam, which featured former Mother Love Bone members Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, had released its debut album "Ten" in August 1991, a month before "Nevermind", but album sales only picked up the following year. By the second half of 1992 "Ten" had become a breakthrough success, being certified gold and reaching number two on the "Billboard" charts. "Ten" by Pearl Jam was certified 13× platinum by the RIAA.


title: Grunge

text: The band Soundgarden's album "Badmotorfinger" and the band Alice in Chains' album "Dirt", along with the band Temple of the Dog's self-titled album, a collaboration featuring members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, were also among the 100 top selling albums of 1992. The popular breakthrough of these grunge bands prompted "Rolling Stone" to nickname Seattle "the new Liverpool". Major record labels signed most of the prominent grunge bands in Seattle, while a second influx of bands moved to the city in hopes of success. The grunge scene was the backdrop in the 1992 Cameron Crowe film "Singles". There were several small roles, performances, and cameos in the film by popular Seattle grunge bands including Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains. Filmed in and around Seattle in 1991, the film was not released until 1992 during the height of grunge popularity.


title: Grunge

text: The popularity of grunge resulted in a large interest in the Seattle music scene's perceived cultural traits. While the Seattle music scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s in actuality consisted of various styles and genres of music, its representation in the media "served to depict Seattle as a music 'community' in which the focus was upon the ongoing exploration of one musical idiom, namely grunge". The fashion industry marketed "grunge fashion" to consumers, charging premium prices for items such as knit ski hats and plaid shirts. Critics asserted that advertising was co-opting elements of grunge and turning it into a fad. "Entertainment Weekly" commented in a 1993 article, "There hasn't been this kind of exploitation of a subculture since the media discovered hippies in the '60s". Marketers used the "grunge" concept to sell grunge air freshener, grunge hair gel and even CDs of "easy-listening music" called "grunge light". "The New York Times" compared the "grunging of America" to the mass-marketing of punk rock, disco, and hip hop in previous years. Ironically the "New York Times" was tricked into printing a fake list of slang terms that were supposedly used in the grunge scene; often referred to as the grunge speak hoax. This media hype surrounding grunge was documented in the 1996 documentary "Hype!". As mass media began to use the term "grunge" in any news story about the key bands, Seattle scene members began to refer to the term as "the G-word".


title: Grunge

text: A backlash against grunge began to develop in Seattle; in late 1992, Jonathan Poneman said that in the city, "All things grunge are treated with the utmost cynicism and amusement [. . .] Because the whole thing is a fabricated movement and always has been." Grunge and grunge bands received criticism from musicians such as Blur's Damon Albarn, who was quoted saying "fuck grunge" and "The Smashing Pumpkins can kiss my fucking ass" while performing onstage. Many grunge artists were uncomfortable with their success and the resulting attention it brought. Nirvana's Kurt Cobain told Michael Azerrad, "Famous is the last thing I wanted to be." Pearl Jam also felt the burden of success, with much of the attention falling on frontman Eddie Vedder.


title: Grunge

text: Nirvana's follow-up album "In Utero" (1993) featured an intentionally abrasive album that Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic described as a "wild aggressive sound, a true alternative record". Nevertheless, upon its release in September 1993, "In Utero" topped the "Billboard" charts. In 1996, "In Utero" was certified 5× platinum by the RIAA. Pearl Jam also continued to perform well commercially with its second album, "Vs." (1993). The album sold a record 950,378 copies in its first week of release, topped the "Billboard" charts, and outperformed all other entries in the top ten that week combined. In 1993, the grunge band Candlebox released their self-titled album, which was certified by the RIAA. In February 1994, Alice in Chains' EP, "Jar of Flies" peaked at number 1 on the "Billboard" 200 album chart. Soundgarden's album "Superunknown", which was also released in 1994, peaked at number 1 on the "Billboard" 200 chart, and was certified 5× platinum by the RIAA. In 1995, Alice in Chains' self-titled album became their second number 1 album on the "Billboard" 200, and was certified 2× platinum.


title: Grunge

text: At the height of grunge's commercial success in the early 1990s, the commercial success of grunge put record labels on a nationwide search for undiscovered talent to promote. This included San Diego, California-based Stone Temple Pilots, Texas-based Tripping Daisy and Toadies, Paw, Chicago-based Veruca Salt, and Australian band Silverchair, bands whose early work continues to be identified broadly (if not in Seattle itself) as "grunge". In 2014, "Paste" ranked Veruca Salt's "All Hail Me" #39 and Silverchair's "Tomorrow" #45 on their list of the 50 best grunge songs of all time. "Loudwire" named Stone Temple Pilots one of the ten best grunge bands of all time. Grunge bands outside of the United States emerged in several countries. In Canada, Eric's Trip, the first Canadian band signed by the Sub Pop label, has been classified as grunge and Nickelback's debut album was considered to be grunge. Silverchair achieved mainstream success in the 1990s; the band's song "Tomorrow" went to number 22 on the Radio Songs chart in September 1995 and the band's debut album "Frogstomp", released in June 1995, was certified 2× platinum by the RIAA in February 1996.


title: Grunge

text: During this period, grunge bands that were not from Seattle were often panned by critics, who accused them of being bandwagon-jumpers. Grunge band Stone Temple Pilots in particular fell victim to this. In a January 1994 "Rolling Stone" poll, Stone Temple Pilots was simultaneously voted "Best New Band" by "Rolling Stone" readers and "Worst New Band" by the magazine's music critics, highlighting the disparity between critics and fans. Stone Temple Pilots became very popular; their album "Core" was certified 8× platinum by RIAA and their album "Purple" was certified 6× platinum by the RIAA. The British grunge band Bush released their debut album "Sixteen Stone" in 1994. In a review of their second album "Razorblade Suitcase", "Rolling Stone" criticized the album and called Bush "the most successful and shameless mimics of Nirvana's music". In the book "Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota", Chuck Klosterman wrote, "Bush was a good band who just happened to signal the beginning of the end; ultimately, they would become the grunge Warrant".


title: Grunge

text: A number of factors contributed to grunge's decline in prominence. Critics and historians do not agree on the exact point that grunge ended. Catherine Strong states that "... at the end of 1993 ... [,] grunge had become unstable, and was entering the first stages of being killed off"; she points out that the "... scene had become so successful" and widely known that "imitators had begun to enter the field". "Paste" magazine states by 1994, grunge "... was fading fast", with "... Pearl Jam retreating from the spotlight as fast as they could; Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots and hordes of others were battling horrid drug addictions and struggling for survival." In "Grunge: Seattle", Justin Henderson states that the "downward spiral" began in mid-1994, as the influx of major label money into the scene changed the culture and it had "nowhere to go but down"; he states the death of Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff on June 16, 1994, from a heroin overdose, was "another nail in grunge's coffin."


title: Grunge

text: In Jason Heller's 2013 article "Did grunge really matter?", in "The A.V. Club", he stated that Nirvana's "In Utero" (September 1993) was "grunge's death knell. As soon as Cobain grumbled, 'Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I'm bored and old,' it was all over." Heller states that after Cobain's death in 1994, the "hypocrisy" in the grunge of the time "became ... glaring" and "idealism became embarrassing", with the result being that "grunge became the new [mainstream] Aerosmith". Heller states that "grunge became an evolutionary dead end", because "it stood for nothing and was built on nothing, and that ethos of negation was all it was about."


title: Grunge

text: During the mid-1990s many grunge bands broke up or became less visible. On April 8, 1994, Kurt Cobain was found dead in his Seattle home from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound; Nirvana summarily disbanded. After Cobain's death, Bruce Hardy wrote in "Time" magazine that he was "the John Lennon of the swinging Northwest", that he had struggled with a heroin addiction, and claimed that during the last weeks of his life there had been rumors in the music industry that Cobain had suffered a drug overdose and that Nirvana was breaking up. Cobain's suicide "served as a catalyst for grunge's ... demise", because it "... deflated the energy from grunge and provided the opening for saccharine and corporate-formulated music to regain" its lost footing."


title: Grunge

text: That same year Pearl Jam canceled its summer tour in protest of ticket vendor Ticketmaster's unfair business practices. Pearl Jam then began a boycott of the company; however, Pearl Jam's initiative to play only at non-Ticketmaster venues effectively, with a few exceptions, prevented the band from playing shows in the United States for the next three years. In 1996, Alice in Chains gave their final performances with their ailing and estranged lead singer, Layne Staley, who subsequently died from an overdose of cocaine and heroin in 2002. In 1996, Soundgarden and Screaming Trees released their final studio albums of the 1990s, "Down on the Upside" and "Dust", respectively. Strong states that Roy Shuker and Stout have written that the "... end of grunge" can be seen as being "... as late as the breakup of Soundgarden in 1997".


title: Grunge

text: During the latter half of the 1990s, grunge was supplanted by post-grunge, which remained commercially viable into the start of the 21st century. Post-grunge "... transformed the thick guitar sounds and candid lyrical themes of the Seattle bands into an accessible, often uplifting mainstream aesthetic". These artists were seen as lacking the underground roots of grunge and were largely influenced by what grunge had become, namely "a wildly popular form of inward-looking, serious-minded hard rock". was a more commercially viable genre that tempered the distorted guitars of grunge with polished, radio-ready production. When grunge became a mainstream genre, major labels started signing bands that sounded similar to these bands' sonic identities. Bands labeled as that emerged when grunge was mainstream such as Bush, Candlebox and Collective Soul all are noted for emulating the sound of the bands that launched grunge into the mainstream.


title: Grunge

text: In 1995, "SPIN" writer Charles Aaron stated that with grunge "spent", pop punk in a slump, Britpop a "giddy memory" and album-oriented rock over, the music industry turned to "Corporate[-produced] Alternative", which he calls "soundalike fake grunge" or "scrunge". Bands Aaron lists as "scrunge" groups include: Better Than Ezra; Bush; Collective Soul; Garbage; Hootie & the Blowfish; Hum; Silverchair; Sponge; Tripping Daisy; Jennifer Trynin and Weezer; Aaron includes the Foo Fighters in his list, but states that Dave Grohl avoided becoming a "scrunge fall gu[y]" by combining 1980s hardcore punk with 1970s arena trash music in his post-Nirvana group. Bands described as grunge like Bush and Candlebox also have been largely categorized as These two bands became popular after 1992. Other bands categorized as post-grunge that emerged when Bush and Candlebox became popular include Collective Soul and Live.


title: Grunge

text: Conversely, another rock genre, Britpop, emerged in part as a reaction against the dominance of grunge in the United Kingdom. In contrast to the dourness of grunge, Britpop was defined by "youthful exuberance and desire for recognition". The leading Britpop bands, "Blur and Oasis existed as reactionary forces to [grunge's] eternal downcast glare." Britpop artists' new approach was inspired by Blur's tour of the United States in the spring of 1992. Justine Frischmann, formerly of Suede and leader of Elastica (and at the time in a relationship with Damon Albarn) explained, "Damon and I felt like we were in the thick of it at that point ... it occurred to us that Nirvana were out there, and people were very interested in American music, and there should be some sort of manifesto for the return of Britishness."


title: Grunge

text: Britpop artists were vocal about their disdain for grunge. In a 1993 "NME" interview, Damon Albarn of Britpop band Blur agreed with interviewer John Harris' assertion that Blur was an "anti-grunge band", and said, "Well, that's good. If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm getting rid of grunge" (ironically Kurt Cobain once cited Blur as his favorite band). Noel Gallagher of Oasis, while a fan of Nirvana, wrote music that refuted the pessimistic nature of grunge. Gallagher noted in 2006 that the 1994 Oasis single "Live Forever" "was written in the middle of grunge and all that, and I remember Nirvana had a tune called 'I Hate Myself and I Want to Die,' and I was like ... 'Well, I'm not fucking having that.' As much as I fucking like him [Cobain] and all that shit, I'm not having that. I can't have people like that coming over here, on smack [heroin], fucking saying that they hate themselves and they wanna die. That's fucking rubbish." In an interview during Pinkpop Festival 2000, Oasis' Liam Gallagher attacked Pearl Jam, who were also performing, criticizing their depressing lyrical content and writing them off as "rubbish".


title: Grunge

text: Following the end of the original grunge movement, post-grunge increased in popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s with newer bands such as Creed, Nickelback, 3 Doors Down and Puddle of Mudd. Other bands include Foo Fighters, Staind and Matchbox Twenty. These post-grunge artists were criticized for their commercialized sound as well as their "worldview built around the comforts of community and romantic relationships", as opposed to grunge's lyrical exploration of "troubling issues such as suicide, societal hypocrisy and drug addiction." Adam Steininger criticized post-grunge bands' "diluted ditties filled with watered-down lyrics, all seemingly revolving around suffering through romance." Criticizing many bands that have been described as post-grunge, Steininger criticized Candlebox for their "pop-filled" sound, focus on "love lyrics, and writing songs without "versatility and creativity; Three Days Grace for their "diluted" and "radio-friendly music"; 3 Doors Down for focusing on "... snagging hit singles instead of creating quality albums"; Finger Eleven for going in a "pop rock" direction; Bush's "random phrasings of nonsense"; Live's "pseudo pop poetry" that "strangled the essence of grunge", Puddle of Mudd's "watered down post-grunge sound"; Lifehouse, for tearing "... down ... grunge's sound and groundbreaking structure to appeal more to the masses"; and Nickelback, which he calls the "featherweight ... punching bags of post-grunge" whose music is "dull as dishwater".


title: Grunge

text: Many major grunge bands continued recording and touring with success in the 2000s and 2010s. Perhaps the most notable grunge act of the 21st century has been Pearl Jam. In 2006 "Rolling Stone" writer Brian Hiatt described Pearl Jam as having "spent much of the past decade deliberately tearing apart their own fame", he noted the band developed a loyal concert following akin to that of the Grateful Dead. They saw a return to wide commercial success with 2006's "Pearl Jam", 2009's "Backspacer" and 2013's "Lightning Bolt". Alice In Chains reformed for a handful of reunion dates in 2005 with several different vocalists replacing Layne Staley. Eventually settling on William DuVall as Staley's replacement, in 2009 they released "Black Gives Way to Blue," their first record in 14 years. The band's 2013 release, "The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here", reached number 2 on the "Billboard" 200. Soundgarden reformed in 2010 and released their album "King Animal" two years later which reached the top five of the national albums charts in Denmark, New Zealand, and the United States. Matt Cameron and Ben Shepherd joined Alain Johannes (Queens of the Stone Age, Eleven), Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age) and Dimitri Coats (Off!) to form side project Ten Commandos in 2016.


title: Grunge

text: Despite Kurt Cobain's death, the remaining members of Nirvana have continued to be successful posthumously. Due to the high sales for Kurt Cobain's "Journals" and the band's best-of compilation "Nirvana" upon their releases in 2002, "The New York Times" argued Nirvana "are having more success now than at any point since Mr. Cobain's suicide in 1994." This trend has continued through the century's second decade, with the reissuing of the band's discography and release of the authorized documentary "". In 2012, the surviving members of Nirvana re-united, with Paul McCartney in place of Cobain, to record a track for the soundtrack Dave Grohl's documentary "Sound City" titled "Cut Me Some Slack".


title: Grunge

text: One of the most successful rock groups of the 21st Century, Queens of the Stone Age, has featured major contributions from various grunge musicians. Josh Homme had briefly played in Screaming Trees with off-and-on QOTSA member Mark Lanegan, before forming the group. Nirvana's Dave Grohl and Eleven's Alain Johannes have also provided notable contributions. Homme and Grohl joined with Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones to form the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures in 2009. Johannes also performed with the group as a touring member.


title: Grunge

text: In the early 2000s, grunge would make multiple regionally based resurgences, albeit minor ones. In 2005, "The Seattle Times" made note of groups returning in the Seattle scene. Similarly, "The Guardian" reported of grunge-influenced groups from Yorkshire, including Dinosaur Pile-Up, Pulled Apart by Horses, and Wonderswan. Also, in 2003, the "New York Times" noted a resurgence in grunge fashion.


title: Grunge

text: The 2010s have birthed a number of bands influenced by grunge. Unlike their forebears, some of these acts ascribe the label to themselves willingly. Many acts have been noted for affiliating and/or collaborating with prominent figures from the original alternative rock era. Steve Albini has produced for or worked with members of bands such as Bully, Vomitface, and Shannon Wright, while Emma Ruth Rundle of Marriages has toured with Buzz Osborne of the Melvins. Other notable acts that have been labelled as grunge or as heavily influenced by the grunge era, include Courtney Barnett, Wolf Alice, Yuck, Speedy Ortiz, the Kut, Mitski, , False Advertising, Slothrust, Baby in Vain, Big Thief, Torres, Lullwater, and Red Sun Rising.


title: Grunge

text: Media outlets also began referring to a revival of the grunge sound around the mid-2010s, with the label being given to bands such as Title Fight, InCrest, Fangclub, Code Orange, My Ticket Home, Citizen, Milk Teeth and Muskets, some of which have been described as merging the genre with emo.


title: Grunge

text: In 2011, music critic Dave Whitaker wrote, "every generation since the beginning of recorded music has introduced a game-changing genre", from swing music in the 1930s, rock and roll in the 1950s, punk rock in the 1970s, and then grunge in the 1990s. However, he states "grunge was the last American musical revolution", as no post-grunge generation has introduced a new genre which radically changed the music scene. He states that the "digital revolution" (online music, file sharing, etc.) has meant that there has not been a "... generation-defining genre since grunge", because, for "one genre to so completely saturate the market requires ... a music industry with immense control over the market". In 2016, Rob Zombie stated that grunge caused the death of the "rock star"; he states that unlike previous stars like "Alice Cooper and Gene Simmons and Elton John", who "might as well have been from another fuckin' planet", with grunge the attitude was "[we] need all our rock stars to look just like us."


title: Grunge

text: Bob Batchelor states that the indie record mindset and values in Seattle which provided guidance for the development and emergence of Nirvana and Pearl Jam "... conflicted with the major recording label desire to sell millions of CDs." Batchelor also states that despite grunge musicians' discomfort with the major labels' commercial goals, and the resistance by some key bands to do the promotional activities required by the labels, including music videos, MTV's video programs "... played an instrumental role in making [grunge]" become "... mainstream, since many music fans received their first exposure" on MTV, rather than on local or "niche radio." Gil Troy states that the "... grunge rebellion, like most others" in America's "consumerist" culture, ended up being "commodified, mass-produced, ritualized, and thus sanitized" by major corporations.


title: Grunge

text: In 2011, John Calvert stated that "timing" is the reason why a grunge revival did not happen; he says that the cultural mood of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which inspired the movement, were no longer present. Seattle songwriter Jeff Stetson states that people from the 2010s who are listening to grunge should learn about the "... context and history of how it all came to be" and "... respect for what a truly amazing thing it was that happened here [in Seattle,] because you probably won't see anything like it again." "Paste" magazine's Michael Danaher states that the grunge "... movement changed the course of rock 'n' roll, bringing ... tales of abuse and depression" and socially conscious issues" into pop culture.


title: Grunge

text: Calvert stated that Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has an "iconic place in history" as it had "generation-defining resonance" for young people from its era"; he states that "no other band ... made the urge to self-destruct ... as listenable", with "authentic" pain and "disaffection". Calvert also calls the record "chart history's most ferocious, dark and intense" music since early punk rock, and he says it was "heavy when heavy was needed" by young people of that era, "jarr[ing] young America awake" and giving them something to "cling to" in difficult times. A 2017 book stated that grunge "..forever changed the identity of rock music in a way analogous to punk"; moreover, grunge added "introspective" lyrics about "existential authenticity" and "what it means to be true to oneself". Grunge's Kurt Cobain has been called the "voice of Generation X", playing the same role for this demographic as Bob Dylan played for 1960s youth and that John Lennon played for the 1970s generation. Bob Batchelor states that Nirvana was "as important as Elvis or the Beatles."


title: Grunge

text: In 2008, Darragh McManus of "The Guardian" states that grunge was not simply a young person's trend or a musical fad; she states that grunge synthesized the key philosophies of the modern era, from "Feminism, liberalism, irony, apathy, cynicism/idealism ..., anti-authoritarianism, [to] wry post-modernism". McManus states that grunge dealt with serious, "weighty" topics, which does not occur often in popular music. McManus stated that for Generation X, grunge was not just music, it was a key cultural influence. Marlen Komar states that Nirvana's success popularized "non-heterosexist", non-binary ways of thinking about "gender and sexuality", emphasized how men and women were alike and promoted progressive political thinking.


title: Grunge

text: When asked about the '90s grunge movement in 2021, Mark Lanegan commented, "It’s not something that was contrived or cooked up around the campfire somewhere. It just happened organically. It’s hard for me to comment, because there’s always great new music and there probably always will be – as long as the sun keeps shining."


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market. It was launched in 2011 by its American founder Ross Ulbricht under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts". As part of the dark web, Silk Road operated as a hidden service on the Tor network, allowing users to buy and sell products and services between each other anonymously. All transactions were conducted with bitcoin, a cryptocurrency which aided in protecting user identities. The website was known for its illegal drug marketplace, among other illegal and legal product listings.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: In October 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down Silk Road and arrested Ulbricht. Silk Road 2.0 came online the next month, run by former site administrators, but was shut down the following year as part of Operation Onymous. In 2015, Ulbricht was convicted in federal court for multiple charges related to operating Silk Road and was given two life sentences without possibility of parole.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: The website was launched in February 2011; development had begun six months prior. The name "Silk Road" comes from a historical network of trade routes started during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) between Europe, India, China, and many other countries on the Afro-Eurasian landmass. Silk Road was operated by the pseudonymous "Dread Pirate Roberts" (named after the fictional character from "The Princess Bride"), who was known for espousing libertarian ideals and criticizing regulation. Two other individuals were also closely involved in the site's growth and success, known as Variety Jones and Smedley.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: In June 2011, Gawker published an article about the site which led to an increase in notoriety and website traffic. U.S. Senator Charles Schumer asked federal law enforcement authorities to shut it down, including the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Department of Justice.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: In May 2013, Silk Road was taken down for a short period of time by a sustained DDoS attack. On 23 June 2013, it was first reported that the DEA seized 11.02 bitcoins, then worth a total of $814, which the media suspected was a result of a Silk Road honeypot sting. The FBI has claimed that the real IP address of the Silk Road server was found via data leaked directly from the site's CAPTCHA and it was located in Reykjavík, Iceland. IT Security Experts have doubted the FBI's claims because technical evidence suggests that no misconfiguration that could cause the specific leak was present at the time.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: Henry Farrell, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, analyzed Silk Road in an essay for Aeon in 2015. He noted that Ulbricht created the marketplace to function without government oversight but found it difficult to verify anonymous transactions. To sustain a steady stream of revenue, he started increasing oversight to ensure low transaction costs. To do this, he added measures to ensure trustworthiness with implementation of an automated escrow payment system and automated review system.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: Due, in part, to off-duty research conducted by IRS criminal investigator Gary Alford, Ross Ulbricht was alleged by the FBI to be the founder and owner of Silk Road and the person behind the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts" (DPR). He was arrested on 2 October 2013 in San Francisco in Glen Park Library, a branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Ulbricht was indicted on charges of money laundering, computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic narcotics, and attempting to have six people killed. Prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht paid $730,000 to others to commit the murders, although none of the murders actually occurred. Ulbricht ultimately was not prosecuted for any of the alleged murder attempts.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: The FBI initially seized 26,000 bitcoins from accounts on Silk Road, worth approximately $3.6 million at the time. An FBI spokesperson said that the agency would hold the bitcoins until Ulbricht's trial finished, after which the bitcoins would be liquidated. In October 2013, the FBI reported that it had seized 144,000 bitcoins, worth $28.5 million, and that the bitcoins belonged to Ulbricht. On 27 June 2014, the U.S. Marshals Service sold 29,657 bitcoins in 10 blocks in an online auction, estimated to be worth $18 million at contemporary rates and only about a quarter of the seized bitcoins. Another 144,342 bitcoins were kept which had been found on Ulbricht's computer, roughly $87 million. Tim Draper bought the bitcoins at the auction with an estimated worth of $17 million, to lend them to a bitcoin start-up called Vaurum which is working in developing economies of emerging markets.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: Ulbricht's trial began on 13 January 2015 in federal court in Manhattan. At the start of the trial, Ulbricht admitted to founding the Silk Road website, but claimed to have transferred control of the site to other people soon after he founded it. Ulbricht's lawyers contended that Dread Pirate Roberts was really Mark Karpelès, and that Karpelès set up Ulbricht as a fall guy. However, Judge Katherine B. Forrest ruled that any speculative statements regarding whether Karpelès or anyone else ran Silk Road would not be allowed, and statements already made would be stricken from the record.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: In the second week of the trial, prosecutors presented documents and chat logs from Ulbricht's computer that, they said, demonstrated how Ulbricht had administered the site for many months, which contradicted the defense's claim that Ulbricht had relinquished control of Silk Road. Ulbricht's attorney suggested that the documents and chat logs were planted there by way of BitTorrent, which was running on Ulbricht's computer at the time of his arrest.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: On 4 February 2015, the jury convicted Ulbricht of seven charges, including charges of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and computer hacking. He faced 30 years to life in prison. The government also accused Ulbricht of paying for the murders of at least five people, but there is no evidence that the murders were actually carried out, and the accusations never became formal charges against Ulbricht.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: During the trial, Judge Forrest received death threats. Users of an underground site called The Hidden Wiki posted her personal information there, including her address and Social Security number. Ulbricht's lawyer Joshua Dratel said that he and his client "obviously, and as strongly as possible, condemn" the anonymous postings against the judge. "They do not in any way have anything to do with Ross Ulbricht or anyone associated with him or reflect his views or those of anyone associated with him", Dratel said.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: In late March 2015, a criminal complaint issued by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California led to the arrest of two former federal agents who had worked undercover in the Baltimore Silk Road investigation of Ulbricht, former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Carl Mark Force IV and Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges. The agents are alleged to have kept funds that Ulbricht transferred to them in exchange for purported information about the investigation. The agents were charged with wire fraud and money laundering. In late November 2016, Ulbricht's lawyers brought forward a case on a third DEA agent, who they claim was leaking information about the investigation and tampered with evidence to omit chat logs showing conversations with him.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: In a letter to Judge Forrest before his sentencing, Ulbricht stated that his actions through Silk Road were committed through libertarian idealism and that "Silk Road was supposed to be about giving people the freedom to make their own choices" and admitted that he made a "terrible mistake" that "ruined his life". On 29 May 2015, Ulbricht was given five sentences to be served concurrently, including two of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He was also ordered to forfeit $183 million. Ulbricht's lawyer Joshua Dratel said that he would appeal the sentencing and the original guilty verdict. On 31 May 2017, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied Ulbricht's appeal, and affirmed the judgment of conviction and life sentence, in a written opinion authored by Gerard E. Lynch, United States circuit judge. The Supreme Court declined to review the case.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: In February 2013, an Australian cocaine and MDMA ("ecstasy") dealer became the first person to be convicted of crimes directly related to Silk Road, after authorities intercepted drugs that he was importing through the mail, searched his premises, and discovered his Silk Road alias in an image file on his personal computer. Australian police and the DEA have targeted Silk Road users and made arrests, albeit with limited success at reaching convictions. In December 2013, a New Zealand man was sentenced to two years and four months in jail after being convicted of importing 15 grams of methamphetamine that he had bought on Silk Road.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: 23 year-old Dutch drug dealer Cornelis Jan "Maikel" Slomp pled guilty to large-scale selling of drugs through the Silk Road website, and was sentenced in Chicago to 10 years in prison on 29 May 2015 with his attorney, Paul Petruzzi, present. Dealer Steven Sadler was sentenced to five years in prison. There have been over 130 other arrests connected with Silk Road, although some of these arrests may not be directly related to Silk Road, and may not be public information due to legal reasons.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: On 3 November 2020, after years of inactivity, observers of the bitcoin blockchain detected that two transactions totaling 69,370 bitcoin and bitcoin cash, worth approximately $1 billion in total at the time of transfer, had been made from a bitcoin address associated with the Silk Road. At the time of transfer, it was worth 58 times its value in 2015. It was subsequently revealed that the transfer had been made by the United States government in a civil forfeiture action. According to a press release by the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Northern District of California, the bitcoin wallet belonged to an "Individual X" who had originally acquired the bitcoins by hacking the Silk Road.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: In March 2013, the site had 10,000 products for sale by vendors, 70% of which were drugs. Drugs were grouped under the headings stimulants, psychedelics, prescription, precursors, other, opioids, ecstasy, dissociatives, and steroids/PEDs. Fake driver's licenses were also offered for sale. The site's terms of service prohibited the sale of certain items. When the Silk Road marketplace first began, the creator and administrators instituted terms of service that prohibited the sale of anything whose purpose was to "harm or defraud". This included child pornography, stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of any type; other darknet markets such as Black Market Reloaded gained user notoriety because they were not as restrictive on these items as the Silk Road incarnations were. There were also legal goods and services for sale, such as apparel, art, books, cigarettes, erotica, jewellery, and writing services. A sister site, called "The Armoury", sold weapons (primarily firearms) during 2012, but was shut down, due to a lack of demand.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: Buyers were able to leave reviews of sellers' products on the site and in an associated forum, where crowdsourcing provided information about the best sellers and worst scammers. Most products were delivered through the mail, with the site's seller's guide instructing sellers how to vacuum-seal their products to escape detection.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: Silk Road provided goods and services to over 100,000 buyers. Based on data from 3 February 2012 to 24 July 2012, an estimated $15 million in transactions were made annually on Silk Road. Twelve months later, Nicolas Christin, the study's author, said in an interview that a major increase in volume to "somewhere between $30 million and $45 million" would not surprise him. Initially there were a limited number of new seller accounts available; new sellers had to purchase an account in an auction. Later, a fixed fee was charged for each new seller account. Buyers and sellers conducted all transactions with bitcoins (BTC), a cryptocurrency that provides a certain degree of anonymity. Silk Road held buyers' bitcoins in escrow until the order had been received and a hedging mechanism allowed sellers to opt for the value of bitcoins held in escrow to be fixed to their value in US$ at the time of the sale to mitigate against Bitcoin's volatility. Any changes in the price of bitcoins during transit were covered by Dread Pirate Roberts.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: The complaint published when Ulbricht was arrested included information the FBI gained from a system image of the Silk Road server collected on 23 July 2013. It noted that, "From February 6, 2011 to July 23, 2013 there were approximately 1,229,465 transactions completed on the site. The total revenue generated from these sales was 9,519,664 Bitcoins, and the total commissions collected by Silk Road from the sales amounted to 614,305 Bitcoins. According to the government, total sales were equivalent to roughly $183 million and involved 146,946 buyers and 3,877 vendors. According to information users provided upon registering, 30 percent were from the United States, 27 percent chose to be "undeclared", and beyond that, in descending order of prevalence: the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Canada, Sweden, France, Russia, Italy, and the Netherlands. During the 60-day period from 24 May to 23 July, there were 1,217,218 messages sent over Silk Road's private messaging system.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: The Farmer's Market was a Tor site similar to Silk Road, but which did not use bitcoins. It has been considered a 'proto-Silk Road' but the use of payment services such as PayPal and Western Union allowed law enforcement to trace payments and it was subsequently shut down by the FBI in 2012. Other sites already existed when Silk Road was shut down and "The Guardian" predicted that these would take over the market that Silk Road previously dominated. Sites named 'Atlantis', closing in September 2013, and "Project Black Flag", closing in October 2013, each stole their users' bitcoins. In October 2013, the site named "Black Market Reloaded" closed down temporarily after the site's source code was leaked. The market shares of various Silk Road successor sites were described by "The Economist" in May 2015.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: On 3 May 2019 a similar website was shut down, and three German men were arrested by the FBI and DEA agents. The website, called "Wall Street Market", allowed for the illegal sale of drugs and fake documents such as driver's licenses.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: Silk Road had a Tor-based book club that continued to operate following the initial site's closure and even following the arrest of one of its members. Reading material included conspiracy theories and computer hacking. Some of the titles included mainstream books as well as books such as "The Anarchist Cookbook" and "Defeating Electromagnetic Door Locks". Most of the titles on this book club were pirated. This book club still exists as a private Tor-based chatroom.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: On 6th November 2013, administrators from the closed Silk Road relaunched the site, led by a new pseudonymous Dread Pirate Roberts, and dubbed it "Silk Road 2.0". It recreated the original site's setup and promised improved security. The new DPR took the precaution of distributing encrypted copies of the site's source code to allow the site to be quickly recreated in the event of another shutdown.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: On 20 December 2013, it was announced that three alleged Silk Road 2.0 administrators had been arrested; two of these suspects, Andrew Michael Jones and Gary Davis, were named as the administrators "Inigo" and "Libertas" who had continued their work on Silk Road 2.0. Around this time, the new Dread Pirate Roberts abruptly surrendered control of the site and froze its activity, including its escrow system. A new temporary administrator under the screenname "Defcon" took over and promised to bring the site back to working order.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: On 13 February 2014, Defcon announced that Silk Road 2.0's escrow accounts had been compromised through a vulnerability in Bitcoin protocol called "transaction malleability". While the site remained online, all the bitcoins in its escrow accounts, valued at $2.7 million, were reported stolen. It was later reported that the vulnerability was in the site's "Refresh Deposits" function, and that the Silk Road administrators had used their commissions on sales since 15 February to refund users who lost money, with 50 percent of the hack victims being completely repaid as of 8 April.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: On 6 November 2014, authorities with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Europol, and Eurojust announced the arrest of Blake Benthall, allegedly the owner and operator of Silk Road 2.0 under the pseudonym "Defcon", the previous day in San Francisco as part of Operation Onymous. The creator of the relaunched website — an English computer programmer named Thomas White — was also arrested in the course of the shutdown, but his arrest was not made public until 2019 after he pled guilty to charges stemming from running the website and was sentenced to five years in prison. Among the charges White admitted to was creating child pornography, and chat logs recovered by police showed White discussing the possibility of launching a website to host such material.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: Following the closure of Silk Road 2.0 in November 2014, Diabolus Market renamed itself to 'Silk Road 3 Reloaded' in order to capitalize on the brand. In January 2015, Silk Road Reloaded launched on I2P with multiple cryptocurrency support and similar listing restrictions to the original Silk Road market. This website is also defunct.


title: Silk Road (marketplace)

text: Meghan Ralston, a former harm reduction manager for the Drug Policy Alliance, was quoted as saying that the Silk Road was "a peaceable alternative to the often deadly violence so commonly associated with the global drug war, and street drug transactions, in particular". Proponents of the Silk Road and similar sites argue that buying illegal narcotics from the safety of your home is better than buying them in person from criminals on the streets.


title: Star Alliance

text: Star Alliance is the world's largest global airline alliance. Founded on 14 May 1997, its CEO is Jeffrey Goh and its headquarters is located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. , Star Alliance is the largest of the three global alliances by passenger count with 762.27 million, ahead of both SkyTeam (630 million) and Oneworld (528 million). Its slogan is "The Way the Earth Connects".


title: Star Alliance

text: Star Alliance's 26 member airlines operate a fleet of approximately 5,033 aircraft, serving more than 1,290 airports in 195 countries on more than 19,000 daily departures. The alliance has a two-tier rewards program, Silver and Gold, with incentives including priority boarding and upgrades. Like other airline alliances, Star Alliance airlines share airport terminals (known as co-locations) and many member planes are painted in the alliance's livery.


title: Star Alliance

text: On May 14, 1997, an agreement was announced forming the Star Alliance with five airlines on three continents: United Airlines, Scandinavian Airlines, Thai Airways International, Air Canada, and Lufthansa. The alliance chose Young & Rubicam for advertising, with a budget of $25 million (€18 million). The airlines shared the star logo from the beginning, with its five points representing the founding airlines. The alliance adopted its first slogan, "The Airline Network for Earth", with its goal "an alliance that will take passengers to every major city on earth".


title: Star Alliance

text: The now defunct Brazilian airline VARIG joined the Star Alliance network on 22 October 1997, extending the alliance into South America. Also joining were Ansett Australia and Air New Zealand, expanding Star Alliance to Australia and the Pacific. With the addition of the latter two carriers, the alliance served 720 destinations in 110 countries with a combined fleet of 1,650 aircraft. The next airline to join was All Nippon Airways (ANA), the group's second Asian airline, on 15 October 1999.


title: Star Alliance

text: During the early 2000s, a number of airlines joined Star Alliance; the Austrian Airlines Group (Austrian Airlines, Tyrolean Airways and Lauda Air) joined on 26 March 2000 and Singapore Airlines on 1 April. BMI (British Midland) and Mexicana joined on 1 July, bringing the alliance's membership to 13. With Singapore Airlines' entry into the alliance, Thai Airways considered moving to OneWorld, but eventually decided to remain. The addition of BMI made London Heathrow the only European hub with two alliances. During the year, Emirates considered joining Star Alliance, but decided against it. That year the now-defunct BWIA West Indies Airways, which had entered an alliance with United Airlines, considered becoming a member but did not. In 2000, the alliance also opened its first three business centers (in Los Angeles, Frankfurt, and Bangkok) and announced the formation of an Alliance Management Team (AMT), the partnership's executive body. In September 2001, Ansett Australia (the alliance's only Australian member) left Star Alliance due to bankruptcy, giving most of the Australian market to Qantas (a Oneworld member). That year, Star Alliance announced the appointment of a new CEO, Jaan Albrecht.


title: Star Alliance

text: Partner airlines promoted Star Alliance brand with a ‘Round the World’ ticket (RWT) that offered choice of 19,000, 21,000, and 23,000 miles with stopover of 15 cities valid for one year. RWT was path-breaking in that travel buffs could visit destinations of their choice by charting a year long itinerary without disrupting work commitments. Until then tourists took annual vacationa of two or three weeks, often settling for lesser known destinations because flights were overbooked during peak holiday season. Customer loyalty ratings went up, driven by the underlying message - Forget about the countries and cities. Go where RWT ticket takes you!


title: Star Alliance

text: Asiana Airlines joined the alliance on 1 March 2003, Spanair on 1 May, and LOT Polish Airlines (Poland's flag carrier) in October.


title: Star Alliance

text: Around this time, Mexicana Airlines left the alliance after deciding not to renew a codeshare agreement with United Airlines, later joining Oneworld. US Airways joined the alliance in May 2004, becoming its second US-based airline. In November Adria Airways, Blue1 and Croatia Airlines joined the alliance as its first three regional members.


title: Star Alliance

text: Although Star Alliance invited Lineas Aereas Azteca in 2005 to join in mid-2007, the airline filed for bankruptcy. TAP Air Portugal joined on 14 March 2005, adding African destinations to the network. In April 2006 Swiss International Air Lines, the alliance's sixth European airline, and South African Airways (its first African carrier) became the 17th and 18th members.


title: Star Alliance

text: By May 2007, Star Alliance's 10th anniversary, its members had a combined 16,000 daily departures to 855 destinations in 155 countries and served 406 million passengers annually. The alliance introduced Biosphere Connections, a partnership with UNESCO, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands to promote environmental sustainability.


title: Star Alliance

text: VARIG left the alliance on 31 January 2007, and the two Chinese airlines, Air China and Shanghai Airlines joined on 12 December.


title: Star Alliance

text: On 1 April 2008, Turkish Airlines joined the alliance after a 15-month integration process beginning in December 2006, becoming its 20th member. EgyptAir, Egypt's national airline and Star Alliance's second African carrier, joined on 11 July 2008.


title: Star Alliance

text: On 27 October 2009, Continental Airlines became the 25th member of Star Alliance after leaving SkyTeam three days earlier. According to alliance CEO Jaan Albrecht, "Bringing Continental Airlines into Star Alliance has been a truly unique experience. This is the first time an airline has moved directly from one alliance to another and I would like to thank all those involved in ensuring a smooth switch". At the time, it was rumoured that the switch was Continental's first move in a planned merger with United Airlines. Two months later, Brussels Airlines joined the alliance.


title: Star Alliance

text: Brazilian carrier TAM Airlines joined Star Alliance on 13 May 2010, increasing its foothold in South America. Aegean Airlines, Greece's largest airline by number of passengers, joined on 30 June.


title: Star Alliance

text: Shanghai Airlines left the alliance on 31 October 2010 when it merged with China Eastern Airlines, a SkyTeam member. On 29 September, the chief executive board approved Ethiopian Airlines as Star Alliance's 30th member. In 2010 the alliance flew to 1,172 airports in 181 countries, with about 21,200 daily departures.


title: Star Alliance

text: Since 2011, the alliance has gained several large members but has lost others due to collapse or mergers. On 13 December 2011, Ethiopian Airlines joined, adding five countries and 24 destinations to the alliance's map.


title: Star Alliance

text: Star Alliance saw a tumultuous 2012–13, starting with two key departures but ending with a major move into Latin America. In Europe, Spanair ceased operations, and BMI left after being acquired by International Airlines Group (IAG), the parent company of Oneworld members Iberia and British Airways. BMI was integrated into British Airways. In North America, Continental merged with United Airlines, reducing Star's membership further, even if it effectively stayed in the alliance after the merger. On 21 June, though, Avianca, TACA Airlines and Copa Airlines joined, massively increasing the alliance's Latin American presence. In November, Blue1 left after becoming an affiliate of parent Scandinavian Airlines. and Shenzhen Airlines joined, augmenting Air China's Chinese network. Taiwanese carrier EVA Air then joined on 18 June 2013, and after TACA's integration into Avianca, the alliance grew to 28 members, making it the largest of the three major airline alliances. On 13 December, Air India was again invited to begin an integration process with Star Alliance and joined the alliance on 11 July 2014.


title: Star Alliance

text: Following this string of expansions, 2014 opened with two major departures through mergers. First, Brazilian carrier TAM Airlines merged with LAN Airlines to become LATAM Airlines Group, leaving the alliance without a presence in the world's fifth-largest country. Next, US Airways completed its merger with American Airlines and also left the alliance. Both parent companies stayed with Oneworld. On 24 June, though, the alliance finally approved Air India which joined on 11 July, leaving the alliance at 27 members.


title: Star Alliance

text: Future expansion centers around the addition of "Connecting Partners," subsidiaries or partners of alliance members which will add connectivity to the alliance without becoming full members. Avianca Brasil joined in this way on 22 July 2015, bringing the alliance back into the Brazilian market partially filling the void left by TAM. South African Airways' low-cost subsidiary, Mango, was initially announced to join as a Connecting Partner in Q3 2016 but has since been delayed. Juneyao Airlines, which codeshares with Shenzhen Airlines, joined as a Connecting Partner on 23 May 2017. Thai Smile, subsidiary of Thai Airways, joined as a Connecting Partner in February 2020. On 20 August 2019, Star Alliance announced affiliate member Avianca Brasil's exit from the alliance from 1 September 2019. The departure, however, won't affect Avianca's membership. On 30 September 2019, Adria Airways ceased operations, and the airline exited the alliance on 2 October 2019.


title: Star Alliance

text: On 16 November 2020, Asiana Airlines announce their plans to exit the alliance. Asiana will merge with Korean Air, the Korean Government confirmed, in a $1.6 billion acquisition by the SkyTeam member.


title: Star Alliance

text: In 2022, Lufthansa announced plans to buy 40% stake in ITA Airways, a SkyTeam member. If this goes through then the latter can become a member of Star Alliance.


title: Star Alliance

text: United Express flights are operated by Air Wisconsin, CommutAir, GoJet Airlines, Mesa Airlines, Republic Airways, and SkyWest Airlines.


title: Star Alliance

text: Olympic Air, UNI Air, Air Dolomiti, and AnadoluJet are wholly owned regional subsidiaries that operate flights for their parent company under a different name.


title: Star Alliance

text: As a subsidiary of Thai Airways International, Thai Smile was originally as an affiliate member, but it transferred as Connecting Partners since 2020.


title: Star Alliance

text: Starting from August 2022, the German railway provider Deutsche Bahn will be the first intermodal partner of the Star Alliance, whose airlines will in future be able to assign their own flight numbers for trains.


title: Star Alliance

text: Codeshare flights of Star Alliance airlines are consistent. This cooperation led to suspicions of anti-competitive behaviour; the alliance was suspected by the European Union of being a virtual merger of its members, and speculation existed that if government regulations were relaxed the members would merge into one corporation.


title: Star Alliance

text: Star Alliance developed a "regional" concept in 2004, which helped it penetrate markets with participation by smaller regional carriers. Regional Star Alliance members had to be sponsored by an alliance member. The alliance no longer designates airlines as "regional" members, now referring to its 27 airlines as "members".


title: Star Alliance

text: In 2007, alliance members flew 18,521 daily flights to 1,321 airports in 193 countries with a fleet of 4,025 aircraft. Its members carried a total of 627.52 million passengers, with revenue of US$156.8 billion (€145 billion). It had 28 percent of the global market based on revenue passenger kilometres (RPK), greater than the combined market share of all airlines not in one of the three major alliances. All alliance carriers combined employed over 405,000 pilots, flight attendants, and other staff.


title: Star Alliance

text: Star Alliance has two premium levels (Silver and Gold), based on a customer's status in a member's frequent-flyer program. Member and regional airlines recognize Star Silver and Gold status, with a few exceptions mostly about airport lounge access. Membership is based on the frequent-flyer programs of the individual airlines. Many members have a premium status with their individual airline program that goes beyond Gold, however these levels are all grouped together as Gold status when being recognized by Star Alliance overall.


title: Star Alliance

text: Silver Status recognizes that customers having shown loyalty to Star Alliance member airlines and earns them two privileges that can make their journeys smoother. This includes priority reservations waitlist and priority airport stand-by.


title: Star Alliance

text: Star Alliance Gold status is given to customers who have reached a higher level of a member airline's frequent-flyer program. Benefits are priority reservations waitlist, airport stand-by, check-in and baggage handling; an additional checked luggage allowance of 20 kg (or one extra piece, where the piece rule applies), and access to designated Star Alliance Gold lounges the day and place of departure with the presentation of a Star Alliance boarding pass. Some airlines also offer preferred seating (an exit seat or a special section of the plane); guaranteed seating on fully booked flights, subject to the booking class code and notice period, and free upgrades in the form of a voucher, certificate or automatic upgrade at check-in. United restricts US lounge access for their Gold Members to long-haul international passengers; Gold members from other carriers are welcome in US lounges run by United on all itineraries.


title: Star Alliance

text: Some Star Alliance members paint some of their aircraft with the alliance livery, usually, a white fuselage with "Star Alliance" across it and a black tail fin with the alliance logo; the colour or design of the engine cowlings or winglets remains, depending on the member's livery. Singapore Airlines is the only exception, formerly keeping its logo on the tails of its aircraft but now using the Star Alliance logo on white tails.


title: Star Alliance

text: Asiana Airlines was the first Star Alliance member to paint its aircraft in the current Star Alliance livery. Aircraft painted in an airline's regular livery have the Star Alliance logo between the cockpit and the first set of cabin doors.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: The Clinton–Lewinsky scandal was a sex scandal involving Bill Clinton, the president of the United States, and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Their sexual relationship lasted between 1995 and 1997. Clinton ended a televised speech in late January 1998 with the later infamous statement: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." Further investigation led to charges of perjury and to the impeachment of Clinton in 1998 by the U.S. House of Representatives. He was subsequently acquitted on all impeachment charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in a 21-day U.S. Senate trial.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Clinton was held in civil contempt of court by Judge Susan Webber Wright for giving misleading testimony in the Paula Jones case regarding Lewinsky, and was also fined $90,000 by Wright. His license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas for five years; shortly thereafter, he was disbarred from presenting cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Lewinsky was a graduate of Lewis & Clark College. She was hired during Clinton's first term in 1995 as an intern at the White House and was later an employee of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. It is believed that Clinton began a personal relationship with her while she worked at the White House, the details of which she later confided to Linda Tripp, her Defense Department co-worker who secretly recorded their telephone conversations.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: In January 1998, Tripp discovered that Lewinsky had sworn an affidavit in the Paula Jones case, denying a relationship with Clinton. She delivered tapes to Ken Starr, the independent counsel who was investigating Clinton on other matters, including the Whitewater scandal, the White House FBI files controversy, and the White House travel office controversy. During the grand jury testimony, Clinton's responses were carefully worded, and he argued "it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is", with regard to the truthfulness of his statement that "there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship".


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: This scandal is sometimes referred to as "Monicagate", "Lewinskygate", "Tailgate," "Sexgate", and "Zippergate", following the "-gate" construction that has been used since Watergate.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Lewinsky said she had sexual encounters with Bill Clinton on nine occasions from November 1995 to March 1997. According to her published schedule, First Lady Hillary Clinton was at the White House for at least some portion of seven of those days.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: In April 1996, Lewinsky's superiors relocated her job to the Pentagon, because they felt she was spending too much time around Clinton. According to his autobiography, then-United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson was asked by the White House in 1997 to interview Lewinsky for a job on his staff at the United Nations. Richardson did so, and offered her a position, which she declined. "The American Spectator" alleged that Richardson knew more about the Lewinsky affair than he declared to the grand jury.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Lewinsky confided in Linda Tripp about her relationship with Clinton. Tripp persuaded Lewinsky to save the gifts Clinton had given her, and not to dry clean a semen-stained blue dress in order to keep it as an "insurance policy." Tripp reported their conversations to literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, who advised her to secretly record them, which Tripp began doing in September 1997. Goldberg also urged Tripp to take the tapes to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and bring them to the attention of people working on the Paula Jones case. In the fall of 1997, Goldberg began speaking to reporters (including Michael Isikoff of "Newsweek") about the tapes.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: In the Paula Jones case, Lewinsky had submitted an affidavit that denied any physical relationship with Clinton. In January 1998, she attempted to persuade Tripp to commit perjury in the Jones case. Instead, Tripp gave the tapes to Starr, who was investigating the Whitewater controversy and other matters. Starr was now armed with evidence of Lewinsky's admission of a physical relationship with Clinton, and he broadened the investigation to include Lewinsky and her possible perjury in the Jones case.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: News of the scandal first broke on January 17, 1998, on the "Drudge Report", which reported that "Newsweek" editors were sitting on a story by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff exposing the affair. The story broke in the mainstream press on January 21 in "The Washington Post". The story swirled for several days and, despite swift denials from Clinton, the clamor for answers from the White House grew louder. On January 26, President Clinton, standing with his wife, spoke at a White House press conference, and issued a denial in which he said:


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Pundits debated whether Clinton would address the allegations in his State of the Union Address. Ultimately, he chose not to mention them. Hillary Clinton remained supportive of her husband throughout the scandal. On January 27, in an appearance on NBC's "Today" she said, "The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: For the next several months and through the summer, the media debated whether an affair had occurred and whether Clinton had lied or obstructed justice, but nothing could be definitively established beyond the taped recordings because Lewinsky was unwilling to discuss the affair or testify about it. On July 28, 1998, a substantial delay after the public break of the scandal, Lewinsky received transactional immunity in exchange for grand jury testimony concerning her relationship with Clinton. She also turned over a semen-stained blue dress (which Tripp had encouraged her to save without dry cleaning) to the Starr investigators. The FBI tested the dress and matched the semen stains to a blood sample from Clinton, thereby providing unambiguous DNA evidence that could prove the relationship despite Clinton's official denials.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Clinton admitted in taped grand jury testimony on August 17, 1998, that he had engaged in an "improper physical relationship" with Lewinsky. That evening he gave a nationally televised statement admitting that his relationship with Lewinsky was "not appropriate".


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: On August 20, 1998, three days after Clinton testified on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Operation Infinite Reach launched missiles against al-Qaeda bases in Khost, Afghanistan, and the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, in retaliation for the 1998 United States embassy bombings. Some countries, media outlets, protesters, and Republicans accused Clinton of ordering the attacks as a diversion. The attacks also drew parallels to the then-recently released movie "Wag the Dog", which features a fictional president faking a war in Albania to distract attention from a sex scandal. Administration officials denied any connection between the missile strikes and the ongoing scandal, and 9/11 Commission investigators found no reason to dispute those statements. The missile strikes also caused anti-Semitic canards to spread in the Middle East that Lewinsky was a Jewish agent sent to influence Clinton against aiding Palestine. This conspiracy theory would influence Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of al-Qaeda's Hamburg cell and the September 11 attacks.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: In his deposition for the Jones lawsuit, Clinton denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky. Based on the evidence—a blue dress with Clinton's semen that Lewinsky provided—Starr concluded that the president's sworn testimony was false and perjurious.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: During the deposition, Clinton was asked "Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit1?" The judge ordered that Clinton be given an opportunity to review the agreed definition. Afterwards, based on the definition created by the Independent Counsel's Office, Clinton answered, "I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." Clinton later said, "I thought the definition included any activity by [me], where [I] was the actor and came in contact with those parts of the bodies" which had been explicitly listed (and "with an intent to gratify or arouse the sexual desire of any person"). In other words, Clinton denied that "he" had ever contacted "Lewinsky's" "genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks", and effectively claimed that the agreed-upon definition of "sexual relations" included "giving" oral sex but excluded "receiving" oral sex.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Two months after the Senate failed to convict him, President Clinton was held in civil contempt of court by Judge Susan Webber Wright for giving misleading testimony regarding his sexual relationship with Lewinsky, and was also fined $90,000 by Wright. Clinton declined to appeal the civil contempt of court ruling, citing financial problems, but still maintained that his testimony complied with Wright's earlier definition of sexual relations. In 2001, his license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas for five years and later by the United States Supreme Court.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: In December 1998, Clinton's Democratic political party was in the minority in both chambers of Congress. A few Democratic members of Congress, and most in the opposition Republican Party, claimed that Clinton's giving false testimony and allegedly influencing Lewinsky's testimony were crimes of obstruction of justice and perjury and thus impeachable offenses. After a delay due to a brief bombing campaign in Iraq, the House of Representatives voted to issue two Articles of Impeachment against him which was followed by a 21-day trial in the Senate.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Clinton was acquitted on both counts as neither received the necessary two-thirds majority vote of the senators present. Between 45 and 50 senators voted to convict, depending on the charge, short of the 67 votes needed for conviction and removal from office. All the Democrats in the Senate voted for acquittal on both the perjury and the obstruction of justice charges. Ten Republicans voted for acquittal for perjury: John Chafee (Rhode Island), Susan Collins (Maine), Slade Gorton (Washington), Jim Jeffords (Vermont), Richard Shelby (Alabama), Olympia Snowe (Maine), Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania), Ted Stevens (Alaska), Fred Thompson (Tennessee), and John Warner (Virginia). Five Republicans voted for acquittal for obstruction of justice: Chafee, Collins, Jeffords, Snowe, and Specter.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: President Clinton was thereby acquitted of all charges and remained in office. There were attempts to censure the president by the House of Representatives, but those attempts failed.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: The scandal arguably affected the 2000 U.S. presidential election in two contradictory ways. Democratic Party candidate and sitting vice president Al Gore said that Clinton's scandal had been "a drag" that deflated the enthusiasm of their party's base, and had the effect of reducing Democratic votes. Clinton said the scandal had made Gore's campaign too cautious, and that if Clinton had been allowed to campaign for Gore in Arkansas and New Hampshire, either state would have delivered Gore's needed electoral votes regardless of the effects of the Florida recount controversy.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Political analysts have supported both views. Before and after the 2000 election, John Cochran of "ABC News" connected the Lewinsky scandal with a voter phenomenon he called "Clinton fatigue". Polling showed that the scandal continued to affect Clinton's low "personal approval" ratings through the election, and analysts such as Vanderbilt University's John G. Geer later concluded "Clinton fatigue or a kind of moral retrospective voting had a significant impact on Gore's chances". Other analysts sided with Clinton's argument, and argued that Gore's refusal to have Clinton campaign with him damaged his appeal.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: During the scandal, supporters of former president Clinton alleged that the matter should remain private, and called some supporting Clinton's impeachment hypocritical. A highly publicized investigation campaign actively sought information that might embarrass politicians who supported impeachment. According to the British newspaper "The Guardian",


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Henry Hyde, Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee and lead House manager, also had an affair while in office as a state legislator. Hyde, aged 70 during the Lewinsky hearings, dismissed it as a "youthful indiscretion" (he had been 41).


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Bob Livingston Republican congressman had been widely expected to become Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in the next Congressional session. Then just weeks away after Flynt revealed the affair, Livingston resigned and challenged Clinton to do the same.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Bob Barr (R-GA) another Republican House manager, had an affair while married. Barr had been the first lawmaker in either chamber to call for Clinton's resignation due to the Lewinsky affair. Barr lost a primary challenge less than three years after the impeachment proceedings.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Dan Burton (R-IN) said, "No one, regardless of what party they serve, no one, regardless of what branch of government they serve, should be allowed to get away with these alleged sexual improprieties..." In 1998, Burton admitted that he himself had had an affair in 1983 which produced a child.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Newt Gingrich (R-GA) US Representative, Speaker of the House and leader of the Republican Revolution of 1994, admitted in 1998 to having had an affair with then House Agriculture Committee staffer Callista Bisek while he was still married to his second wife, at the same time as he was leading the impeachment of Bill Clinton for perjury regarding an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Steven C. LaTourette (R-OH) US Representative, voted to impeach Bill Clinton for the Lewinsky scandal while he himself, was having a long-term affair with his chief of staff, Jennifer Laptook. (2003)


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Republican Helen Chenoweth-Hage from Idaho aggressively called for the resignation of President Clinton and then admitted to her own six-year affair with a married rancher during the 1980s.


title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

text: Historian Taylor Branch implied that Clinton had requested changes to Branch's 2009 Clinton biography, "", regarding Clinton's revelation that the Lewinsky affair began because "I cracked; I just cracked." Branch writes that Clinton had felt "beleaguered, unappreciated, and open to a liaison with Lewinsky" following "the Democrats' loss of Congress in the November 1994 elections, the death of his mother the previous January, and the ongoing Whitewater investigation". Publicly, Clinton had previously blamed the affair on "a terrible moral error" and on anger at Republicans, stating, "if people have unresolved anger, it makes them do non-rational, destructive things".


title: Fringe (TV series)

text: Fringe is an American science fiction television series created by J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci. It premiered on the Fox television network on September 9, 2008, and concluded on January 18, 2013, after five seasons comprising 100 episodes. An FBI agent, Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv); a genius but dysfunctional scientist, Walter Bishop (John Noble); and his son with a troubled past, Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), are all members of a newly formed Fringe Division in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, and under the supervision of Homeland Security, the team uses fringe science along with traditional FBI investigative techniques to investigate a series of unexplained, often ghastly occurrences, which are related to mysteries surrounding a parallel universe.


title: Fringe (TV series)

text: The series has been described as a hybrid of fantasy, procedural dramas and serials, influenced by films like "Altered States" and television shows such as "Lost", "The X-Files" and "The Twilight Zone". The series began as a traditional mystery-of-the-week series and became more serialized in later seasons. Most episodes contain a standalone plot, with several others also exploring the series' overarching mythology.


title: Fringe (TV series)

text: Critical reception was lukewarm at first but became more favorable after the first season, when the series began to explore its mythology, including parallel universes and alternate timelines. The show, along with cast and crew, were nominated for many major awards. Despite its move to the "Friday night death slot" and low ratings, the series developed a cult following. It also spawned two six-part comic book series, an alternate reality game, and three novels.


title: Fringe (TV series)

text: "Fringe" follows the casework of the Fringe Division, a Joint Federal Task Force supported primarily by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which includes Agent Olivia Dunham; Dr. Walter Bishop, the archetypal mad scientist; and Peter Bishop, Walter's estranged son and jack-of-all-trades. They are supported by Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick), the force's director, and Agent Astrid Farnsworth (Jasika Nicole), who assists Walter in laboratory research. The Fringe Division investigates cases relating to fringe science, ranging from transhumanist experiments gone wrong to the prospect of a destructive technological singularity to a possible collision of two parallel universes. The Fringe Division's work often intersects with advanced biotechnology developed by a company called Massive Dynamic, founded by Walter's former partner, Dr. William Bell (Leonard Nimoy), and run by their common friend, Nina Sharp (Blair Brown). The team is also watched silently by a group of bald, pale white men who are called "Observers".


title: Fringe (TV series)

text: Season 1 introduces the Fringe Division as they investigate cases that form "the Pattern" geographically centered around Reiden Lake in New York state, many of which are orchestrated by an international network of rogue scientists known as ZFT ("Zerstörung durch Fortschritte der Technologie", or in English, Destruction through Advancement of Technology), led by David Robert Jones (Jared Harris), who are preparing for a doomsday event. The ZFT threat appears to end when Peter kills Jones as he attempts travel to a parallel universe. Olivia comes to learn she was a child test subject for Walter years ago (then known as Olive) for a nootropic drug, Cortexiphan, giving her weak psionic abilities. Walter also struggles with adjusting to normal life in Peter's care after living seventeen years in a mental institution while hiding the fact that Peter is from the parallel universe, "his" Peter having died as a child.