I keep missing entire musical movements. It could be a product of age and its accompanying time compression—I don't know. Lo-fi, emo, neo- new wave, post post-punk, electro-crunk—what happened? Anyway—zoom—now they're gone. I guess. It could also be that I'm not looking hard enough.

Grunge was the last big scene that I can remember. It was the kind of musical movement so huge and obnoxious and out of hand that even the TV morning show Florence Henderson-types were dropping the G-word and chirping about "the Pearl Jam" and "the Nirvana." And like all big scenes, once exploded, it was doomed to end in a fiery ball of scorn and ridicule.

I wasn't the biggest fan of grunge—a bit of a problem since I was living in Seattle at the time. The streets were paved with it. It was a relentless soundtrack, a never-ending theme, like a jukebox stuck on the same song. A few years of that can really get to you. And as a Canadian I was particularly baffled by the aesthetic—a quaint throwback to the doofus stoner look of my high school days, minus the hockey crap.

The pop culture pundits called it an antidote to the eighties, to the happy pop poop of MTV and its multicoloured world of corporate manufacturing and image consciousness, in much the same way that punk was an antidote to bloated arena rock and droopy mustaches. Everything's an antidote, a tonic, a salve, an ointment to whatever came before it. If it weren't for all of these antidotes, we'd still be infected with a bad case of Fabian.

Grunge had a good run, but I knew it was all over the day I saw Gap window displays full of plaid flannel shirts and jeans preripped at the knee.

And there's always the question: is it possible to maintain your grungy indie cred when you're getting rich off of being an alleged miserable loser? As the wheels came off the bandwagon, Seattle started to feel like a bar after all the lights go up at closing time. Breakups, heroin, death, and Courtney Love really didn't help either.

"If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm about getting rid of grunge," Blur front man Damon Albarn declared in 1993, just before his band and the Britpop scene would face extinction themselves. Behold, the cycle of life.

Well, not exactly life—more like mutation. Somewhere right now there's probably some spotty guitar-slingin' garage rat discovering the delights of loud-quiet-loud dynamics and thrilling to the ancient, obscure sounds of Soundgarden, and then melding it somehow with his love of 80's MTV bands, Britpop, and emo.

Or not. Things may be too fractured now, too wildly democratic. The Seattle scene was born of its off-the-radar insularity. Today, thanks to our wondrous digital age, everything is on the radar—a billion blips beeping for our attention. Movements come and go like slice joints, hype-fests peak and crest over a lunchtime. And we're left with a large steaming load of beard-and-scarf music and the insipid nursery rhymes of Feist—ready-made margarine commercial soundtracks, tasteful, non-threatening iPod filler.

To paraphrase Travis Bickle, one day a real antidote will come. Who knows? It could be rockabilly. It could be grunge-a-billy. Or electro-crunk-a-billy. Whatever it is, it could be the next big thing—except smaller. Keep your peepers peeled; blink and you might miss it.