re: Grunge band singers are underated as a whole

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I disagree. I think they're widely viewed as great.

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especially cornell

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The mumbling Jim Morrison of his time

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nah, he was kurt cobain.

I saw STP at an old movie theater on Canal St (NOLA) around January of 2000. Not a bad seat in the house for a concert. Weiland’s performance was off the charts. Great singer and energetic entertainer. It is really a shame that he had so many demons.

Overrated as being the voice of his generation? Absolutely yes. Cobain did not have much interesting to say. His lyrics were vague enough that people want to read all sorts of things into them that he almost certainly didn't intend. Dave Grohl said that he wrote the lyrics to most of the songs immediately before they were recorded. Hell, one of the songs on Nevermind (I think it is "Territorial Pissings") even has the line, "No thought was put into this." I mean, he can't get much more clear than that.

Overrated as a musician? No way. He created his own sound, and it is a sound that no one, to my knowledge, has ever been able to imitate. There is no other band that sounds like Nirvana. I think that played a large part in the short shelf life of "grunge" as a force in popular music - Nirvana was the flagship of the movement, and the other bands that got lumped under that label for marketing purposes sounded nothing like them. I know a young TheTideMustRoll found Nirvana as his first real exposure to alternative rock, thought, "Yeah, I want to hear some more music like this!" and was then immediately disappointed to find that Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and the rest of the "grunge" crew were doing something else altogether. Those bands did grow on me (except for Pearl Jam, with a few exceptions their catalog is just terrible), but it was not the same.