I've always heard them defined as "Grunge." Maybe because of where I was at (Michigan, then Chicago), it's likely that the midwest wanted a band to link to Grunge and Smashing Pumpkins was the closest they could get. But they were known as Grunge BEFORE the postmortems.

Actually, the one thing that seems to unite those bands isn't sound or geography (Smashing Pumpkins was from Chicago, was considered Grunge) but lyrical content. Whereas all the major genres did happier songs (or, as in punk, aimed critiques at society at large), grunge spent a lot of time writing about how life…