01-04-2018, 22:09
(01-04-2018, 10:54)CRAZY-HORSE Wrote: Grunge was, overall, IMO, terrible also....
I hated Nirvana with a passion and still do, except for their "unplugged" set which thought was brilliant...
Soundgarden...I can take or leave them, I own an album, its okay...
and the third of the "big three", Pearl Jam, own a couple of albums, there okay for the most part....
I think their vocalist Eddie Vedder is a versatile vocalist, im always impressed with his vocals...
Grunge never, as I posted, impressed me on the whole even with one of my favourite singers in Neil Young
championing the genre of Grunge,and being the supposed indirect creator of the style with Crazy Horse and their
garage rock sound....
My original point was that the music industry made a conscious decision to jettison melodic rock, and that I believe this was a mistake and unnecessary. there's no reason that Warrant, Slaughter, Winger, etc. couldn't have existed side-by-side with the Seattle scene. An equivalent , what if when rap got big, the industry had decided to no longer promote R&B? But R&B and rap exist side-by-side, and collaborate with each other, with no tension.
What happened just didn't have to happen, the industry MADE it happen. As long as the industry kept releasing melodic rock, melodic rock did well. Keep the Faith sold well, Bat Out of Hell II sold well, Firehouse's Hold Your Fire, and even 3, which came out in 1995, did well. Mr. Big did well. But then the supply just dried up even with that trickle of good releases and everyone just moved on.
The common belief is that melodic rock got tired, then grunge came out, and grunge then dominated. But that's not what happened. melodic rock was at its peak when grunge came out. 1991 and 1992 were great years for it, sales wise. And during the height of the grunge era, melodic rock releases, what few there were, STILL charted well, on both singles and album charts. And then the record companies just gave up on it for no particular reason. It never went sour for anyone who enjoyed Nirvana's melodies. Funny that Nirvana made music with abstract lyrics, but yet you believe that the lyrics should only mean something special to awkward kids. When Guns n Roses were at their peak they were the next Rolling Stones if anyone ever was. Grunge pretty much died when Guns n Roses imploded anyway. Guns and Roses is the last really good American hard rock band. I'm a massive Aerosmith fan. Even in 1993-1994, at the height of alternative's popularity, Aerosmith also remained incredibly popular during the "Get A Grip" period. Eventually it became passe to like a lot of the "hair bands", mostly once Beavis And Butt-Head came on, but it was more of a gradual shift of tastes as opposed to the way history makes it out like one day Poison were the biggest band around then Nirvana hit.
It strikes me that if MTV hadn't suddenly changed course, that the 80s would have evolved into the 90s in much the way that the 70s evolved into the 80s. There wasn't some massive shift between the rock of the 70s and the rock of the 80s. Rock got big, it declined a little when disco became king, and then it emerged again repackaged. I think the same thing would have happened had the industry stayed the course. Instead, they did a massive 180, and while alternative kept people interested for a little while, when that mini-boom ended rock as an industry was mangled beyond recognition. There was no longer a "formula". Which a lot of people would consider to be a good thing from a creative standpoint, but makes the music less viable from a commercial standpoint. Everyone knows the formula for writing a successful pop, R&B, rap, or country hit, but there really isn't a way to predict what rock will sell and what won't, so the industry is cautious about promoting new rock artists. They just try a little big of everything and a few bands manage to stick. I think it was really the media and the record companies that killed "Hair" metal rather than the music itself, although I think that some of the bands were to blame too as they decided to jump on the bandwagon rather than stay true to their roots (although that blame could go to the record company forcing them to go in that direction). I don't recall the changeover being so immediate. Obviously MTV starting playing more grunge and less hair metal, but I think the process took two years. Nirvana ruined rock & roll. So Nirvana were pretty terrible, at least musically speaking, but so was most of the rest of grunge. For the most part, grunge was a media sensation, driven by hype. The bands from that era worth listening to, which can be named on a single hand (Alice in Chains, Mother Love Bone, Stone Temple Pilots), are the ones furthest from Nirvana’s divorce rock. When Nirvana came along, they broke everything and the pieces are never going to be put together again. People might still keep killing it on the underground circuit and that might be better, but since Nirvana, rock has slowly exited mainstream consciousness. Today’s rock audience prefers stuff like The White Stripes, The National and Arcade Fire. It’s over, kids. Today, in 2018, rock songs almost never get anywhere close to the top 10, whereas from the 70s to about 1993, hard rock regularly topped the charts. It's an incredible failure to market the music.
And it wasn't really too little, too late. In the middle of the grunge era, freakin' Meat Loaf managed to have one of the biggest albums of the year and a #1 hit. There was still demand for melodic rock. So what if the kids were only interested in alternative? SOMEONE was buying melodic rock CDs, and requesting them on MTV. The demand didn't dry up, the supply did.
So what ended up happening is that almost every melodic rock fan just went back to their old CD and tape collection and gave up on new music. I'm sure most of you have dealt with this before, a metalhead who listens to Iron Maiden and Megadeth and Metallica, but as hard as you try, you can barely convince him to try listening to something new, because he gave up on new music 20 years ago! I only focus on it because I'm wondering what MTV and the labels were thinking. There was no reason to stop playing traditional hard rock, but they did it with only a few exceptions.
It's very unusual behavior for the industry to just summarily end what worked for 20 years and then switch to something totally different. And although it isn't written about much, I think they did realize their mistake, because around 1998 we resumed what I'd consider a normal evolution of the pop music industry.
Hanson, N'Sync, Britney, and the Backstreet Boys came out, and all of a sudden the industry realized, "Hey, they still do love shallow, happy, poppy, sugary pop!"
That 1992-1996 period is just such an aberration, it's as if the whole music industry and quite a few fans went insane for no particular reason, rejecting everything that had come before and becoming totally devoted to what became a pretty short fad. Grunge didn't just lead to the death of hair metal. It led to the death of melodic hard rock and heavy metal in general, at least for a decade, and took hard rock from a widely popular and diverse fanbase to a niche market. Personally, i don't consider GNR hair metal. Even though they came out of that scene and might have looked like a hair metal band at first, musically, they took more inspiration from blues and punk as opposed to pop and glam that many hair metal bands featured in their music. lyrically, i think they were more sophisticated than any hair metal group, and Axl is a much better singer than any hair metal group. So because of these reasons, i think that GNR is hard rock, not hair metal in which they are commonly categorized as. what do you think? The narrative, largely created and driven hard by rock critics, that grunge killed hair metal is a complete myth. Many of those bands were already on their death bed, and bands like Guns N' Roses, Def Leppard and Bon Jovi still did well after grunge exploded.
And what's great is that hair metal has aged well as a fun part of rock history, while grunge, by and large, died a quick death, and ended up having no more than a handful of bands that are still looked fondly upon. Iron Maiden to me, is one of THOSE bands that fills multiple musical needs for me. Metal, melody, and prog are all filled out in one convenient British package. I have enormous respect for that band. They have held up remarkably well through the years, never becoming caricatures of themselves. Their material may have aged better than Priest. Heavy metal over it's 50 years of existence has branched out into many sub genres.
But Metal is falling. After 50 years it has become nothing but distortion and screaming about death, sex and anti-religion. This is pathetic. And so metal is decaying and falling to pop music. Unless the next generation of heavy metal musicians have something NEW! to offer the genre it's going to become a thing of the past.
The metal we hear today has no distinct qualities. It's just this band trying to be as good as all the other bands, and so they end up sounding almost the same. There's no creativity involved. This saddens me to see metal die. I want to be able to enjoy newer music. But I can't unless new bands actually offer something original. Rock music in the 80's/early 90s was awesome! There were great bands with awesome talent like Guns n Roses, Motley Crue, Def Leppard, etc. The music was fun and full of energy! Bands actually knew how to play their instruments well.
Then along one day came Nirvana and a new revolution of no-talent boring depressing whiny music started. These "grunge" bands barely even knew how to play their instruments, but somehow got popular. I remember the first time I saw one of Nirvana's videos , I thought to myself "Is this a joke?" "How did these guys with no-talent actually get a music video?" "This just sounds horrible!". But little did I know that was the beginning of the destruction of rock music.
When I was looking at the charts I didn't see what I expected to see. I got to the point in 1991 where Smells Like Teen Spirit peaked at #7, so then I was like, "Okay, here we go, this is where the grunge era begins and melodic rock ends." But then for the next three years, I see no grunge hits and still quite a few melodic rock hits, although not as many as in the late 80s.I'm sure a lot of people would be surprised that melodic rock still had commercial success long after the record companies and MTV officially declared it "dead".What I don't understand is why the labels gave such shoddy promotion to the followups to the most successful releases from 1990-1993. The Scorpions had a huge smash with Crazy World, they were practically the Rolling Stones of metal, and Face the Heat just got a "meh" promotion and no MTV airplay. Props to Arsenio Hall for having them on though. Extreme followed up Pornograffitti with the amazing III Sides to Every Story. Meh again from the industry and MTV. Mr. Big followed up the smash hit Lean Into It with Bump Ahead. Double meh even though it was a great album. Wild World got a little airplay. Firehouse did VERY well as late as 1995, and then they just were quietly disposed of anyway. Why? These were all fantastic albums, without the ridiculous image, and the industry decided not to push them. What kind of a label stops promoting a band that's still producing hits? This ONLY happened to melodic rock bands! It would never happen in a million years to a country, R&B, or rap artist. You have to fail before getting dropped or not promoted. It's almost as if the industry was angry that people still wanted to listen to this kind of music and decided to just cut out the pretense and FORCE people to accept the new sound by taking away the old sound. Let’s be honest, if Kurt Cobain hadn’t killed himself, Nirvana wouldn’t be nearly as popular as they still are today. In my opinion, most modern music sucks, so I fully admit to being stuck in the past when it comes to what I listen to. The "Hair Metal" era, roughly '83 to '92 or so, represents the last time Heavy Metal was truly relevant. It represents the last time rock was culturally 'dangerous' and also fun as a genre - when rockstars still roamed the Earth. I can see the negative thoughts people have about it - being too corporate and gimmicky. But It was a period when rock was good (for me anyway) and then by like 93 and on rock became depressing sounding with snarling growling singers who were depressed. What really separates Led Zeppelin, say, from "Hair Metal"?
Both had long hair. Both had over-the-top stage shows and self indulgent music videos. Both wore flashy costumes. Both sang about sex, drugs and rock n' roll and groupies.
Or for that matter, the 70s Stones. What separates them in any real way from Warrant? Basically "Hair Metal" became a term used by angry Gen X-ers to describe fun rock while they wallowed in self hating grunge nonsense.