Janszoon

It had a short run because there wasn't really much to it. It was a label that got slapped on a bunch of not-that-similar bands just because of timing and location, but it wasn't a coherent thing that was going anywhere. The bigger picture of rock in the 90s was the rise of alternative rock, which included grunge, and which has continued on to this day metamorphosing from decent music into horribly bland garbage. As Urban mentioned above, the whole grunge/alternative thing was really the last gasp of popular rock music before the long deflation that followed.

I'm pretty neutral about grunge's impact. I appreciate it for the large role it played in eliminating the crappy guitar soloing that had dominated most popular rock since the 70s, but overall it was just a regurgitation of the underground rock of the 80s and wasn't adding much to the equation aside from popularizing things that had been previously more niche.

I totally disagree that hair metal gets more respect than disco. Hair metal is, justifiably, much more of a subject of mockery than disco. Despite the initial backlash shortly after the disco era, disco has gone on to be regarded as great, classic party music that, in it's own subtle way, actually stood for things like racial, gender and sexual orientation equality. Hair metal is remembered for its cheesiness and ridiculousness. The very fact that we're both sitting here calling it "hair metal" is a good example of how it's perceived. Nobody called it "hair metal" back when it was popular, that's a derisive name for it that was coined after it had gone out of style, by people mocking it for its shallowness. The fact that it's the common name for it now just goes to show how people feel about it.

__________________
A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm