Nick1976

The post-grunge landscape (late 90s) was so depressing in terms of rock. The grunge movement really started in 1992, but it wasn't a "shock" or something, and it actually COEXISTED with the successful hair/heavy metal bands. The hype was huge, but no one took the music seriously. Nevermind, elevated that scene and gave it pop credibility, but that is all. Grunge was a marketing term that lead to an early death for a bunch of music. This will sound stupid, but I honestly think Weird Al was responsible for getting more kids into Nirvana than Nirvana themselves were. Mostly I remember kids making fun of them for the lyrics being "impossible" to understand when "Teen Spirit" first came out, and those of us who were into music were still too wrapped up in our Poison and Motley Crue or Guns n Roses or whatever albums to care much for a while. But I'd wager that Weird Al's record sold way more copies to kids at that time than Nevermind did, and I actually knew kids who didn't like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at first but started liking it after "Smells Like Nirvana" broke.

For me I remember just not "getting" SLTP at all when it came out. Why the hell is MTV playing this crap and not the new Slaughter video!? But as for the other kids? I don't think you really saw the changeover take place until at least late 1992. I'd bet everything I own that more kids in this area bought Def Leppard's Adrenalize than bought Alice in Chains' Dirt that year. Plus, I don't think I ever really saw any of the huge backlash against metal/hair-metal like you read about around here - all the kids I knew who loved grunge also still liked Guns 'N' Roses and Ozzy and Metallica and whatnot. You'd probably get made fun of if you were still a huge Winger fan or something, but it seemed like most kids just went along with the "alternative revolution" because that was what was happening at the time, not because they suddenly woke up and hated metal one day. I like Winger. Yes they probably deserve to be lumped as a "hair band" but they were one of the better ones. Bands like Bulletboys, Little Caeser, Black N Blue, etc were awful. Winger actually wrote some good pop metal songs and their ballads I think were pretty damn good. Their 3rd album came out during the grunge era and MTV was actually playing the first single from it and sales were OK but then Beavis & Butthead came along and helped kill the album for them by having their nerd friend in a Winger shirt and making fun of their videos. So many 80's bands kicked guitar ass, people took it for granted back then. It's indeed useless to name 80's band with strong guitar presence because generally it was guitar dedicated decade. Million pages won't be enough to name all the great guitarplayers and the great guitar oriented bands that reigned through this epoch. Quite different than todays music. Warrant had good tracks and were intentional about letting some of their bluegrass rise to the surface in some of their songs. Seriously, how many songs can anyone id that kicks ass and has a banjo in the intro? The lead singer, Jani Lane, died at age 47 from alcohol poisoning. He had such a sad story, I saw him in an interview talking about how all of a sudden grunge was popular and anyone who had anything to do with 80's music was screwed and that his record label dropped him because he was no longer relevant. He turned to alcohol and his life just fell apart and he wound up dying because of it. So sad because he really did have a lot of talent and I thought his voice was great. The problem that Warrant faced is that they were mixed into the Hair Glam Band era along with too many bands of much lesser talent. It was difficult for the good bands to segregate from that label. Another was Winger.