Quote:
Originally Posted by Maajo
I think grunge became stale in the late 90s with the "post-grunge" thing that became popular for around 12 years, but even that speaks to the significance of the genre. It was so big that it's sub-genre was the most popular alt rock genre for about another decade and a half and has only fairly recently died off.
|
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.