mr dave

i think with a lot of those bands, especially nirvana and metallica. you really had to be there to get their full impact.

one thing i've noticed since i started frequenting music message boards a few years ago is that younger people have a hard time truly grasping how music moved through society before the net. it's one thing to know the terms, it's another to have lived with them.

it's not to say that music was better back in the day. hardly. but there was significantly more work involved in getting new music for both the artist and the listener.

it's easy to sit back and reflect on how you perceive things to have been back in the day but it's hardly accurate unless you were there. metallica all sounded the same in the 80s? perhaps if you're listening to them with current ears (compare 'jump in the fire' with 'leper messiah' or 'creeping death' with 'blackened' there's a fair amount of growth). nirvana is overrated? only if you're comparing their early 90s output with everything you've downloaded since the early 2000s (it was one thing to read about early pavement, pixies, sonic youth, husker du albums - it was an entirely different thing to actually find those albums on a shelf if you didn't live in a large city)

oasis WAS mostly hype though, they were in competition with blur to be the next big thing from the UK in north american press once grunge started repeating itself.

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