Necromancer

I personally think individual opinions are better received when sticking to the critique, instead of constantly critisizing the music by a particular band or artist.

Scarlett O'Hara

I completely agree hun.

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The Batlord

I don't know what this means.

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Janszoon

Why aren't you sticking to the critique? What the fuck, man!?

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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

Neapolitan

I think people are more likely praise the bands they do like and criticize (in a negative way) the bands the don't like. And sometimes give a plus & minus account of a band. I think they are more prone to do that if they are not invested as a fan of the band or the band has an inconsistent output. It seems it would hard to able to stick to the critique (if what you mean by that is to explain the good and band points equally). I think someone sets out to do that, there will still be a tendency for them to be bias in some way. I think it is inevitable because they already know how they feel about it, so they find arguments to support what they think of it either way.

I can understand what you mean "constantly criticizing" a band. I am usually on the short of the stick when it comes to that. What I notice is that there is almost a group mentality on whether a band should be accepted or rejected. And it always seem that I am on the wrong side. I notice that I love to find a band that no one criticize. For me they are in a safe zone away from the music critic and negative criticism. And I can enjoy the music for what it is, not what it fails to be for those who don't get it.

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Necromancer

I wasn't referring to you or anyone in particular Neo. I don't see you as always being on the wrong side either. Just about everything concerning music can be subjective in one way or another.

kriswright

I'm sorta late to the party, but I'll have a go at the original question:

We're in an odd era right now where the teens and young twentysomethings seem to be the children of people who played Bon Jovi's "Blaze of Glory" at their wedding reception. So I can sorta understand where you're coming from when you talk about Nirvana being blamed for killing off hair metal, rather than celebrated. These days I meet more younger types who'd admit to liking Def Leppard than you'd have seen when I was a teenager in the 90s.

But, yeah, I do think Nirvana "killed hair metal", if we're being a little tongue in cheek when we say it. Of course no one band killed the genre off. REM had a hit album a few months before Nirvana, if we're being technical. But back then, when I was 13 or so and just developing my love for rock, the radio was offering me a clear choice: On one side, "Let's Get Rocked" by Def Lep, "I Hate Everything About You" by Ugly Kid Joe, and "Unskinny Bop" by whoever did Unskinny Bop. On the other, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, "Jeremy" by Pearl Jam and "Under the Bridge" by Red Hot Chili Peppers. There was no question to my group of friends which side looked cooler - the grunge/alternative guys. My age bracket turned away from the hair bands in droves and it buried all those old bands. Yesterday's news. For all the subversion and rebellion we like to talk about in rock history, it's actually pretty rare for there to be such a clear outright rejection of what was popular just a few years before. It's usually more gradual. (The kids today aren't talking about how terrible the White Stripes and Radiohead were.)

But the fans of those bands didn't just die. They're still out there and they still haven't gotten over it. You know what was funny, actually? Being a guitar player in the mid 90s and reading guitar magazines that refused to believe that hair bands were passe. You couldn't get an article on Nirvana or really even Pearl Jam until the movement was pretty much over. Those mags were too busy talking about Nuno from Extreme's next big album or whatever.

Those are the guys who still can't stand grunge to this day because, to them, it buried the thing they liked about rock music in the first place: Guitar heroics. And I have a certain degree of sympathy, in retrospect. Grunge has some downsides and a lack of musical adventure is one of them. But anyone who thinks rock is about "scoring chicks with your badass licks" was going to be unhappy that all these mopey grunge puppies had kicked them off the charts.

Why did grunge die off so fast? I'd say it's because of a shotgun blast to Kurt Cobain's head. Sure, it managed to make an important music figure into a legend, but it also served as the "sell by" date for grunge. It signposted that this was a dead end. Literally.

That's my general take, anyway.

Chula Vista

^^^^ Excellent post! I completely agree. And I was an active guitar player throughout both of those eras.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Plankton

Poison.

Hate that song, but it sticks to your ear like a leach. Or an earwig. Do earwigs suck on earwax? I dunno, but yeah, hate it.

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