Grunge - how did the '80s hair metal bands react?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5e/Native_Tongue_Cover.jpg

I was gonna say on that 70s thread that in the US "punk" didn't really hit until grunge...

they got butthurt and moaned how it took the funmoney out of their bank accounts rock n roll

Not really hair metal but I thought this was a pretty good reaction:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_KQlh6G_ERA8/SYHbHpZPqqI/AAAAAAAABxk/FnhryktOJA0/s400/1993+-+Counterparts+(cover).jpg

Whining About How Supposedly Great Hair Metal Was Until Mean Old Grunge Wiped It Out C/D?

xp right, because jon bon jovi and def leppard have clearly put no money whatsoever in their bank accounts since nirvana came along.

there's always an exception.

though def leppard are nowhere as near as big as they were. Bon Jovi can still sell out stadiums here though.

Def Leppard headlined over a (DeYoung-less) Styx here not too long ago.

what size venue?

A thirty-seat supper club.

Uh guys do you not watch CMT? Def Lep is huge among the mainstream country fans right now.

Uh guys do you not watch CMT?

I thought they branded themselves out of existence.

No, they are always popping up on the Palladium HD channel with different country stars, mostly just Taylor Swift though.

the answer is they hated it then mimicked it and finally grungingly accepted it

apparently grunge was invented in 1977

Alice In Chains opened up for both Van Halen and Metalicca prior to Nevermind.

Def Lep is huge among the mainstream country fans right now.

^^^ haha I thought this exact same thing listening to country radio stations on a road trip yesterday - when did country music become so damn focused on heavy rock rhythms? fuck that shit. a lot of mainstream country radio stations are essentially (really shitty) southern rock stations with a few passably country tracks thrown in

this makes total sense. its like grunge (or hip hop/r&b) never existed in large swaths of north america... hard rock/heavy metal and country have never died in the midwest.

When Bon Jovi came back a few years post grunge years they had to change their sound/image to be more serious the they were.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b31HkdMDHa4

though not extant in the '80s, these guys and this video sum up this period for me. they're clearly hair to the bone, but also crave respect, acceptance and sales from the grunge crowd.

In terms of conforming to the grunge zetigeist, few acts dove in deeper than the Goo Goo Dolls, whose image was completely amorphous prior to this horrific Nirvana-wannabe low:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk-VzGDOcLg

I mean Cobain had a better excuse than heroin there.

Um, Def Leppard may be hitting the country sweet spot for the exact same reason Shania Twain did, no? But anyway, xposting, there is no way Def Leppard is at all equal to Bon Jovi these days. Bon Jovi inexplicably sells out multi-night stands at stadiums. Def Leppard is a few steps up from the state fairs, headlining nostalgia bills.

Bon Jovi executed the most profitable crossover in pop: they were accepted by NASCAR fans.

Oh I wasn't trying to argue that Def Leppard was at the same level as Bon Jovi, no, but I think they are a little more popular than you are giving them credit for. I mean they headlined a tour with Cheap Trick and Poison this summer that hit the First Midwest Amphitheater (or whatever it is now, the old World down in Tinley Park) and thats a pretty sizable shed.

they headlined a tour with Cheap Trick and Poison

Anyway, best hair metal/grunge bridge/divide anecdote I have is from a model UN field trip we took in high school. There was a party at the end, with a DJ, but when he played "Paradise City" he cut the track off early, before the double-time part, so that the model UN nerds wouldn't mosh. Must have been sometime in '91-'92. Then again, GNR is/was the exception to many rules.

"Um, Def Leppard may be hitting the country sweet spot for the exact same reason Shania Twain did, no?"

Mutt Lange?

does bryan adams get played on country radio too?

In terms of conforming to the grunge zetigeist, few acts dove in deeper than the Goo Goo Dolls, whose image was completely amorphous prior to this horrific Nirvana-wannabe low:

uh... if anything Nevermind was a rip-off of the Goo Goo Dolls!!! Hold Me Up was a precursor for Metal Blade-type bands turning pop... long before the Sub Pop crowd did at least.

Oh good God you can't be serious. The Goo Goo Dolls entire template was jangle and/or the Placemats until Nirvana broke through. I mean they covered the Plimsouls on that record. Please watch the video.

You obviously are only aware of their post-nevermind career dude. go listen to their first 3 records instead of reading wiki and amg!

Uh guys do you not watch CMT? Def Lep is huge among the mainstream country fans right now.
Yeah they played Frontier Days in Cheyenne, WY last year! I think the hair band/country thang is pretty dead-on -- there's a cowboy bar in Denver that's always hosting kinda random hair bands like Warrant or the Bret Michaels Experience or some shit.

i always thought it was kinda funny that anthrax pretty ably adjusted to the grunge era by going out and getting the singer from....armored saint.

also: slave to the grind by skid row to thread, that did it well.

the junk monkey's five star fling is pretty good faux replacements too, if you like the metal blade goo goos records

iirc motley crue did it not so well

metallica cut their hair, worked with marianne faithful

isn't this kinda part of the reaction as well?
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_k-Fm2vJ8Fw4/SKLbcPx0NFI/AAAAAAAAAU4/E5x5Epsg5ho/s400/g+n+r+-+spaghetti+incident.jpg

"the spaghetti incident?"

xpost Man, I'd be shocked if Bryan Adams didn't get country play!

Remember when Buffalo Tom was nicknamed Dinosaur Jr. Jr., and Soul Asylum was considered Husker Du redux? Makes the Goo Goo Dolls shift seem weak by comparison.

That was because J produced the first BT album and Bob produced SA's first two.

i mean soul asylum was around pretty early on anyway, as loud fast rules, they were pretty much a part of the same scene as huskers for the most part

slave to the grind by skid row to thread, that did it well

But that was mid '91, by which time lots of hair bands (Cinderella, Poison, etc) were already "getting serious," before grunge broke through. I have an a piece on this in the current issue of Spin btw (didn't notice all the comments until just this second, though):

http://www.spin.com/articles/myth-no-2-nirvana-killed-hair-metal

And yeah, Goo Goo Dolls were totally a Soul Asylum style indie-rock band (as in Replacements + Husker Du - most of their inspriation) when they were on Celluloid and Metal Blade Records in the late '80s.

And nope, Bryan Adams doesn't get on country radio. But Bret Michaels has been a judge on Nasvhille Star and is supposed to be on Hillary Duff's imminent "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" cover, Carrie Underwood covered Motley Crue, Jon Bon Jovi collaborated with Sugarland (and a couple country acts covered "Wanted Dead Or Alive" -- "I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse" etc), Tom Keifer from Cinderella was on an Andy Griggs album a couple years back, some guy frome the Bullet Boys has a country rock band, and so on. So yeah, hair metal still lives, in Nashville.

didn't the dude from Keel end up as country too?

Aargh...not Hillary Duff, I mean Miley Cyrus (whose Nashville connection is her dad, obviously.)

and right, the Keel guy went country too.

I'd definitely second that assertion about skid row - they weren't reacting to grunge so much as courting a "proper" metal audience. after their early patronage by bon jovi went sour, they were trying to shake off the pretty-boy pop-metal thing they'd been saddled with. hence the hardening of the sound (at that time, virtually every pop-metal band claimed they were going to do this), touring with pantera, etc.

come to think of it, the sven gali track above may be a hair-metal response to skid row, rather than grunge.

and of course pantera used to be hair metal too before going for the hardman image

this is true. they presumably shared hair-flattening tips.

If some hair metal bands went grunge, how many went Pantera hardman or nu-metal?

http://media.fanfire.com/images/product/large/TLE/TLECD001.jpg

Btw, Warrant's very good '90s albums -- Dog Eat Dog from '92 and Ultraphobic from '95, both 7 out of 10s in Martin Popoff's metal guide -- might be the best hair-gone-grunge examples of all.

worst grunge move i've heard in recent months is a tape of kevin seconds and his band drop acid. yuck. album came out a month or two after nevermind and 10 so it was an EARLY grunge move. but definitely trying to emulate bleach/seattle stuff. yuck! oh i said that. but its really bad. (i can still remember feeling betrayed by 7 seconds when they put out new wind in 1986. kevin seconds, betrayer of youth!)

waht abt hardcore kids who went metal who went grunge

At the time, Alice in Chains seemed to me more of a metal band than a grunge band, but they got lumped in with grunge since they were from Seattle.

Posted By Kiko Jones
11.23.09 5:21 AM

"This coming from someone who once, non-ironically, raved to me about the merits of Poison, of all people? Pay attention to Chuck Eddy and your brain will turn to mush."

OTM!

very

Yes Chuck their PCTV rip through "Don't Fear the Reaper" was metal as fuck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmAyUr4DqAk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB8l3-mGeSg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDY2DVju1c4

Anyway, I think xhuxk is right. Hair metal - if defined as silly, glammy, party-hardy pop-metal - was already on the way out by '91. If anything killed it, it was probably Appetite for Destruction, with its nasty, snarly, darker vibe - though the long-maned, mascara'd beast took a few years to toddle off.

And besides, what is grunge if not the incorporation of metal elements into hardcore? And then grunge elements were re-incorporated back into metal. So it's not who-killed-whom but rather a long dialogue that extends back to the late '70s at least.

Van Hagar did much to bridge the gap between hair metal and Pearl Jam.

It seems that there were a lot of darker currents in popular music and culture in the late '80s/early '90s, or maybe it just seems that way, since the '80s Reagan years were an unusually sunny time for pop culture. But it wasn't just in rock with grunge supplanting pop-metal, you also have gangsta rap (NWA, Ice-T, Cypress Hill, etc.) supplanting fun party rap, the cartoon violence of '80s action-comedy movies being supplanted by the grittier, more realistic violence of Tarantino, etc. - you even have a very dark movie like "Silence of the Lambs" about cannibalism and serial killers sweeping the Oscars in '91. So something was going on in the culture. Maybe it was a reaction to losing the optimistic, grandfatherly presence of Reagan for the dour, slightly creepy Bush Sr. Or a reaction to the uncertainty caused by the fall of Communism. Or the violence related to the crack cocaine epidemic in the inner cities.

"or maybe it just seems that way, since the '80s Reagan years were an unusually sunny time for pop culture."

i'm having trouble remembering the sunny parts! do you mean bobby mcferrin?

It just seems like if you look at the top-selling music, movies and the highest-rated TV shows, etc, it was a more light-hearted, less serious, more optimistic time as compared to the late '80s/early '90s. I realize this could be hard to quantify though.

Whoa on getting all historically accurate and intelligent and shit. I mean grunge was a complete media creation and did not kill hair metal, I was just making a goof thread b/c hair metal is something that absolutely fell from fashion and was derided as false and overblown a la Prog/Arena which was not particularly "killed" by Punk Music but rather Punk as a proposition. Grunge was part of the total Alternative proposition that killed Harmless Music and the '70s music industry dynamic (which survived Punk and flourished through the home taping is killing music era, printed absurd profits on CD markups, etc). It was briefly difficult to be taken seriously as a musician if you were not serious about the content of and popular response to your music. The same white men in tattered clothes was a comically inverse reaction to glam/hair metal and the industry turned comparable profits on Pearl Jam, Nirvana, STP et al. Ultimately all of the major grunge acts were suckered-in or only to happy to help an industry they purported to deride.

a case could be made for or against i guess. there was a lot of fear and loathing too. post-vietnam death trips. threat of nuclear destruction. slasher-mania. sly. arnold.

then again, there were the pointer sisters. mtv was pretty upbeat and colorful.

x-post

Ultimately all of the major grunge acts were suckered-in or only to happy to help an industry they purported to deride.

*drops dishes*

threat of nuclear destruction

I think that having this in the back of people's minds may have contributed to the shallow, materialistic, fun vibe of the '80s - it was like, "Don't think about anything serious, it will just bum you out."

Wait, so where does "99 Luftballons" fit into that equation?

see also Prince's 1999

Nuclear paranoia was definitely a current that runs through the '80s, along with the sharp rise in homelessness, urban decay, and lots of other unhappy things. But the biggest-selling phenomena of '80s pop culture were things like the upbeat idealism of Michael Jackson, the hedonistic fun attitudes of Madonna or Ferris Bueller, the larger-than-life heroism of Sly, Arnold or the A-Team, or the perfect parental role model of a Bill Cosby. The dark underbelly of life in America in the '80s remained mostly out of sight in the mainstream popular culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTqElk6TpgY

upbeat idealism of Michael Jackson

Uh, did you ever listen to his lyrics? (The music could be pretty dark, too, come to think of it.)

There was a lot more to Madonna than "hedonistic fun," too, as I recall.

And I'm pretty sure Springsteen and Mellencamp had some big songs about, like, the recession and stuff.

also doesn't Bobby McFerrin commit suicide in the Don't Worry Be Happy video

Whatever. Not trying to be cranky -- and pop music did sound pretty celbratory though much of the '80s, one of the things I liked about it -- but there were counter-examples everywhere. And even a lot of the celebratory stuff had a underside that didn't seem quite so optimistic. Lots of paranoia songs, for one thing. (Rockwell, the Police, Men At Work, whoever.) And by 1987 -- hardly the end of the decade -- you had GnR and P.E. and a big album by Metallica, too. ("The Message" was 1982, and it wasn't alone then.)

I think that upbeat idealism and hedonistic fun were a large part of what the broader audience who bought those Madonna and Michael Jackson records was hearing, though of course there was more nuance there if one listened for it.

Any generalization about an entire decade is going to have many exceptions, but what I'm saying isn't terribly novel. Many observers at the time commented on it: The "Daydream Nation" of Sonic Youth's album title. The bafflement of liberals at the hypnotic effectiveness of Reagan's pied-piper act. The alienated subcultures of goths and pig-fuckers who mocked the sunny mood of the mainstream. They were reacting to the same feeling.

one of the only parts about "fargo rock city" that i thought was really good was when klosterman was talking about how you always read that in the 80s everyone was living under some cloud of nuclear war and fear, and he was like "i don't remember even caring or thinking about it as a kid"...i was the same way, none of that stuff seemed real at all, i just wanted to play with star wars toys and ride bike and stuff

I was a kid in the 80s and was totally freaked out about nuclear annihilation - but then I had parents who were part of a anti-nuke group and let me watch stuff like The Day After and Testament

but yeah my emotional/general memories of the 80s boiled down to "wow shit is really terrible what is everybody else so goddamned cheery about"

culturally it really seems its closest analog is the 50s - this outward facade of wide-eyed optimistic consumerism papering over paranoia, racial tensions, etc.

Pretty sure little kids in the '60s, '70s, '90s, and '00s mostly just wanted to play with their toys and ride their bikes, too. (I dunno, maybe a day or two in mid-September 2001 might've been different, but then again I lived in New York.)

It's possible I'm letting my personal experience color my view of the decade, because I was pretty much just a kid in the '80s, so naturally things would have looked different to me if I had been an unemployed rust-belt autoworker or something. But it does seem like there are lots of examples that fit the overall pop-culture trend narrative of mid-'80s optimism giving way to late '80s/early '90s grit and realism.

i think you are right. lots of stuff was hidden from view. there was a definite party in the ruins vibe too. rome before the fall. i was miserable and worried about the bomb and my heroes were joy division, crass, and others like them. so, i was not the norm.

i got all my news from subhumans u.k. lyrics.

i remember lots of talk of nuclear war and how evil the soviets were but i never once thought it might happen.

Grew up two miles away from a primary target - general attitude among the kids was "if it happens, whatcha gonna do?"

I was in the Army for four years in the middle of the decade, setting up communication rigs on hilltops within spitting distance of the East German border, so it seemed real to me. I mean, "99 Luftballons" was a really fun song and all, but it wasn't only fun. (The Clash seemed really big with soldiers at the time, as far as I could tell.)

i was definitely paranoid during the 80's. might have been the coke though. i thought it was pretty evil overall. the reagan sunny 50's thing hiding all the repub evil. and moving to philly in the late 80's during crack fever and homeless epidemic just confirmed all my worst fears about everything.

The '80s were the beginning of the end. That's all so obvious now.

Yeah, I don't remember ever being scared of nuclear war, either (even though I recall in the mid-80s seeing a poll where kids reported it as their #1 fear), but then I was born in '79 and always figured it was the kids just a few years older than me that would've been more cognizant of it.

i was born in 73 and thought it must be older kids who were worried.

http://www.international.ucla.edu/media/images/gilmoregirls3-lrg.jpg

does bryan adams get played on country radio too?

There was a Crossroads crossover show with him and Jason Aldean doing each other's hits -- with Aldean it's "hits" since his songs haven't yet been as successful. There are some similarities, although Aldean's more a Bad Company
copyist.

I was born in 73 and thought it must be older kids who were worried.

Maybe. I played this game a few times, never got very worked up over it. Three Mile Island, which was 50 miles to my west in '79, was far more 'interesting' for a short period of time than potential thermonuclear bombardment.

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2006/07/ultimatum-how-i-learned-to-stop.html

I was born in '74 and tried to build a bomb shelter in my parents' basement. But they wouldn't buy me 1,000 sandbags.

I was born in '73 and had nightmares about nuclear annihilation. But I just embraced GWAR and Ministry and hoped for the best Mad Max-style dystopia possible.

does bryan adams get played on country radio too?

he does in Canada.

i think there is a law though.

It seems that there were a lot of darker currents in popular music and culture in the late '80s/early '90s, or maybe it just seems that way, since the '80s Reagan years were an unusually sunny time for pop culture. But it wasn't just in rock with grunge supplanting pop-metal, you also have gangsta rap (NWA, Ice-T, Cypress Hill, etc.) supplanting fun party rap, the cartoon violence of '80s action-comedy movies being supplanted by the grittier, more realistic violence of Tarantino, etc.

― o. nate, Friday, December 18, 2009 12:30 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

= me getting all possessive over lame CW truism

So, in what sense did "punk-influenced indie/alt culture" not already exist in the '80s again? (Not even gonna touch the silly "cartoon pop idols" stuff. As if '90s idols were any less cartoonish.)

The 80's were like John Hughes films and Rambo and Rocky sequels on one hand and shit like Blue Velvet on the other hand. New kids on the block and Van Halen on one hand, Appetite For Destruction and NWA on the other hand.

The 90's were more like Forrest Gump on one hand vs Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas on the other hand. Oasis, Barenaked Ladies and En Vogue on one hand, and Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, and Radiohead on the other hand.

I think the biggest cultural differences between the two decades are reflected in television. Married with Children, Roseanne, Seinfeld and the Simpsons vs Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court, Alf.

In the 80s, we all loved OJ. 90s not as much.

One reason I don't buy what you're saying, contenderizer, is that even within what you call "alt culture" it didn't look particularly gritty, and grunge was just one concern among many. Sure, RHCP and Green Day were punk-influenced, but they weren't "no-nonsense"---they pretty much celebrated nonsense! And that's just to look at the hugest bands of the era---when I remember listening to alt radio in the 90s I think of novelties like "Flagpole Sitta" and "Banditos" (and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" too). That was a 1990s for a lot of us---and even the jam bands you mention were pretty far from having authenticity fetishes as I understand that term---the Spin Doctors fit right into the pop novelty culture I loved, as did Blues Traveler, and Phish has always been a goofy pop band.

I mean, you can focus just on the "serious" sides of all these bands, or just point to Alice In Chains or Soundgarden or the album cuts on Doggystyle or whatever but I don't see the pop 90s as anymore "serious" than the 80s. It just had a different bunch of goofballs.

i very distinctly remember when I first learned about nuclear war, it was from a drunken uncle of mine, I had to be about 10 or maybe 11 at the oldest, and I completely freaked out, went for a long walk by myself afterward, terrified, and had nightmares that night. that would have been around 82

On which side of the "serious, artistic"/"cheesy, happy, pop" divide did the "like a prayer" video fall? And which decade was it? late 80's or early 90's? Seriously, don't remember.

It is interesting though that people remember the 80's as a cheesy decade and the 90's as an uber serious one. I wonder why that is.

Interesting. Like jaymc, I was born in 1979. I totally remember being terrified of nuclear annihilation as a kid, of genuinely thinking the world was fundamentally twisted for a Cold War to even be possible.

(I listened to Michael Jackson and Bon Jovi FWIW.)

I think that second "of" should be left out of that sentence.

I have an a piece on this in the current issue of Spin btw (didn't notice all the comments until just this second, though):

http://www.spin.com/articles/myth-no-2-nirvana-killed-hair-metal

― xhuxk, Friday, December 18, 2009 10:07 AM

OTM and thanks for making me feel just a little less alone on this one

But Bret Michaels has been a judge on Nasvhille Star and is supposed to be on Hillary Duff's imminent "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" cover

every rose was never anything BUT a country song!

the difference between the naive goofiness of the 80s and the dark seriousness of the 90s is one of scant degrees, imo. it's not like the universe was suddenly upended or anything. but it's fairly easy (and in the way of all gross reductions, inaccurate, but i think still useful) to reduce the 80s to a time of willed innocence. the pop of the 80s, as exemplified by madonna, prince and michael jackson, was about fantasy characters that did not inhabit the real world. they were exaggerated, dramatic, "cartoonish" and unashamedly silly. they lived only in and on TV.

(there are of course a MILLION exceptions to this paper-thin rule. the countervailing fashion for rootsy authenticity, for instance. but bear with me for a minute...)

this naivete is typified by "new wave", american pop's saleable version of punk: devo, the cars, the b-52s, talking heads, blondie and even the go-gos. and by the john huges and steven spielberg films that reshaped the era's cinema.

the first inklings of a hard new sensibility were felt, i think, in the mid-to-late 80s in a number of pop niches. in the indie/alt underground's "just folks" resistance to capitalism and corporate cooption, in guns n roses & metallica's rejection of hair metal drag, and in gangsta rap's emphasis on thug hardness & street cred.

indie culture took great pains to announce that its performers and their art were not commercial confections that arrived from on high. they were the product of the creative imagination of people just like you (this has always been the case for all artists & art, of course, but the mythology of indie alt music stresses this, while the dominant mythology of most 80s pop tended to distance the performer from the audience - again, imo). "flying the flannel" & "book yr own life" are the purest reductions of this ideology imaginable. what guns & roses & metallica did was similar. metallica was quite clear about the meaning of their dress, its identification with the "real fans" and its opposition to MTV's "phony" hair metal ethos. same goes for the street/thug hardness of gangster rap. gangsta staked its entire identity on authenticity.

all of these pop subcultures produced music that took pains to present itself as "more real" than mainstream pop, and they seemed to be embraced by fans in that spirit. were they really more real? of course not, and that's not my point. my point is that the dominant mythology of 90s pop, as it was born in the 80s, was centered around a narrative of realness, of truth.

each of these subcultures bloomed out in the 90s, and in the process became more cartoonish and distorted, but retaining the essential mythology of their realness. and i think this realness fetish persists in pop, though it hasn't been so dominant for quite some time. (compare here the james bond movies of the 80s with those of the present day.)

my point is that the dominant mythology of 90s pop, as it was born in the 80s, was centered around a narrative of realness, of truth.

and yeah i think the dominant mythology of 80s pop was a sort of "laugh while the world burns" faux-innocence. to the extent that this was not true (as in the "rootsy authenticity" farm aid business i mentioned above), pop's real person interaction with the real world was conducted in a spirit of wide-eyed earnestness and goodwill. in the more cynical 90s, this would become a tortured punk howl - a much more teenage version of real concern. and maybe that's the key i'm missing. it's not so much that the 80s were fake and the 90s real, but that the 90s seemed built around this teenage rejection of the presumed fakeness of the 80s. That coupled with an embrace of a rather juvenile vision of the real, one predicated either on angst & toughness (rap & nu metal), or on indie-style "artistic seriousness" (which would really take off in the 00s).

This isn't meant to explain everything. You could build an equally valid 90s counter-narrative around boy bands and the continuity of "prefab" pop, but that doesn't really discredit what I'm talking about. There's always more than one narrative unfolding.

xp haha yeah!

I dunno; I get that you're constructing a narrative, but it's not the only one, nor do I see any reason to think it's the "truest" one.

E.g. it's hard for me to see what Metallica authentically stands for, since they were pretty knowingly cartoonish: it's not like any of them had been strapped to the electric chair or shot up in war. I see that we can move the goalposts and say "oh, I mean their *image*" but e.g. "Trapped Under Ice" is a really FUNNY song and I think the band "meant it" that way; but those are my 80s and maybe not yours.

I don't see where RHCP or Green Day or Weezer fits into the "cynical 90s"; and all of those bands are punk-derived. And all were cartoons and that's why they were appealing!

well, punk comes with the teen-cred "authenticity" mythology built in, no matter what supposedly punk bands do or how they act/sound

this differentiates it from new wave, which has a built-in "we're so fake! isn't it hilarious! LET'S PARTY!" payload

plus RHCP were clearly an outlier wr2 what i'm talking about. an example of there being more than one narrative in play. punkification of pop radio (a la nirvana, green day, sublime, etc) can be taken as a sign of cred-fixated, nu-era teen realness, but also as the development of the next wave of fun rock party music. both make sense, imo.

i probably go overboard in trying to make my case universal. it's just one thread among many, but seems particularly significant to me.

I think there's certainly some truth to the narrative that Contenderizer is proposing; in the 80s thread I was trying to explain why Prince couldn't really make it from the 80s to the 90s, and Contenderizer outlining nicely the sort of trend changes that were the cause of this. I think Prince really is a prime example of an artist failing to adjust to these sort of changes. He exemplifies many of the trends of 80s pop/rock people have mentioned above: the "party while the world burns" attitude (for which "1999" was practically the anthem), the colourful playfulness and a certain detachment from "reality", postmodern roleplay and continous changing of images and personas (the ultimate example of which is blending of gender, something which he did with his "Camille" tunes). But when the 90s came, "realness" (as outlined by Contenderizer above) became a much more important in popular music, as the dominance of grunge, gangsta rap, etc prove. Prince tried to adapt to that, in the early 90s he tried to assume a tougher, more "real" hip-hop image, but no one really took it seriously. His artistic image, his persona(s), was so much tied to those 80s ideals of a pop star that he couldn't really turn into a 90s star.

Now, Western popular music has never been an monolithic field, of course there are always a lot of exceptions to be found to any sort of simplified narrative, but I do feel there was some sort of a general paradigm change between the 80s and the early 90s (which of course was tied to larger social changes such as the end of Cold War, global recession, etc), and fall of artists like Prince was at least partly due to this. It's worth noting that out of the triumvirate of 80s megapopstars, i.e. MJ/Prince/Madonna, only Madonna managed to keep her popularity throughout the 90s, and that was partly because she discarded her playful, detached "party girl" image of the 80s in favour of a more serious image(s) and persona(s).

"Contenderizer outlines nicely"

Contenderizer and Tuomas' ideas here suddenly made me think about how skilled Sonic Youth have been at riding these shifts. Particularly in their first 10 years, they were able to project party-while-the-world-burns alongside high-art and street-smart in a way the other NYC noise acts couldn't or didn't try. Just "Death Vally 69" and "Get into the Groovy" shows how they could jump from metallic splatter-film to Pee Wee Herman ironic-naivte. But both are very 80s exercises in "bad taste." They were able to leave that behind in the 90s and get by on their "modern composer" and "DIY rock" personas.

what guns & roses & metallica did was similar. metallica was quite clear about the meaning of their dress, its identification with the "real fans" and its opposition to MTV's "phony" hair metal ethos.

Actually, one big selling point of even DEF LEPPARD, at first, is that they "dressed like regular guys not like rock stars" -- I'm talking real early '80s here. They (and some of other NWOBHM bands) were supposed to be just like their fans. Like, uh, the Ramones or somebody (not that the Ramones actually dressed like their fans -- but we're talking marketing and image here.) Also, TONS of '80s alt/indie rock, from Replacements to Husker Du to REM on down, was supposed to be "regular guy" stuff. That's what the grunge bands were drawing on --- that and all the meaner/schticker/harder edged hardcore and pigfuck bands that were hardly obscure to anybody paying attention in the '80s.

It is interesting though that people remember the 80's as a cheesy decade and the 90's as an uber serious one. I wonder why that is.

Judging from this thread, it's mainly because they were really young in the '80s, and only noticed certain things. And then, in the '90s (biggest musical act: Garth Brooks) they ignored lots of other things.

Shania pretty big too in the '90s, obv. (And if we're talking hair metal to country trajectories, they're both huge. By the way, actually, in the '80s, I observed that lots of the hair metal power ballads -- by bands like Cinderella, say -- sounded like '70s Southern Rock ballads, and also that songs like "Every Rose" and "Wanted Dead Or Alive" were very obsessed with cowboys. So right, country was in there all along.)

And then, in the '90s (biggest musical act: Garth Brooks)

Only in the US, in Europe for example he's pretty much unknown.

And Shania is basically known only for "That Don't Impress Me Much".

Also, TONS of '80s alt/indie rock, from Replacements to Husker Du to REM on down, was supposed to be "regular guy" stuff. That's what the grunge bands were drawing on --- that and all the meaner/schticker/harder edged hardcore and pigfuck bands that were hardly obscure to anybody paying attention in the '80s.

Yeah, but the during the 80s these acts were considered alternative or underground, whereas in the early 90s this sort "keeping it real" attitude became the mainstream with Nirvana, Pearl Jam, gangsta rap, etc. The point Contenderizer and I are making is not that appreciation of "realness" wasn't something that wasn't to be found in 80s music, just that in the 90s it became a much bigger part of mainstream popular music than it was in the 80s.

R.E.M. were pretty darn mainstream in the '80s, actually. (And ""punk-influenced indie/alt culture" doesn't mean "mainstream" anyway.)

And then, in the '90s (biggest musical act: Garth Brooks)
Only in the US, in Europe for example he's pretty much unknown.

Good point! Far more serious musical acts, such as Ace of Base and Aqua, were apparently much bigger in Europe in the '90s.

hahaha

And Dr. Bombay and Los Umbrellos and Mo-Do and Jordy -- can't forget them! (I actually get the idea that Garth and Shania were better known in much of Europe than Tuomas lets on, but I won't worry about that.)

When I went to Europe in the late 90s, Shania was everywhere.

Maybe after "That Don't Impress Me Much", but that was in the late 90s already, and the period I'm talking about here is the early 90s. Before that song she hadn't had any hits in Europe.

Garth Brooks has managed to get one album and two singles in the UK top 20, and I'm pretty sure he's even less popular in most of the rest of Europe. If I remember correctly, he's never had any record in the Finnish top 40, for example.

The gritty 90s everybody is talking about is actually a 6 year window, from 1991 to 1996. In 1997 all that realness began to give way to Spice Girls, Backstreet, N Sync and in 1999, Britney Spears.

The realness kick sort of crested with Hootie and the Blowfish, a workmanlike band of regular guys who sold a ridiculously large amount of records. Bigger than anybody in the 2000s, fer sure.

And the biggest selling record in the heart of the authentic and real 90s was the soundtrack to The Bodyguard.

My point? Don't really have one.

nice article xhuxk

Yeah, but the during the 80s these acts were considered alternative or underground, whereas in the early 90s this sort "keeping it real" attitude became the mainstream with Nirvana, Pearl Jam, gangsta rap, etc.

springsteen,u2 and petty and co weren't keeping it real in the 80s?

The best selling single ever also came from the 90s, this gem that championed authenticity and realness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1pIboUZQF4

that is not even the bayside boys remix is it??? that's just the original spanish macarena/"Non Stop" version - way less annoying than the remix that got bigger airplay

WARNING: SHIT IS ABOUT TO GET REAL AUTHENTIC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwCt0YQPn7g

Big 80's musical acts, other than Prince, who weren't quite as dominant in the 90's:

Dolly Parton
Elvis Costello
Joan Jett
David Bowie
Willie Nelson
Tears For Fears
Paul Simon

Very few acts have even a small run of albums that are culturally huge. Very very very few acts get to do it for going on 25 years. Even with ones who stay huge celebrities, like Bowie, despite their new albums not selling that well.

Also the extremely frivolous Midnight Oil (whose singer was, admittedly, a bit of a cartoon in his own way. But then so was Eddie Vedder.)

Btw, the idea above that '80s "new wave" was all "we're so fake! isn't it hilarious! LET'S PARTY!" is pretty specious as well, given that a few of the biggest new wave acts of the decade were U2, R.E.M., Depeche Mode, and some band led by Sting (who actually sold more records as they got more pompous).

I was born in 1981 so I only really started noticing pop music in the '90s but I don't remember it feeling particularly serious - in terms of non-serious stuff I was aware of at the time (off the top of my head): cartoony chart rave, novelty eurodance, some fairly funny hip-hop (Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill), pop ragga, ska/pop punk, the chirpy sub-Blur side of britpop, big beat, the Beck/Pavement side of US slacker indie.

U2 of course got less serious in the '90s.

One thing that hasn't been addressed is the acoustic/unplugged revolution that toned things down around 89 (?): MTV unplugged, Tesla covering "Signs", Bon Jovi doing "Wanted..." acoustic on the MTV awards, then GnR Lies, pretty sure Poison did an early Unplugged sesh as well.

wrt: 1980s movies, there was this one from 1984 that pretty sure all the over 35 american ilxors saw:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_I4WgBfETc

xp Honestly you could go and on with what I just said about '80s new wave, esp. after 1982 or so (i.e., the vast majority of the decade) -- Doubt anybody really considered, say, Tears For Fears or Simple Minds "hilarious party bands." And people like the Eurythmics and Pretenders had at least as much "we're making sincere emotional statements" to their image and music as "we're so fake." Even Frankie Goes To Hollywood had their second biggest hit with a war protest song (and Culture Club did one of those, too.)

Yeah, I think this fake/authentic contrast says more about the perceiver than it does about the 80s/90s.

The Smiths (never huge in America, but still pretty important) fit in there somewhere too. And Echo and the Bunnymen. And Gang Of Four, and New Order, and goth-rock in general. Etc.

Instead of killing glam, seems like grunge revived hard (aka electric, distorted) rock as there was a huge acoustic trend in popular rock music ("Jane Says", "Patience", "Signs", "Fast Car", "Losing My Religion", etc)

Plenty of po-faced bands came in the wake of Live Aid.

plus the 90's is when punk truly became party music. as opposed to dour ultra-serious 80's stuff. people had been looking for a way to sell punk to kids for decades and they finally did this with all the warped tour stuff.

'Doubt anybody really considered, say, Tears For Fears or Simple Minds "hilarious party bands."'

If you've ever seen those K-Tel Best of the 80s TV ads, they'll put "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" right next to "Caribbean Queen" yes they will

Even Frankie Goes To Hollywood had their second biggest hit with a war protest song

a sophomore trend?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDewDnVsNUY

I think you people are exaggerating and simplifying what Contenderizer and I were trying to say. We weren't saying that 80s popular music was all about "hilarious party bands". The point was that a certain playfulness and detachment from "gritty" realism and "everyday life" was more obvious in mainstream popular music back then than in the early 90s, but that doesn't necessarily exclude politics. Yes, Frankie Goes to Hollywood did release a political song as their second single, but it's still miles away from "Jeremy" or "Killing in the Name". The music video for "Two Tribes" features Reagan and Gorbachev having mud fight - how many early 90s political bands can you imagine doing the same?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZyxYL753w4

w tuomas here. of course there are other things going on in pop, and what i'm talking about is largely confined to a portion of the mainstream rock & hip-hop narrative. country doesn't figure in at all, though i realize that's a false dichotomy to some extent. i leave the untangling of country & country crossover's storyline to someone else. and many of the bands xhuxk is mentioning as "new wave" don't, it seems to me, properly belong to that genre. simple minds american pop was in a new romantic mold, and thus different from the early 80s, specifically american new wave i was talking about. the new romantics sold a vision of cool sophistication that would similarly come to seem a little absurd in the ripped-jeans, angst-ridden 90s, but that's a tangent anyway.

of course there are countless examples of acts that don't fit this formula, but it seems self-evident to me that a series of late-80s and early-mid 90s pop movements significantly transformed at least part of the american musical landscape, in a way that prized a sullen-teen vision of hardness, realness and punk-style rejection. gangsta rap, grunge & nu-metal being the obvious examples, but i think you see elements of this in other musical genres (ascent of indie values and bands) and even media. further, it seems to me (and this was tuomas point) that many mainstream pop acts of the 80s struggled to adapt to these changes by releasing angstier &/or somehow more "serious" product, some successfully and some not.

also, i do agree that this "90s thing" i'm talking abt properly began in the mid-to-late 80s (master of puppets = 86, appetite = 87, straight outta compton = 88), and probably died off with the short lived "return to rock" mania at the end of the 90s/top of the 00s.

"This negative energy just makes me stronger .... Yeah!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-j31YoEeRU

"also, i do agree that this "90s thing" i'm talking abt properly began in the mid-to-late 80s"

okay...

I also like the creative "new romantics were not new wave" formulation (which definitely contradicts every new wave radio show I heard at the time. Though I probably wished they weren't new wave back then.)

the 90's to me just seemed like a streamlining and mainstreaming of 80's stuff. 80's noise rock becomes more catchy less noisy grunge. gangsta rap becomes g funk. ministry becomes manson. lots of pop punk in the 80's but now it had a bigger budget and bigger labels.

There was definitely a point when marketing macho homophobia and misogyny using rock & roll transvestites became untenable. Somewhere along the line it became backwards baseball caps and clown makeup.

the playaz change but the game remains the same. or something.

a certain playfulness and detachment from "gritty" realism and "everyday life" was more obvious in mainstream popular music back then

That's true. But a lot of that is an inadvertent by-product of the fashion and style, those ridiculous clothes and hairstyles. 25 years later, it's hard to sound sincerley socially conscious in shoulder pads.

I also like the creative "new romantics were not new wave" formulation (which definitely contradicts every new wave radio show I heard at the time. Though I probably wished they weren't new wave back then.)

― xhuxk, Sunday, December 20, 2009 3:35 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

this is totally fair. i was using the term "new wave" to define the specifically american bands that were branded that way in the late 70s and early 80s, as that's my primary point of reference & interest here. and i do tend to assume that others use the term that way, defining most of the contemporaneous/corresponding UK bands and trends separately, as pub rock, post punk, technopop, etc.

but that mindset & distinction are perhaps not as common as i imagine, and i wasn't taking care to define my terms. mea culpa. so let me ask: what's a good, specific term for the first wave of dance/pop-oriented, non-stereotypically-punk CBGB's bands - and for their american contemporaries? (again, i mean the likes of talking heads, blondie, devo, the cars, the b-52s, etc.) i ask cuz many of the bands & artists constructing that moment in specifically american pop did, it seems to me, share certain characteristics - characteristics that make it worth defining this moment/scene as a distinct genre, in isolation.

i'm focusing on this specific moment & scene because i think these artists were important in the shaping of a naive & playful dance & party pop aesthetic that became dominant in america during the early 80s, helped along by MTV's youth-oriented, "next generation" POV & marketing. though i haven't been clear about it, the "young rock" vibe of early-days MTV is a core element of my argument (symbolized as much by the buggles as by any other single band, and yeah buggles = english).

i say that because what i'm trying to describe as tough 90s realness seems like a response response to MTV's first generation stars & aesthetic - to MTV's successful marketing of/waveriding of an 80s fashion for playful pop plasticity. understand that this puts perhaps undue emphasis on MTV as the locus of america's pop music culture in the 80s and 90s.

that many mainstream pop acts of the 80s struggled to adapt to these changes by releasing angstier &/or somehow more "serious" product, some successfully and some not.

Same goes for some pop acts from the 90's! (or acts that had their biggest success in the 90's)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/36/Mc_hammer_funky_headhunter.jpg

Yes, Frankie Goes to Hollywood did release a political song as their second single, but it's still miles away from "Jeremy" or "Killing in the Name". The music video for "Two Tribes" features Reagan and Gorbachev having mud fight - how many early 90s political bands can you imagine doing the same?

Sorry to be pedantic, but it was Reagan and Chernenko. But I think "Jeremy" and "Killing in the Name" are not particularly representative of the 90's -- plenty of grunge-associated bands had goofy/satirical videos that were mega-hits, the first two that come to mind are Blind Melon's "No Rain" and Nirvana's "In Bloom" (OK, these are not "political bands" but still).

pearl jam were a political band?

Well, I didn't call anyone a political band ... I'm just saying that even "serious" grunge-ish bands weren't always so serious.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d1/Beastieboys_checkyourhead.jpg

And Shania is basically known only for "That Don't Impress Me Much".

man you euros have terrible taste in shania songs

"Well, I didn't call anyone a political band"

i was reading the post you were quoting. about jeremy and political bands.

i mean i guess pearl jam are known for being political. jeremy is more of a luka/fast cars kinda thing though. the kind of video that the 80's had too many of.

black hole sun is still my all time fave grunge video. and maybe even song.

Oh God how I hate/d Soundgarden. The epitome of hair metal continuity in "new era" clothes. To each theirs scott.

black hole sun is a good song!

its the only soundgarden i ever liked. but i haven't heard a lot. i liked alice in chains a little better. loved their rooster song. and i ended up liking stp more than any of them.

for some reason i went on a drunken nirvana youtube spree last week! i watched hours of nirvana stuff! probably more nirvana than i've ever heard at one time. i don't know what it taught me. it was kinda fascinating though.

I should be more forthcoming though - I would level the same (and worse) charges against STP and AiC, but was a major sucker for "Them Bones", "Would" and a couple of the STP singles while they were on the air. I mean I remember swaying emotionally to "Big Empty" while shit-faced at a teenage house party.

So, yeah.

black was the only pearl jam song i ever liked. cuz i'm goth.

Actually, if any band was "the epitome of hair metal continuity in "new era" clothes", it was STP. I couldn't stand them. Soundgarden had their moments though.

Absolutely STP were. Soundgarden at least lays claim to SST in '88.

Many hair bands went the KMFDM/NIN wannabe route. Shotgun Messiah comes to mind. Eventually Danzig. And then there was that one GNR song on UYI2...

I figured SST was paid to release Soundgarden for college radio/indie cred, no?

That doesn't seem very likely. They were on Sub Pop before that.

black not for you was the only pearl jam song i ever liked. cuz i'm goth garage.

STP and Soundgarden both have good if uneven best-of CDs, fwiw (both with a couple likeable songs missing.)

I still don't understand what people heard in Alice In Chains, and probably never will.

Sub Pop Soungarden stuff (first 45 and EP) was still probably the best things they ever did though.

I mean it's kind of like Scott said above -- the Seattle sound (just like NIN-type industrial, and whatever the Butthole Surfers and White Zombie and Meat Puppets and Flaming Lips and Soul Asylum etc eventually had hits with) was an '80s sound that sounded a whole lot more compromised and less wildass by the time it finally hit the mainstream in the '90s. So it seems really strange to pretend the '90s suddenly turned music dangerous. (Though, I guess if you never heard anything in the '80s that didn't get on MTV, you might somehow get that delusion.)

Really, though, there's not a huge distance from the Zeppelin rips that say Whitesnake and Kingdom Come and the Cult were hitting with in the late '80s and the ones Soundgarden hit with the '90s. So even if you were only seeing MTV in the '80s, I don't get it.

(And Soul Asylum never sounded particularly wildass even in the '80s of course. But they did sound like a Husker/Replacements hybrid, just like sundry other '80s bands -- Squirrel Bait etc -- whose synthesis Nirvana eventually took to the platinum level.)

And Flipper and Black Flag were the early '80s. (But obviously I'm beating a dead horse here; I should go eat breakfast instead.)

I figured SST was paid to release Soundgarden for college radio/indie cred, no?

― Sock Puppet Pizza Delivers To The Forest (Sock Puppet Queso Con Concentrate), Monday, December 21, 2009 4:34 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

what the fuck? that's a ridiculous claim. just ridiculous. early soundgarden was one of the bands MOST in line with the lineage of late period black flag.

Yeah, I thought that was maybe a joke.

Also wanna add that '80s Seattle (Malfunkshun / U-Men / Green River / Skin Yard) totally kills '90s Seattle in terms of strangeness and raunch. One of the things that bugged me about grunge in the '90s (even before the Candlebox/Collective Soul/Live/Silverchair/Bush/Creed era kicked in) wasn't just that it usually didn't seem to me to pull off pop-metal very well (at least compared to '80s hair metal); it didn't do grunge very well. It sounded compromised from all sides. (And still managed to cough a few good radio hits regardless, of course.)

yeah, is there an example of that happening? of a band paying SST to release their records?

"Big Dumb Sex" was my favorite Soundgarden song in high school. I wasn't aware that it was supposed to be a parody of hair metal until well after I had pissed off my parents for months by cranking it at full volume.

eah, is there an example of that happening? of a band paying SST to release their records?

no but I'l bet there were plenty of bands who had SST release their records and never got paid anything (and paid for the recording themselves).

is there a musical equivalent of vanity press publishing? arguably 80s indie, maybe?

sorry that's off-topic but I was never crazy about grunge or hairmental

(yes, the SST payola post was a joke attempt made on little sleep.)

Does nibble around the "fake indie debut" issue, which was widespread (GNR, Jane's, Nirvan-- oooooh).

smashing pumpkins did it, right? fake indie single before the debut.

They did a self-release and then gave a couple of tracks to Sub Pop, both of which were sort of fertilizer moves because I think Corgan was already hashing out their offer from Caroline.

Wait, so are you saying that GnR were maybe already signed to Geffen when they put out their Uzi Suicide EP, and Jane's to Warner Bros. when they put out their Triple X album? (Hence, building word of mouth and more grass-roots credibility for the kidz? If so, I hadn't heard that before, but it seems possible. If not, how exactly were they "fake"?)

Or maybe you just Uzi Suicide wasn't a legit label in the first place? (I've never thought of this before, but did they even put out any other records? Triple X obviously did, over the years, albeit sporadically.)

Wiki, fwiw: UZI Suicide was a record label that was created by Guns N' Roses to release their first record, Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide. The next record (Appetite for Destruction) was released through Geffen Records although UZI Suicide legally remained in control of this, and all other Guns N' Roses recordings (effectively giving the band an additional degree of control over their music) until the company was closed down when the band went into hiatus in the late 90s. The label also re-released albums by the Finnish glam band Hanoi Rocks.

Dave Navarro states it in no uncertain terms in the Jane's oral history - Triple X was a dead entity at that point, they used it as a way to invoke its rep and get product out, to stage the Warner Bros. coup. Warners allowed and was aware of it, it was marketing.

Uzi Suicide was a fake Geffen imprint. http://www.ladydairhean.0catch.com/Axl/Guides/Suicide.htm

i thought the first pumpkins single was payed for with big label money. or that's what i heard way back when.

Wiki claims in re: Pumpkins that "I Am One" was money Corgan's grandmother left him for tuition. Would be more inclined to believe that as Caroline was hardly a "big label" to begin with and he was a major self-starter.

awwww...

"One was recorded in 1990 and was the Pumpkins' first release and first on Limited Potential. This recording was financed with the money from Corgan's college tuition fund left by his grandmother."

x-post

yeah probably just a scurrilous rumor some hipster told me back in the grunge days.

Did not need to see the cover of that single ever again. Wonder if my college pal that had it has checked the going eBay rates.

the limited potential label that the first pumpkins single was on was started by a guy named mike potential! great name. here's a fun post of his from idolator:

Yeah, I've known the dude since we were twenty. I put out his first single, helped hook him up with Butch Vig for Gish, hooked him up with Sub Pop for their single of the month, basically got him his deal with Virgin by virtue of the "I Am One" single landing on the right desks back when Caroline was distributing our crap...

And since then, have watched him systematically alienate and outright fuck over every single human being who ever did him a favor or said a nice thing about him (which, okay, granted, is like five people in total). As a human being goes: this guy is the most fundamentally fucked up piece of shit I have ever encountered, EVER - and I actually still LIKE the guy. Just an absolute joke of a basket case, this guy is, and now that he's found "god..."

Oh, people, please, just quit buying and listening. There are REAL artists out there.

we hate it when our friends become successful.

That is funny but I think you have to account for how good (or at least "marketable" if you hate them) the Smashing Pumpkins were. I mean I knew girls coming off New Kids on the Block that were positively rabid for Gish. It was a serious crossover with little behind it, financially.

So I'm too lazy to research this (and don't care that much), but are you saying there was a similar fake-indie-imprint backstory connected to the release of Bleach on SubPop? (Way more skeptical that Soundgarden would figure in this, though, since their first indie single was three whole years before they wound up on A&M.)

(Well, not fake imprint obv, seeing how it was SubPop.)

Oh god no it was a joke, Nirvana worshiped Sub Pop and were hugely into the independent scene, like, emotionally.

I still think there was a shift in mainstream pop culture around the late '80s/early '90s, at least in terms of how that culture understood itself and presented itself. Of course there are many exceptions, and to those who thought the '80s were mainly about Flipper and Black Flag, they may not believe this story. But this is mainly about the pop culture that was coming through TV, Hollywood movies, and Billboard-selling music. The "cutting edge" bands of the early '90s may have been ripping off '80s bands - but those bands never appeared on Billboard or Soundscan charts or MTV (outside of maybe "120 Minutes"). The early '90s brought a cult of authenticity, but at the same time there was a cult of irony. These were perceived as being related. There was a new generation on the rise, "Generation X", which was supposedly alienated, apathetic, sarcastic, distrustful, and unmotivated. To this generation, angst and irony were authentic, and any other attitude was fake. Of course, this narrow view about what could be authentic was naive in its own way. But it was a self-conscious reaction.

This shift is generally nerds winning in a way that isn't marginalized like Devo or Weird Al.
Simpsons -- written by nerds with theme song by Oingo Nerdo!
Twin Peaks -- David Lynch's nerdism finally embraced by middle American soap opera fans!
Eddie Vedder reads Ms Magazine -- what a nerd!
Soundgarden appears on Bill Nye the Science Guy -- what nerds!
Sassy -- insanely popular girl's magazine -- but written by progressive nerds!

"progressive nerds"

The editorial staff of Seventeen were all thuggish Republican jocks who loved Stryper

the Seattle sound (just like NIN-type industrial, and whatever the Butthole Surfers and White Zombie and Meat Puppets and Flaming Lips and Soul Asylum etc eventually had hits with) was an '80s sound that sounded a whole lot more compromised and less wildass by the time it finally hit the mainstream in the '90s. So it seems really strange to pretend the '90s suddenly turned music dangerous. (Though, I guess if you never heard anything in the '80s that didn't get on MTV, you might somehow get that delusion.)

― xhuxk, Monday, December 21, 2009 8:54 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

okay, but that's my point entirely! i WAS listening to the grunge & "pigfuck" & post-HC noise & no wave in the 80s. and i saw a lot of that as a contemporaneous response to plastic MTV pop. but it tended to be a niche or even an underground thing. visible to critics & hipsters, but totally invisible to pop radio & mall music stores & "the mainstream".

in the 90s, the values & aesthetics of this 80s underground went mainstream, though often in a dumbed-down, distorted, and/or politically neutered form. the anti-ness of the 80s indie scene relative to commercial culture became a dominant paradigm - which was weird, since it was so deeply predicated on its own outsider status. most obvious example of this being grunge a la nirvana & pearl jam. SST's "corporate rock still sucks" punk values pushed into arenas and onto top 40.

Exactly, when "alternative" is the mainstream, then what it is an alternative to?

Republicans

another view holds that mid-to-late 80s indie/underground was at its core musically and culturally conservative, a reactionary macho response to all that gay new pop/MTV fluff of the early 80s

cobain wearing a "corporate rock still sucks" shirt on the cover of rolling stone always struck me as the height of self-delusion

xp Yeah, we've talked about this on other threads plenty -- red-blooded American guitar bands countering all those faggy synthy Limeys. (At least, that's how indie rock was pretty much marketed, circa 1983-84)

joe carducci is working on a new book: "poptimism & the rockist narcotic"

'"corporate rock still sucks" shirt on the cover of rolling stone'
wasn't this "corporate rock magazines still suck" or something? it was some ploy to get out of being on the cover but they ended up running it anyway? the other t-shirt they had was a cartoon duck taking a duck shit on jan wenner?

another view holds that mid-to-late 80s indie/underground was at its core musically and culturally conservative, a reactionary macho response to all that gay new pop/MTV fluff of the early 80s

― chief rocker frankie crocker (m coleman), Monday, December 21, 2009 2:21 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

i think both views are correct. for me at the time, as a serious young man, it was easy to see the noisy indie/underground stuff as raw honesty in relation to a commercial pop culture that was interested only in marketable inanities. in retrospect, i can see that the "inanities" were often a fascinating & sophisticated form of play, and that the angst i so prized often reads as reactionary masculine drag - but not always in a bad way. big black and killdozer, for instance, tended to be humorously ironic about the tough-guy shtick.

"angst i so prized often reads as reactionary masculine drag"
How would you compare that against actual reactionary masculine drag as practiced by hair metallers?

I can't say for certain how real all this realness was, floating around in 89 - 94, but there was at least a huge change in marketing.

You see it in the commercials, where everything became Xtreme, and exploding on skateboards; and Sprite ads where Grant Hill wasn't going to kid you cause you knew it was a commercial, and he knew it was a commercial, and Sprite knew it was a commercial so let's just be REAL about it.

And I still do see a difference between RHCP and Green Day and Sublime, Mighty Mighty Bosstones and all the fun 90s bands, compared to all the fun party 80s bands. It's a difference that's hard to explain but I can sense it none the less. Maybe it's that the 80s had irony and the 90s had sarcasm? A sarcasm that Chandler from Friends was designed to embody.

I think that by the 90s, the average fan had a bit more insight into the realities (and iconic motifs) of life in a rock band. So bands had to posture differently because the audience wouldn't fall for the same smoke & mirrors (ie The Beatles drink milk and eat jellybeans/Michael Jackson is a benevolent god/Kurt Cobain is an indie-rock martyr). It's a continuum that stretches back decade after decade and the only solution for the really fabricated artists is to go after the youngest and least cultured paying demographic available. Everyone else (the bands that are "keeping it real") is stuck justifying their existence in whatever sense works best for the time and place (and allows them to sleep at night).

Well there was dialog *on MTV* about all of this, when Green Day broke they had their little soundbite interview where Billy says "You know everybody talks about 'alternative' it's like alternative to what?" because so many of these bands were playing clubs and doing the punk/cred/fanzine circuit, whatever you thought of their commercially polished material. The Offspring are a very interesting case, because they were possibly the most "credible" group of folks to come through, yet one of their breakthrough hits ("Self Esteem") was a complete "Smells Like Teen Spirit" knock in all respects, down to the video. And they endured in the mainstream for a while, during a window where it seemed Green Day would not (of course they bounced back in frighteningly conservative garb, to address that line of thought, and won stupefying mainstream acceptance).

Totally not getting the irony vs sarcasm dichotomy, tbh. (But then, I never got the Chili Peppers either. Or the Bosstones. Or Friends.) (I want to say, compared to hit rock from previous decades, that what distinguished all those '90s bands -- even Green Day and Sublime and the Offspring, all of whom I liked a lot at the time -- was their clumsiness and smarminess, but that's just probably just me being cranky and old. I still sense it though. And obviously, say, the Eagles were no less smarmy in the '70s. They were just a whole lot better.)

Or maybe you just Uzi Suicide wasn't a legit label in the first place? (I've never thought of this before, but did they even put out any other records? Triple X obviously did, over the years, albeit sporadically.)

what I had always heard was what it says in the G'n'R wiki (though yeah again: it's WP, who knows)

Geffen Records released an EP in late 1986 to keep the interest in the band alive while the band withdrew from the club scene to work in the studio. The four song EP Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide came out on the ostensibly independent "Uzi Suicide Records" label (which was actually a Geffen subsidiary.)

thought I read something about this in that Restless Road book, I'll dig it out later if I can find it.

So, we can all still blame Jesus Jones for all of this, right?

xp Though eh (one 45-minute bike ride later) it's not as if Motley Crue weren't just as smarmy-clumsy as Green Day or the Offspring etc. And those bands were definitely better than, say, the Outfield, or the Hooters, or (fill in some shitty '70s band I can't think of right now.) So I shouldn't have implied all "hit rock from previous decades." (Motley Crue's best-of CD is no better or worse than STP's or Soundgarden's or Soul Asylum's or the Counting Crows' or the Black Crowes', maybe a little worse than the Offspring's and a little better than the Spin Doctors'. Not saying the '90s invented mediocrity, even if mediocrity is what distiguishes the decade in the long run.)

Motley Crue = jocks
Green Day = nerds
Offspring = nerds
Counting Crows = nerds
Soundgarden = nerds
STP = jocks with nerd singer? (Weiland is into Devo and wimpiest pop possible)

90s is the ascent of nerds occupying positions previously held by jocks
in the 80s, nerds are consigned to the novelty ghetto with B-52s, Weird Al and Thomas Dolby.

scott weiland = quarterback of his high school football team and also on wrestling team

believe me the jock/nerd thing is always always way more complicated IRL when you get into it.

also robert pollard from guided by voices is/was an excellent athlete...and gibby haynes from buttholes was an athlete to iirc and in a fraternity in college

Wasn't Britney Spears also a big-deal basketball prodigy, once upon a time in Louisiana?

Top music jock of recent decades would probably be Nelly, right?

"believe me the jock/nerd thing is always always way more complicated IRL when you get into it."
oh yeah there are definitely mountains of doctorate theses you can mine from unpacking all this (like rise of nerd thugs in 00s)
but butthole surfers helmed by jock is not surprising...

yeah, i mean, the wrestling team -- loaded with super nerds bound for MIT who could also kick your ass.

Technically, Kurt Cobain's poor scholastic performance and his participation in high school wrestling would make him more jock than nerd, but c'moooon.

Motley Crue = jocks burnouts who smoked behind the shop class
Counting Crows = nerds hippies
Soundgarden = nerds preps

Didn't I see Tommy Lee palmsmash LL Cool J in the face in MTV's Rock & Jock B-ball challenge, cementing his team's threepeat?

vince neil was good at baseball i think...

lots of burnouts were jocks and jocks were burnouts and nerds were jocks and jocks were nerds IMO

yeah, i mean, the wrestling team -- loaded with super nerds bound for MIT who could also kick your ass.

― tylerw, Tuesday, December 22, 2009 6:07 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hmmm..i think this is more my area but yeah that was not true for me at all, but we were close enough to iowa where wrestling was more of a glamour sport, more popular than basketball tbh

but wrestling is a weird subculture for sure.

lots of burnouts were jocks and jocks were burnouts and nerds were jocks and jocks were nerds IMO

and nerds were burnouts, too

that too

it's like we learned nothing from carlos the dwarf.

or randall "pink" floyd

"gibby haynes from buttholes was an athlete to iirc and in a fraternity in college"

yes! He went to my college about ten years before me. I know the frat he was in (we only had local frats, not national ones, so naming it isn't going to be helpful for you guys)...it was the frat for rich, athletic, good-looking party kids---jocks, basically. I was in another frat, for nerdy drunks, but we'd go to his frat's parties...sadly there were no xrays of girls passing gas there.