Grunge vs Nu Metal best?

hair metal asshoppers need not apply

I lived in Seattle in the early 90s when grunge was ubiquitous if not particularly my thing, although I really liked Mudhoney. (My claim to “fame” is seeing an early performance by a band I proclaimed were horrible and would go nowhere: Alice In Chains.)

Never got into any nu-metal, but I’m old af and probably ill equipped to take part in this conversation.

Most of our fellow ilxors are old but young enough to remember both.

Grunge via Nirvana changed my life. I imagine a few younger ones had the same experience with nu-metal?

Teen me did try to get into grunge but lord it all felt so limp and lifeless. Nu Metal was much beloved by the kids who bullied me. Spoiling my ballot.

Grunge bands I actually like(d):

Mudhoney (everything from their first decade is really good)
Tad (everything up until 1993 or so is great)
Soundgarden (really only Ultramega OK and Badmotorfinger)

Nu-metal bands I actually like(d):

Deftones (only Around The Fur and White Pony)
Mudvayne (second album only)
Nothingface (Violence)
Static-X (first two albums and fifth album)
Disturbed (all)
Slipknot (first two albums and We Are Not Your Kind)

I guess I'm voting nu-metal!

I think the real contest is going to be between Butt Rock and Christian Grunge.

Does Slayer's Diabolus In Musica count as nu-metal? Lots of people said so at the time but I don't really think so. It's better than I remembered, though.

At the time, I felt it was more post-thrash like Machine Head, with the exception of "Stain of Mind" and "In the Name of God" which are kinda Korny

The first time I saw Machine Head was on the Burning Red tour. Coal Chamber headlined, Slipknot and Amen opened. Robb Flynn had braids.

That was definitely a nu-metal influenced album

usually i'm pretty averse to calling anything a sell out or "cringe" - but the From This Day video with Robb Flynn rap is... quite something. probably the nu-metal "please let us onto your bandwagon" equivalent of the STP Plush video

saying that, its sort of enjoyable in retrospect in a similar way to... the film Hackers?

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

both bands redeemed themselves with much better music later on (and Machine Head had done much better before Burning Red)

I'm sure he feels deep shame over that era.

ever been an ilm poll for best Nu-metal cover of an 80s synth pop hit (ie: the label demands a song with a hook for the single/video)?

Message In A Bottle vs Faith vs Cars vs Blue Monday vs Smooth Criminal vs Shock The Monkey

I'm sure he feels deep shame over that era.

I worked with Robb Flynn for several years. He's a good dude, but he's incapable of shame.

Grunge by a country mile, but i imagine the answer isn't so much qualitative as down to what age you are

I have never enjoyed a nu metal song.

I was the correct age for grunge when it broke. Even then, I knew that Alice in Chains was not Pearl Jam was not Nirvana, but I liked most of the stuff the heavy hitters put out, as well as some of the smaller Subpop and CZ Records bands. Going through a bit of a weird patch with it right now though. I joined a gym, and while they switch the music up occasionally, mostly they stick to a channel that is a blend of grunge classics and post-grunge crap. I'm wearing earbuds most of the time anyway, but sometimes I'll catch a few notes of "Would?" or something, and it's just like, this song about your best friend dying of a heroin overdose does not exactly make me wanna blast out leg presses.

i will probably get around to those first slipknot albums at some point. i keep hearing good things about them.

i was a grunge kid but i was also liking the music to make friends. the stuff i really liked was rachmaninoff and radio pop. nirvana was too scary for me then. the only band that i liked at the time (ca 13-14 years old) and still like now is pearl jam. i would probably like a soundgarden album if i played one all the way through today idk.

I was goaded into liking mainstream grunge to be cool, but I liked Euro pop, Aerosmith and power ballads. But I found what I liked, i.e. Soundgarden, AiC, STP.

Metal I found on my own and my tastemaking, domineering best friend couldn't act like a know-it-all anymore.

But this made me hate nu-metal from the jump. I loved Korn's debut. But I never thought I was hearing the birth of a genre. I just thought they were another form of unique alternative metal that stood out.

Once I started hearing of Limp Bizkit and the scene exploded I got annoyed because none of it appealed to ke like Korn did. Korn were fairly anti-jock mentality on their first album, and sang about heavy shit, but the scene quickly became inebriated by loudmouthed dudebros with little talent, and it was making it difficult for me to find actual metal in the music stores near me because half the section was taken up by nu-metal.

so by 1998, I pretty much wasn't willing to listen to any of it...other than Korn, but I stopped at Follow the Leader. And I would later realized I missed out on System of a Down because of my knee-jerk dismissiveness. But I still would vote for almost everything over nu-metal, including a ball of hardened stool, and armpit hair tacos

surprising take to me! I think a lot of the nu metal shit has aged pretty well...slipknot, mudvayne...some of these guys can really shred

My experience matches Neanderthal's. First two Korn albums made me think of a darker, more muscular RATM. But soon a bunch of whiny copycat acts came out and it all felt a bit cringey and diminishing returns

Both are complete shit and it's amazing that people keep pushing for those genres to be "reevaluated" as if we all somehow managed to miss their brilliance during the 10+ years they were everywhere.

At least they pushed me to look for other music, initially metal, then prog, then art pop / rock / classic rock, then everything else.

Of those years though (my youth is late 90s early 00s), my vote would go towards pop punk, Britney Spears, R&B, dance pop. Those made the 90s-00s popular and happy to remember.

Grunge is a little before my time, it was already the tail end. Nirvana gets a pass, but as a movement (admittedly a loose one), Grunge felt quite bankrupt.

Where does Tool fit? They seemed to gain popularity as nu-metal took hold but debuted during prime grunge era

They are neither imo.

I'd consider them first a prog or art band, with alt/grunge/post- influences, sonically at the interface between rock and metal, so there's definitely a continuation there.

Tool's origins were in line with stuff like Helmet, Rollins Band, Prong. I have no idea if this had a genre term at the time, but I sometimes see it lumped under the utterly lame "alternative metal" sobriquet.

I once went to a concert with Soundgarden and Voivod as co-headliners and Prong as the opening act. Maybe Tool was born there.

Tool definitely got lumped in with Grunge at the time

the big grunge bands were all fantastic soundgarden and aic specifically but ... would i take kittie's spit over most of them? yeah kinda

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeUkKeo43GU

^^^ using the phaser-heavy extremely layered siamese dream guitar tone for good

Kittie released their 7th!!! studio album in 2024. getting a lot more love nowadays than they did at the time.

By the time Lateralus came out there was definitely a nu-metal sheen to Tool's sound, even if the execution was firmly proggy.

I think the main trouble with these genres is how ubiquitous they were.

I would honestly say Pearl Jam were at one point my favourite US rock band. Also a huge fan of Pumpkins and Nirvana. And more recently I've become really entranced by Alice In Chains and Soundgarden - even more than I was as a teenager. They all had real chops, could really play, and the songs came from somewhere deep and genuine.

But for every great grunge band there were a zillion terrible no marks that mainly got signed off the back of Kurt's death. And the whole post-grunge era was largely soundalike johnny-come-latelies apeing the sound but bypassing the magic.

Unfortunately that's the shit that rises to the top in a lot of people's minds when they think of "grunge". Bush, Silverchair, Puddle Of Mudd, Nickleback - all stuff that came after the fact but ended up somehow flooding the popular idea of what grunge sounded like: Po-faced semi-nonsense lyrics over generic minor-key barre chords in a pale imitation of the musicianship and raw emotional power of the best of those bands.

Same could be said for Britpop of course. The great stuff somehow got drowned out by drab super-commercial retreads that mostly came at the arse-end of that era but somehow came to epitomise it.

As for nu-metal, it was so all-encompassing that pretty much every "heavy" band had to assimilate some element of the sound in some way.

So even bands as diverse as Atari Teenage Riot, Sepultura The Prodigy, Slayer, Cypress Hill, Ash, Machinehead and, yes, Tool, got given a down-tuned whiteboy rap-metal makeover; or at least the production values switched overnight from album to album come 1998-2002 before everyone got a hold of themselves again and restabilised.

nu metal was all dogshit except for SOAD and Deftones.

at the time i was too old for nu-metal but loved whatever i heard via the odd night out/radio etc,
had no interest in anything re grunge, post or otherwise (other than soundgarden for some reason).
yet, over the last decade i have realised that any guitar band that incorporated a DJ on decks will always be of interest to me.
and i have totally fallen under the spell of korn.
so, yeah, guess my vote goes for nu-metal.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I wasn't expecting it to be that wide

Buncha lying-ass cowards on this board.

Summon The Nutz!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uww2zyJgbE0

Good result