Groups that have appealed to two completely different audiences in two completely different eras

I'm sure they won't love me for pointing this out, but Alex and Jed are both in their 30s...

I'm sure they won't love me for pointing this out, but Alex and Jed are both in their 30s...

i kinda figure most folx on ILM know both eras, regardless of age..or are at least aware....i was talking about more the general public...

by the way, if i'm wrong on those dates, a steve vai fan should correct me...

KILLING JOKE:
in the early 80's: Punks, non-discophobic metalheads and Kate Bush
in the mid-80's: what my wife calls "mongs"
in the 90's: Industrial fans (though I've never understood how KJ would ever qualify as "industrial") and misinformed Grunge fans.
Today: old men like myself.

early 70s days - So Cal singer songwriter fans

Mid-80s through now - Hipster doofuses like meeself.

I could see that, but I think he's so "legendary" that I'd be surprised if someone hadn't have heard of his history no matter when they got into him....

I don't know much about Mercury Rev's background actually (really remember hearing them on Deserter's Songs, so maybe I'm one of the people you're talking about!)

I think this is the winner so far!

'80s: drunk Replacements fans
'90s: their moms

gotcha that makes total sense.

Similar to Flaming Lips actually, they were noisy and then were kinda gone/forgotten and then came back all critically acclaimed and adult (I like both bands later output much better).

The Black Crowes:

80s - hard rock/heavy metal kids and classic rock fans

mid-90s and onward - Jam band followers

vs.

Post Who's Next US stadium rock gods Who

That applies almost exactly to Soul Asylum too

x-post

i remember someone dividing pavement fans into 3 separate groups in review of theirs that i read online, but i can't recall what the groups were

i'd say a more accurate statement would be that he played for PiL. It's not like he was ever an active member of the band outside of the studio. And it was for only one album.

The glam triumvirate

'60s - nobody
late '70s onwards - everybody apparently

'94-'95: UK Pre-Teens

'97-present: American indie kids.

Fans of MOR Tedious guitar rock and... what?

Joy Division pre-Unknown Pleasures - punks (at least they wanted to be) post-UP, not punks.

The Cure had their post-punk phase, then goth.

Pre-Live Aid: piss-stained, denim-clad, long-haired blues-metal boys.
Post-Live Aid: Baby boomers, who filed their CDs alongside Phil Collins solo albums and only listen to Classic radio stations.

Hey you forgot:

Pre-1970 : Heavily phased pop-psych combo!

1950s-60s: ?
1970s-80s: country nostalgists
1990s on: alternative kids

See also Depeche Mode. Except, not quite.

1977-79: sleazy punk rockers with a penchant for sado masochism
1980-> : pantomime pirate teenybop glam band

1976-78: wild, anarchic, rebellios, anti-establisment youths
1996-> : sad, tired, balding, beer-bellied, middle-aged gits

No, wait, we're the same audience!

mid-90s - Jam band followers

Late 90's - Kate Hudson

REM
ditto U2

Bon Jovi
80s - hair metal fans
90s - the Melrose Place generation
00s - jel ;)

Hmmmmm....its not like they were GG Alllin & the Murder Junkies. They've always had a pretty populist bent, I'd say.

groan....

Corrosion of Conformity

Goo Goo Dolls

The Coup

I was part of the initial audience for the Coup. Who made up the second audience?

They went more funk rock on their last album. Though there was still rapping it didn't feel like rapping

I'm fascinated by Slowdive's ascent to the top of the shoegaze heap. "Much more interesting than MBV", says a core zoomer to me.

Primal Scream?

Scott Walker
Kate Bush

Scott Walker definitely.

I suppose there's a difference between artists who change their style and are embraced by a different audience (Walker), and those whose work is just discovered by a new audience (Bush).

Which describes Slowdive, who seem to appeal to the Black Metal crowd nowadays which certainly wasn't the case first time around

The Ramones.

From the voice of punk outcast weirdos, to the soundtrack for frat parties and major league sporting events...

slowdive have really played a lot of different festivals that I think probably helped them pick up some fans who were into deafheaven etc.

xpost yeah, to me it is much more interesting to think about a band like Aerosmith ('70s rockers vs. '90s MTVheads and soccer moms) than bands that just switched up their style

unrelated, i listened to Slowdive for the first time in a long time the other day ... that band doesn't hold a candle to MBV.

They've already been mentioned upthread but Kraftwerk was my first thought. Their fans in the 70s and early 80s were cool electronica types like me. In the 80s and 90s they were embraced by the dance tent crowd and since the 00s their increasingly nostalgia-driven schtick has appealed mainly to boomers.

Gary Numan perhaps as well, with new wave and electronic fans early on to heavy industrial fans these days. maybe there is more overlap in that fanbase than it seems

Zappa appeals to at least 2 very different audiences but probably not in different eras.

Stockhausen too. In the 80s he was very much part of the classical music community, and a minority of it at that. I remember going to a performance of Hymnen at the Festival Hall in the 80s where the place was no more than 30% full. Then in the 90s and 00s he was adopted by chin-stroking Wire-reading types.

I think some nu metal bands reckon they've always had a shoegazing element to their music these days, for some reason

Health - Who i remember seemed to fit in with late 2000s GAPDY indie Pitchfork-adjecent crowds but now seem to be more embraced by avant-metal type people

Similarly Arab Strap

Corrosion of Conformity

neando who are the two types of people who like CoC?

i think this sort of applies to king gizzard & the lizard wizard. not really different times, or at least extremely overlapping times. the garage / noise weirdos vs the jam band hippie brah element.

scott's "hipster kisses" thread is a related phenom

neando who are the two types of people who like CoC?

― map, Tuesday, February 17, 2026 9:53 PM bookmarkflaglink

Hardcore kids and older stoner/southern rock fans

fucking weezer

In the 80s and 90s they were embraced by the dance tent crowd

Was there such a thing as a dance tent in the 80s? My recollection is that when Electric Café was released, Kraftwerk's appeal was very niche indeed, and festivals were the exclusive preserve of rock bands and boomer icons like Dylan.

There was the whole wave of '60s-'70s rockers who retooled themselves for the '80s. MTV kids who'd never heard "Roundabout" made 90125 the best-selling Yes album. One that I think gets a little overlooked just because he's such a monument on the landscape is Springsteen. Born in the USA crossed him over to a raft of teenagers who were in nursery school when Born to Run came out. I guess that's not a "completely different audience," because he still had his older audience, but it definitely felt like a different era.

Bowie, mentioned upthread, is another obvious example.

thing about the Ramones is that they really thought they'd be lifted out the the niche weirdo zone to be embraced by the sporting chants and frat party strata. I guess Johnny lived just barely long enough to see it take hold. They lost money by overestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

Yeah they kept trying to have hits, they released singles, they went on TOTP to lip sync a Phil Spector song. I don't think they would have had any angst about selling out or anything.

Even at the very beginning of their career Johnny was talking about how he thought they should be touring with Ted Nugent.

I always saw them as self-directed bubblegum music (in other words not afraid of being popular), but I'm not old enough to have opinions of them besides in retrospect. I think it's fair to say while they were super influential, they didn't stay a "punk" band for long.

Zappa appeals to at least 2 very different audiences but probably not in different eras.

would that be musos into prog rock and john zorn and modern composers, AND people into like, morning zoo radio and cheech and chong and stuff?

king gizzard is the biggest "no one asked for this push" in my feeds

B-52s, pleasing the “party time!” crowd and the rhythm guitar freaks

Alice Coltrane being revived largely on the basis of her devotional music seems like a good example of this?

^ very much so

I think Depeche Mode had a different type of audience in the US in the 90s/00s than they'd had in the UK in the 80s.

B-52s makes me think that a lot of queer artists of the 20th century had an audience who could read the camp and another where it sailed right past them.

Haruomi Hosono I think might be one of these. Probably YMO in general but Hosono in particular. His recent sudden popularity in the West surprised even him, especially since it centered around recordings he doesn't even remember making anymore. But its real! I ordered the Tropical Dandy reissue through my local shop and he ordered an extra copy because he thought the cover was hilarious ("it doesn't even look like him!"), now he's telling me he's sold through 4 of them! That would be crazy to imagine like, a decade ago.

Puzzled by the absence of Underworld in this thread.

Perhaps because "Underneath the Radar" wasn't a hit anywhere other than Australia? (Slight exaggeration)

Oh yeah! Absolutely did not believe they were the same band for quite some time.

David Johansson:
New York Dolls and Buster Poindexter had very different audiences.

I think it's fair to say while they were super influential, they didn't stay a "punk" band for long.

wait wut no