Rock music had been going to a place that wasn't "sustainable" for a mass audience for years. That was basically my point. Pop music, no matter what style it's in, fills an emotional need. Some rock of the mid- to late 1980s was capable of filling the emotional needs of an adolescent audience (the primary audience for pop music), but a lot of it wasn't. Consider the embarassment of Billy Idol's "Cradle of Love"--a dude in his mid-30s singing about banging teenagers. Or consider the singles from
Steel Wheels getting heavy rotation on rock radio. Or consider hair metal, with it's endless warmed over variations on "Rock and Roll All Nite" and "Patience". That's what the rock world
actually looked like before "Smells Like Teen Spirit" broke. It wasn't particularly interesting.
You make it sound as though it's some kind of either/or thing. It is, of course, entirely possible for people to listen to Led Zeppelin
and Soundgarden, or the Rolling Stones
and Nirvana, or whatever. There seems to be a not insignificant overlap between people who enjoy Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam. While Mr. Cats has indicated he had a problem imagining rock radio playing the Eagles alongside Pearl Jam, that's ultimately exactly what happened. After all, it's not a huge leap from, say,
this to
this. The idea that there wasn't an obvious continuity with earlier forms of
rock is, to put it simply,
wrong. Just
wrong.
Ultimately, you're making the same mistake that a lot of people here make (less so in the real world) by assuming that people should enshrine
your musical tastes as they listen privately to their favorite music on their headphones or on their stereos at home. The idea that people actually go out to concerts, or otherwise integrate music into their social lives is lost on you. (This gets back to what I was saying above about not getting out much.) It's cool that The Police put together a reunion tour in 2007, and it's cool that the band's relatively affluent audience was willing to pay an average ticket price of
$112.00, but I bet you wouldn't have seen a lot of people under the age of about 35-40 in the audience. And, of course, in the early 1990s, they weren't touring at all. Neither was Led Zeppelin. The Stones were, and I actually got paid $20 an hour to camp out for Stones tickets by my boss, and even then I wouldn't have dreamed of spending the kind of money she was willing to pay for tickets to see a miniature Mick Jagger and Co. flog the latest (ahem) "hits" off of Voodoo Lounge.
When rock (or any other style of music) ceases to appeal to young people, it becomes a museum piece. Which is basically what was happening in the early to mid-1990s.
Go back to the links I offered in one of my earlier posts. You had people predicting, accurately, that mainstream rock was destroying itself by reaching up the age ladder (to Boomers) as opposed to down the age ladder (to 13ers) as early as
1982. That decision meant that rock was well on its way to being extinct.
And that happens to be where you miss my point. "Grunge" didn't
have to happen, at least not in the way that it did. If rock radio had done a better job of breaking new acts, as it had done up until about the mid-1980s, then it wouldn't have happened. But putting aside grunge,
Metallica wasn't getting much airplay on mainstream rock radio circa 1990. When it was current, you'd have actually had a better shot of hearing "One" (and
only "One") on a mixed Top 40 station as opposed to a mainstream rock station. (Metallica was largely forbidden on mainstream rock stations until the release of the Black Album.) At the time, it was more important to hype up the latest release by the Rolling Stones, the Doobie Brothers, or Billy Idol (all of whom had #1 mainstream rock hits in about the year or so before Nirvana broke).
Of course, other styles of music ended up filling the emotional needs that rock
used to fill, at least for young people, and generally did it better. That left rock with a fairly narrow band, which is how grunge actually ended up happening. (None of this is intended as a defense of grunge. With the exception of the rush of euphoria that accompanied "Smells Like Teen Spirit", I had little use for the "style" myself, although I hesitate to use that word when what actually ended up being labeled as "grunge" represented a pretty wide variety of sounds.)
Originally Posted by Kepi
Since Rani declined, lemme try.
