Ok,

I've some questions. Metal seemed to be at a high point in the late 80's and early 90's and seemed to be literally unstoppable. Then the bubble burst and Metal all but disappeared off the map.

I have heard on more than one occasion that Kurt Cobain and Nirvana were partly responsible for this in some way.

If so, what part did Nirvana play in the downfall of metal? Surely Nirvana were a great metal / rock 'n' roll band in themselves. I can't see the reasoning behind why Kurt Cobain Dave Grohl would want destroy something that they were a big part of.

My take on the matter is that Nirvana popularized a type of metal and gave the genre a more visible presence for a time. But metal existed well before those guys and thrives in many venues that are not as mainstream.

First of all, I don't see Nirvana as "Metal" at all. Loud guitars does NOT equal metal. Well, let me put it this way, the Metal that Nirvana had obviously used as part of its blueprint had been dead for years, most notably Black Sabbath. Nirvana and the whole "Grunge" movement was much closer to Punk by way of Hardcore than it was to the Hair Metal that was popular at the time.

From the late 80's to early 90's, Metal had become an obese, bloated monster named Hair Metal. The fact that the music was known more for its hair as opposed to its music says a lot. Great White, Cinderella, Poison, Warrant...all of them were flushed down the toilet never to reappear. Well, they reappeared, but in a variety of sad, pathetic forms trying to scrape as much cash as they could...which wasn't much.

What Nirvana did was break open a music scene that had been simmering for a few years. Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, Stone Temple Pilots, Smashing Pumpkins...all of these bands helped destroy late 80's Hair Metal.

The kids that listened to Grunge were more Motorhead than Whitesnake, get it? Nirvana did to Hair Metal what the Ramones and Sex Pistols did to Disco.

Thank God.

Realize that these things run in cycles of popularity. Elvis hit big in '55/'56, and then, suddenly, a thousand artists in that vein. The Beatles popped in '64, then we had the British Invasion. Hippie/psychedelic, country rock, disco, smoove r'n'b, etc.

Hair bands had run their course by '91. Of course, the only mainstream radio play they usually got was for the obligatory power ballad (e.g. Poison's "Every Rose Has Its Thorn") included on each album release in order to garner the aforementioned radio airplay, and therefore, sell records. Realize that in 1985 hard rock/metal was nowhere commercially (pretty much confined to a couple of Sunset Strip clubs like Gazzari's, where Faster Pussycat, not LA Guns nor Hollywood Rose (precursors to Guns'n'Roses), was the premier act for the 3-400 people that would come see them night after night. We're talking about a seriously small niche. Then hard rock/lite metal popped, and the charts went from Michael Jackson and Prince to Poison, G'n'R, Whitesnake, Lita Ford, etc. They had their mainstream chart run from ~'86-'91. Then they should have sought their own level for their hardcore audience. Instead, most of them imploded and blamed it on grunge in general, and Nirvana specifically. If it wasn't Nirvana, it would have been something else. The time was right for a change.

Nirvana was a good band that had one truly great album. They came through town in '89 or so to promote their first Sub Pop album, Bleach, and played live on the air on our radio station and slept on my couch afterward. This was nothing unusual. We had bands on the air almost nightly (e.g. Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Didjits, Nomeansno, Cynics, Lazy Cowgirls, Mother Love Bone, TVTV$, Jawbreaker, et. al.), and probably a good third of them spent the night at my place - I have a suspicion that my home address and phone number were listed in Book Your Own Life editions at the time. Interestingly enough, Grohl came through town with Scream about a week before Nirvana did. The next time Nirvana toured, Grohl was their drummer.

Anyway, Nirvana stood out in my mind because they were actually a lot less polished and professional than most other bands that came through town. They were more interested in heavy riffing, a la early Metallica, Melvins, etc., than they were playing actual songs. The one standout was "About A Girl", which was completely atypical for them at the time - an actual song with a melody, verse/chorus/verse, etc. If you want to hear what Nirvana sounded like at the time, take a listen to the final, "hidden" track on Nevermind, "Endless, Nameless", and then imagine an entire 40-minute set of that. They were, at that time, no different than a thousand garage bands I'd listened to and played in. Then they got their major-label record deal tossed at them the same time that Sonic Youth, Redd Kross, and a hundred other alt/indie/postpunk bands did, but their songwriting had matured considerably, and they were put in the studio with Butch Vig, and the result was a multi-platinum album that topped the Billboard album chart for two weeks. Cobain hated the sound of Nevermind, and on their only other studio release after that (In Utero), Cobain purposely hired Steve Albini to make it sound scuzzy, which he did. That album did nowhere near the business the previous one did, and gets probably 1% of the airplay now that Nevermind does.

Nirvana didn't set out to kill lite metal, but that's what happened. They opened the floodgates for thousands of other bands, most undeserving, but a few that left their mark.

For me Nirvana was Kurt Cobain.
And i think he have nothing to do with Heavy Metal.
What i admire about Cobain's songwriting is the simplicity and, simplicity is the hardest thing to achive.
Lyricaly he used unusual images and very straightforward statements about some dark subject matter.Many of his lyrics doesn't mean any sense on paper, but made perfect sense in the song.
Everything was a hook, right down to the one-string guitar solo.
All Apologies, About A Girl or Heart-Shaped Box still commamd our awed attention.
One of the most singular songwriter of his generation.
Of course i don't think " Life's a drag and than you die" is a positive way of living your life,or "Live fast die young and have a beautiful corpse".... but i miss him.

clint.

Sorry mg,
but i have to disagree with you about what Punk did to Disco.
In 76-77 Disco was as undergroud as Punk.It began in underground clubs, survived the longest on the underground gay scene and, throughout its history, was nourished by new expressions - the black and hispanic inner city culture that now informs much of the hip-hop.
Most punks could not have rebeled agains Disco because their knowledge of this American dance form would have been very limited.They would have hated The Bee Gees or Tina Turner, who they heard on Radio One, but then so did everibody who had any pretensions to being "cool".
If they were rebelling against something it was Prog Rock and the like.

clint.

First of all, I don't see Nirvana as "Metal" at all. Loud guitars does NOT equal metal. Well, let me put it this way, the Metal that Nirvana had obviously used as part of its blueprint had been dead for years, most notably Black Sabbath. Nirvana and the whole "Grunge" movement was much closer to Punk by way of Hardcore than it was to the Hair Metal that was popular at the time.

From the late 80's to early 90's, Metal had become an obese, bloated monster named Hair Metal. The fact that the music was known more for its hair as opposed to its music says a lot. Great White, Cinderella, Poison, Warrant...all of them were flushed down the toilet never to reappear. Well, they reappeared, but in a variety of sad, pathetic forms trying to scrape as much cash as they could...which wasn't much.

What Nirvana did was break open a music scene that had been simmering for a few years. Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, Stone Temple Pilots, Smashing Pumpkins...all of these bands helped destroy late 80's Hair Metal.

The kids that listened to Grunge were more Motorhead than Whitesnake, get it? Nirvana did to Hair Metal what the Ramones and Sex Pistols did to Disco.

Thank God.


I don't think Great White belongs in that bunch. Take them out and put "Nelson" or "Europe" in instead.

...they just mutate.

Every form of music eventually diverges into multiple sub-genres as it matures. This is what I saw happening to metal in the Nirvana erra; not so much "death" but just another alteration, and all for the better IMO. The echos of even the cheesy hair bands can still be heard as influences on modern rock. There is at least one mainstream commercial station in Denver (KBPI) that plays a lot of thrash and other "alternative" forms of metal (which are the only forms that have really survived to this day - other than a few reunion/nostalgia tours.)

Mainstream metal, of course, didn't start with the '80's "glam rock", but with Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Rush (which eventually became "prog" metal) and the like back in the early 70's. The over commercialized "bloated monster" big hair bands and punk were the next iterations, and so on.

Trends can be interesting to follow, and we need labels to talk about them. But in the end there are no hard and fast distinctions between "styles" of music, or any artistic expression, for that matter. Unless you work for a record company and you're out to make a buck.

Metal didn't die. The record companies just stopped promoting it, and moved on to tout the next BIG thing. Nirvana and Pearl Jam just happened to be snatched up and marketed more pandemically than many other forms of music that also existed at the time. Basically we're talking about the death of Metal as a 'popular' form of music. Cinderella's best albums were made long after metal 'died'. Great White was another band that settled into a bluesier form of metal, the likes of which - most people never heard.

there are no hard and fast distinctions between "styles" of music, or any artistic expression, for that matter.I love the "cross" or "meets" descriptions, such as this one from the film High Fidelity:
"You remember. I told you about her. I like her. She's kind of Sheryl Crow-ish, crossed with a post-Partridge Family, pre-LA Law, Susan Dey kind of thing, but, you know, uh, black."

I used to get that sort of thing every hour from record reps: "Did you get the new Cheeseboy record? Have you listened to it yet? No? Well, let me tell you, they're a cross between the Buffalo Springfield and Einsturzende Neubauten! Let's just say, if a pre-'65 Bob Dylan met Slayer in a car crash, they'd sound just like Cheeseboy."

note: Cheeseboy was an actual band, but theirs was an indie record, not worked by major-label record company, um, persons.

Cinderella's best albumsIsn't that a non sequitur?

Lots of good points above, and I must say that you guys covered all the bases I was going to post on - I know, shoulda got here sooner - but so far no ones mentioned the one thing that all popular music has in common. Eventually, once the cycle has passed, it will be judged on its merits and it's merits alone. If it has legs, a couple decades will tell the tale. Think of the music that was huge 40 years ago - There were thousands of bands recording in 1965, how much of it still matters today?

Isn't that a non sequitur?

No, but your question reveals that you've never heard them. Ignorance is bliss.

It's a joke, son. I'll be telling a few of them thoughout the course of the evening.

I would never impugn someone's taste in music. Unless they like the Dave Matthews Band. Some things are inexcusable.

I have to agree with Theo that time was due for "metal" to be swept aside.
Never a fan of 1000 notes per measure anyway.

A. Nivrana wasn't Metal
B. Metal isn't dead, but there is Death Metal

Peace :D