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

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