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

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

I think you people are exaggerating and simplifying what Contenderizer and I were trying to say. We weren't saying that 80s popular music was all about "hilarious party bands". The point was that a certain playfulness and detachment from "gritty" realism and "everyday life" was more obvious in mainstream popular music back then than in the early 90s, but that doesn't necessarily exclude politics. Yes, Frankie Goes to Hollywood did release a political song as their second single, but it's still miles away from "Jeremy" or "Killing in the Name". The music video for "Two Tribes" features Reagan and Gorbachev having mud fight - how many early 90s political bands can you imagine doing the same?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZyxYL753w4

w tuomas here. of course there are other things going on in pop, and what i'm talking about is largely confined to a portion of the mainstream rock & hip-hop narrative. country doesn't figure in at all, though i realize that's a false dichotomy to some extent. i leave the untangling of country & country crossover's storyline to someone else. and many of the bands xhuxk is mentioning as "new wave" don't, it seems to me, properly belong to that genre. simple minds american pop was in a new romantic mold, and thus different from the early 80s, specifically american new wave i was talking about. the new romantics sold a vision of cool sophistication that would similarly come to seem a little absurd in the ripped-jeans, angst-ridden 90s, but that's a tangent anyway.

of course there are countless examples of acts that don't fit this formula, but it seems self-evident to me that a series of late-80s and early-mid 90s pop movements significantly transformed at least part of the american musical landscape, in a way that prized a sullen-teen vision of hardness, realness and punk-style rejection. gangsta rap, grunge & nu-metal being the obvious examples, but i think you see elements of this in other musical genres (ascent of indie values and bands) and even media. further, it seems to me (and this was tuomas point) that many mainstream pop acts of the 80s struggled to adapt to these changes by releasing angstier &/or somehow more "serious" product, some successfully and some not.

also, i do agree that this "90s thing" i'm talking abt properly began in the mid-to-late 80s (master of puppets = 86, appetite = 87, straight outta compton = 88), and probably died off with the short lived "return to rock" mania at the end of the 90s/top of the 00s.

"This negative energy just makes me stronger .... Yeah!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-j31YoEeRU

"also, i do agree that this "90s thing" i'm talking abt properly began in the mid-to-late 80s"

okay...

I also like the creative "new romantics were not new wave" formulation (which definitely contradicts every new wave radio show I heard at the time. Though I probably wished they weren't new wave back then.)

the 90's to me just seemed like a streamlining and mainstreaming of 80's stuff. 80's noise rock becomes more catchy less noisy grunge. gangsta rap becomes g funk. ministry becomes manson. lots of pop punk in the 80's but now it had a bigger budget and bigger labels.

There was definitely a point when marketing macho homophobia and misogyny using rock & roll transvestites became untenable. Somewhere along the line it became backwards baseball caps and clown makeup.

the playaz change but the game remains the same. or something.

a certain playfulness and detachment from "gritty" realism and "everyday life" was more obvious in mainstream popular music back then

That's true. But a lot of that is an inadvertent by-product of the fashion and style, those ridiculous clothes and hairstyles. 25 years later, it's hard to sound sincerley socially conscious in shoulder pads.

I also like the creative "new romantics were not new wave" formulation (which definitely contradicts every new wave radio show I heard at the time. Though I probably wished they weren't new wave back then.)

― xhuxk, Sunday, December 20, 2009 3:35 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

this is totally fair. i was using the term "new wave" to define the specifically american bands that were branded that way in the late 70s and early 80s, as that's my primary point of reference & interest here. and i do tend to assume that others use the term that way, defining most of the contemporaneous/corresponding UK bands and trends separately, as pub rock, post punk, technopop, etc.

but that mindset & distinction are perhaps not as common as i imagine, and i wasn't taking care to define my terms. mea culpa. so let me ask: what's a good, specific term for the first wave of dance/pop-oriented, non-stereotypically-punk CBGB's bands - and for their american contemporaries? (again, i mean the likes of talking heads, blondie, devo, the cars, the b-52s, etc.) i ask cuz many of the bands & artists constructing that moment in specifically american pop did, it seems to me, share certain characteristics - characteristics that make it worth defining this moment/scene as a distinct genre, in isolation.

i'm focusing on this specific moment & scene because i think these artists were important in the shaping of a naive & playful dance & party pop aesthetic that became dominant in america during the early 80s, helped along by MTV's youth-oriented, "next generation" POV & marketing. though i haven't been clear about it, the "young rock" vibe of early-days MTV is a core element of my argument (symbolized as much by the buggles as by any other single band, and yeah buggles = english).

i say that because what i'm trying to describe as tough 90s realness seems like a response response to MTV's first generation stars & aesthetic - to MTV's successful marketing of/waveriding of an 80s fashion for playful pop plasticity. understand that this puts perhaps undue emphasis on MTV as the locus of america's pop music culture in the 80s and 90s.

that many mainstream pop acts of the 80s struggled to adapt to these changes by releasing angstier &/or somehow more "serious" product, some successfully and some not.

Same goes for some pop acts from the 90's! (or acts that had their biggest success in the 90's)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/36/Mc_hammer_funky_headhunter.jpg

Yes, Frankie Goes to Hollywood did release a political song as their second single, but it's still miles away from "Jeremy" or "Killing in the Name". The music video for "Two Tribes" features Reagan and Gorbachev having mud fight - how many early 90s political bands can you imagine doing the same?

Sorry to be pedantic, but it was Reagan and Chernenko. But I think "Jeremy" and "Killing in the Name" are not particularly representative of the 90's -- plenty of grunge-associated bands had goofy/satirical videos that were mega-hits, the first two that come to mind are Blind Melon's "No Rain" and Nirvana's "In Bloom" (OK, these are not "political bands" but still).

pearl jam were a political band?

Well, I didn't call anyone a political band ... I'm just saying that even "serious" grunge-ish bands weren't always so serious.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d1/Beastieboys_checkyourhead.jpg

And Shania is basically known only for "That Don't Impress Me Much".

man you euros have terrible taste in shania songs

"Well, I didn't call anyone a political band"

i was reading the post you were quoting. about jeremy and political bands.

i mean i guess pearl jam are known for being political. jeremy is more of a luka/fast cars kinda thing though. the kind of video that the 80's had too many of.

black hole sun is still my all time fave grunge video. and maybe even song.

Oh God how I hate/d Soundgarden. The epitome of hair metal continuity in "new era" clothes. To each theirs scott.

black hole sun is a good song!

its the only soundgarden i ever liked. but i haven't heard a lot. i liked alice in chains a little better. loved their rooster song. and i ended up liking stp more than any of them.

for some reason i went on a drunken nirvana youtube spree last week! i watched hours of nirvana stuff! probably more nirvana than i've ever heard at one time. i don't know what it taught me. it was kinda fascinating though.