"My Chemical Romance is this generation's Nirvana"

OTM. Rock critics live in a myopic world where just because something existed it was important. If a groundbreaking album falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Nobody doubts that Nirvana was hardly innovative. They were essentially the Pixies meets The Wipers. The issue is that Greg Sage and Frank Black never had any meaningful kind of an impact on pop culture. Nirvana did. This should be pretty obvious to anyone who was there for it, who saw it happen. Unless you're a kid, you really have no excuse to not acknowledge this. You don't have to like it, but as much as I think GWB is a moron, he's still our President.

You can kick and scream that they were the most overrated band in the world but that doesn't change the fact that they did influence pop culture and that influence has had a ripple effect that continues today.

...Even worse, intellectually: wanting to cast an entire race or class or social group as one that has no problems is such a deep anti-human affront to the fact that, duh, things still happen to individuals.

What kind of person would think that nobody in a given social group is free of any problems? (answer: A strawman!)

People have serious problems (!) I am aware of this.

As you said, middle-class Americans have less to complain about on "net balance". It should stop a lot of people from wanting to feel like shit and actively looking for grievances when they have that much more to be thankful for, though. When most black Americans had some "genuine-ass problems" they sang the blues and gospel music. They knew they couldn't afford to constantly throw all-day pity parties as it's costly in more ways than one. Only people up the economic ladder can afford to actually want to feel like shit. Hence my attitude towards these mope orgies.

Why were blacks more thankful than most kids today despite an immediate history of slavery? Did they not see death and tragedy? Were they being chumps for not just concentrating on that?

But anyway, even if it were an all-day pity party (which, again, I don't think it is, especially compared to a lot of music that is beloved by critics), it's just one album. There's nothing that says that its fans don't put on happy music some of the time as well. This would be the equivalent of criticizing a blues artist (though I know they usually have a lot of emotional range as well) for being miserable without taking into account that sometimes his or her listeners sing gospel tunes as well.

But wow, is liking this whilst simultaneously decrying Nirvana ever postimism point-missing at it's zenith.

Do you not think Nirvana had HOOKS, and massive pop-teen-outsider appeal too??

I think what turns people off about this band (and emo more widely) is how premeditated, knowing & meta it all comes over image-wise (even in the music it's often a cliche recycled past the point of credibility & definitely past sincerity. That is if you're not "involved" already (i.e. young & emotionally confused) and blind to all this.

Either that or it's some heavily, cleverly, and deliberatly impenetrable phenomenon akin to Gothic Lolitas in Japan. I can't quite credit them with the same creativity though but perhaps I'm just way too familiar with it's antecedents to be impressed with the relative not-newness of emo. And vice versa.

Hot-selling up and coming rock bands in 1990 and early 1991, the year before Nirvana hit: Living Color, Faith No More, Midnight Oil, King's X, Queensryche, Jane's Addiction, Ugly Kid Joe, hell let's throw in Sinead O'Connor, too. (World Party? I dunno.) Obviously Nirvana inspired a feeding frenzy; nobody denies that. But alternative rock - alterenative rock with loud guitars even -- was hardly falling in forests without making a sound before Nirvana showed up. Did they change how some music after them was marketed, and did plenty of other bands get signed thanks to them? Sure. You could say the same about Green Day or Limp Bizkit or Poison or Britney Spears or Avril Lavigne or, I dunno, Dashboard Confessional or whoever. (And plenty of rap and country and r&b acts, too.) Within a few months, you'll be able to say it about *High School Musical,* I bet. The game changes all the time.

1990 on
http://rateyourmusic.com/top_albums/year_is_1990

1991 on
http://rateyourmusic.com/top_albums/year_is_1991

nirvana only the 8th most popular album of 1991 on the rock oriented rym

what nirvana did though was kill off the popularity of hair metal bands. Kerrang instead of being full of bands that looked like trannies [Hair Metal] become full of thick lumberjack shirt wearing [Grunge] bands

also beavis & butthead taking the piss out of stewart re Winger & Warrant

No they didn't, not at all; that's one of the platitudes and delusions that arose out of Nirvana's myth. Check the list a couple posts above. Hair metal was pretty much gone before Nirvana showed up. What was being marketed and selling by 1990 was blatantly art-metal. (And I left out Extreme, who, though their biggest hit was a power ballad, were as artsy by their big second album in 1990 as any of the other bands I listed.)

I'm not really sure that's analagous. (Trying not to take this personally as there is lots of new rock I like and I'm really only indifferent to screamo; emo I find repulsive, but that is pretty directly descended from hardcore.) People aren't arguing that you should be engaging with nu-country simply because it's new, they're saying you should do so because it's good, and because a lot of what's putting people off are signifiers that you just have a knee-jerk reaction to. Also, ageism? Since when have music critics not fetishized teenagers?

That's the "buyer's guide" end of it, which is important, but not the whole enchilada as far as criticism. There's the Frommers guide and then there's travel writing. There's the cookbook and then there's MFK Fisher. Each has its place.

And oh yeah, late '80s pop was great. Nirvana, if anything, made things worse (partially by making people distrust rock bands who sounded happy.)

I'm putting this from a rock fan's perspective, obvs.

Chuck— How can it be a difference of degree and not genre if they didn't sound like Nirvana? As far as the Michael Jackson thing, I think that it was a pretty symbolic thing. Nothing like Nirvana had ever been a #1 before, and Jackson was the "king of pop."
And a difference in degree on its own is significant, if only based on the magnitude of that degree. Again, triple platinum in three months. That's amazing, and seems to imply that there were a lot of people out there who were waiting for an album like Nevermind to come along. Commercial radio was suddenly playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit," a mopey nonsensical muddle of angst and gibberish. It didn't sound like anything else on the radio, aside from a few college stations and that nascent X format. Nevermind was a milepost like Thriller was a milepost (and it was a better album than Thriller, just to toss the obligatory bomb).
And yeah, a lot of their legacy has been crappy. A lot of the My Chemical Romance appeal still owes itself to the legacy of the angsty suburban kids who bought Nevermind. But Nevermind was the first album like that which didn't require actively looking for it. And I don't blame Faith No More and Anthrax for Korn and Limp Bizkit, even though I might (Limp Bizkit opened up for FNM on FNM's last tour, and played three Rage Against the Machine covers).

Uh, because not everybody in every genre sounds exactly the same?

"Symbolic things" matter to people who want to create myths. ("King of Pop" is another myth, by the way. Michael's sales hadn't exactly been on the upswing through the '80s. Being displaced by Nirvana means zilch.) (And he was having hits long after Nirvana, as I recall.)

And lots of hit songs don't "sound like anything else on the radio." If you doubt me, go ask Chumbawamba or OMC or Lou Bega or Crazy Frog. Or Living Color or Faith No More or Queensyryche, for that matter.

As for *Nevermind* vs. *Thriller*...well, nevermind.

I think there might have been an external factor playing into that.

Chuck— Right. So why'd Nirvana have the traction that those other one-hit wonders didn't? And even though I love LC and FNM, they were one-hitters in terms of popular conception.
For all your "not that great, not that big of a deal," there still seems to be the popular perception that Nirvana WERE a huge deal. Where'd that come from?
And again, if you can't tell the difference between what Nirvana was doing and art metal, you're not really trying.

On a mostly unrelated note, my sister is engaged to a guy who has a band that is influenced by "Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Silverchair, and Soundgarden" according to something I just read. I really just want to cry, sometimes.

Touch & Go was one of my favorite labels in the mid '80s too, for whatever it's worth. I wrote a ton about Killdozer and Die Kreuzen; interviewed Scratch Acid for Spin while they were still with Rabid Cat, *before* Corey and Lisa picked them up. Touch & Go's music? Art-metal, mostly. Whether Cobain would have called it that doesn't particularly matter. (Flipper and lots of stuff on SST fit here, too.)