"My Chemical Romance is this generation's Nirvana"

I'm sure in a decade or two when these kids are pushing a stroller through B&N and they see some book that establishes the favorite bands of their teen years in the critical canon that they'll take a look.

Er, just for the record, for most 26-year-olds I know, and even 24- and 25-year-olds, Nirvana was HUGE HUGE HUGE. They are certainly the reason I started listening to non-pop music, and indeed, for most of the people that age I play music with, it can be sorta hard to get them out of the Nirvana mindset sometimes.

The line usually peddled re: Nirvana was that Nevermind got a lot of attention but then In Utero was seen as something of a sophomore slump and they were regarded as fading before the suicide. I was pretty much teaching myself to sing by listening to that album, so I can't vouch for that either way, but I think that's the established narrative.

If Nirvana was regarded as important, I think it was for bringing underground music to the mainstream--someone or other from the Pacific NW saying "they were actually a good band having success" or something like that. Maybe today the problem is that the underground is already transparent to the mainstream, that the barriers to entry have been lowered. I dunno. It's an interesting question.

is my chemical romance the one w/the alice in wonderland video?

Without Nirvana, there'd be no MCR. Without MCR there'll be no...?

That's kind of the question. What will it mean, years down the line, that a lot of people grew up on stuff like this? What'll it mean that a lot of people grew up putting themselves in musical opposition to this stuff, hating it and reacting against it and feeling likt it was everywhere? Maybe nothing, maybe something -- it'll be people who know something about the genre who'll be best at figuring it out.

(Chuck you're right about Mikael; keep him working.)

-- The Man Without Shadow

Nirvana meant a lot to me when i was 16, but it was more for the music they led me to - all the american 'underground stuff' that preceded them - than any particular identification with the lyrics or anything. tho kurt's unsubtle anti-macho stance was something i appreciated.

Also: Bright Eyes

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You really think that's interesting?

xpost Anthony how could that not be interesting/meaningful? I feel like any critic who's not at least a little curious about what that means and how that works is ... well, weirdly uninquisitive! It's one thing if you think you know those subgenres and know what they mean and just aren't interested -- if you feel like you've dealt with them enough -- but otherwise hell yeah, it seems fascinating enough for me.

I was the only one who has Lovespirals on mine. That they're obscure and MCR are huge is the obvious point of difference, but I don't think Jess and I are running for a position in terms of who is the best amateur sociologist here.

It was a remarkably productive tension, though, which it isn't anymore.

Nabisco's right, but I find it pretty hard to write about that class of bands in any interesting way, which is not even the case with other rock bands, it's just the emo ones. I just end up grumping like an old man. It does seem remarkably derivative, but maybe it would be better to regard that as a conscious borrowing rather than just lazy defaultism.

note also that it's technically a 2004 album and got 7 votes in that year's P&J:
http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/pazznjop/04/ballots-votedfor.php?titleid=250905

also most of the people who say "i just listen to what i listen to" also end up inevitably complaining about they'll never get as excited about an album as they did when they were 14 or 18 or 22 or whatever. could it be because since they were about 22, they started slagging off every new band as "derivative"? enjoy life in that hermetically sealed bunker. hope you don't choke when the air runs out.

I think there needs to be a finer -- and much more flexible -- line drawn between 'critics' as such and individual interaction with music as a point of relative importance. It might have been clearer in an era divided between 'critics'/'everyone else,' but that artificial construct has long been on life support.

High school != college. Very different. But even if specific individuals change between high school and college (and they do), they don't forget the high school part.

I have in my life liked hardly anything at all that has anything whatsoever to do with any kind of hardcore lineage.(*) Flat-out. I don't feel in the least bad about this. At the same time, I'm well aware that it keeps me from understanding or having good things to say about a lot of music. If I were a career journalist, I certainly wouldn't want to get into that situation with more and more stuff.

(*) This is not entirely true.

xpost to ned

people having different experiences is what i'm after as a reader. the problem is that there are too many older crtiics having the exact same reaction to the music ver kids are listening to, and it's so predictable. admittedly some people do it well -- even though i am wildly suspicious of aging Dylan fans, Greil Marcus is still interesting and the last new band i can recall him liking was Sleater Kinney -- but most are just old bores, and it's easy to see how they got that way.

also the difference between critics and everyone else is that i'll forgive my buddy who i used to go to shows with for fixating on Springsteen and never moving on because he's my buddy, and although he's really boring to talk about music with, that's not why I hang out with him. i wouldn't read Xgau or Xblogger or dumbass ILX poster X if he wasn't saying interesting things, because reading an interesting perspective although what i'm hoping to gain by reading him. i'm not doing it because i want him to come over saturday so we can play mah jongg.

To me, this seems really a main point in the MCR-Nirvana correlation, and maybe also why I might not be able to completely nix Ultragrrl's point.

They're not are pretty "mall-emo," but nonetheless, a plausible gateway.

nabisco, I sincerely mean no offence by this, but this is often exactly how I've felt when reading or talking with people who come from what I'll crassly class as soft-indie/Britpop/goth/80s/new wave backgrounds, including yourself. This is one of the things that drew me to FT/ILM in the first place though.

Anyway, I was listening to Three Cheers the other day and it's glorious non-stop pop energy. I don't know or care if it's this generation's Nirvana.

("Helena" did OK in the P&J singles poll FWIW.)

I do know kids in high school that were fans of MCR's 2002 debut (which was underground to an extent), and four years later the same kids are hardly following any of the mainstream trends, i.e. listening to non-pop music.