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

the Seattle sound (just like NIN-type industrial, and whatever the Butthole Surfers and White Zombie and Meat Puppets and Flaming Lips and Soul Asylum etc eventually had hits with) was an '80s sound that sounded a whole lot more compromised and less wildass by the time it finally hit the mainstream in the '90s. So it seems really strange to pretend the '90s suddenly turned music dangerous. (Though, I guess if you never heard anything in the '80s that didn't get on MTV, you might somehow get that delusion.)

― xhuxk, Monday, December 21, 2009 8:54 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

okay, but that's my point entirely! i WAS listening to the grunge & "pigfuck" & post-HC noise & no wave in the 80s. and i saw a lot of that as a contemporaneous response to plastic MTV pop. but it tended to be a niche or even an underground thing. visible to critics & hipsters, but totally invisible to pop radio & mall music stores & "the mainstream".

in the 90s, the values & aesthetics of this 80s underground went mainstream, though often in a dumbed-down, distorted, and/or politically neutered form. the anti-ness of the 80s indie scene relative to commercial culture became a dominant paradigm - which was weird, since it was so deeply predicated on its own outsider status. most obvious example of this being grunge a la nirvana & pearl jam. SST's "corporate rock still sucks" punk values pushed into arenas and onto top 40.

Exactly, when "alternative" is the mainstream, then what it is an alternative to?

Republicans

another view holds that mid-to-late 80s indie/underground was at its core musically and culturally conservative, a reactionary macho response to all that gay new pop/MTV fluff of the early 80s

cobain wearing a "corporate rock still sucks" shirt on the cover of rolling stone always struck me as the height of self-delusion

xp Yeah, we've talked about this on other threads plenty -- red-blooded American guitar bands countering all those faggy synthy Limeys. (At least, that's how indie rock was pretty much marketed, circa 1983-84)

joe carducci is working on a new book: "poptimism & the rockist narcotic"

'"corporate rock still sucks" shirt on the cover of rolling stone'
wasn't this "corporate rock magazines still suck" or something? it was some ploy to get out of being on the cover but they ended up running it anyway? the other t-shirt they had was a cartoon duck taking a duck shit on jan wenner?

another view holds that mid-to-late 80s indie/underground was at its core musically and culturally conservative, a reactionary macho response to all that gay new pop/MTV fluff of the early 80s

― chief rocker frankie crocker (m coleman), Monday, December 21, 2009 2:21 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

i think both views are correct. for me at the time, as a serious young man, it was easy to see the noisy indie/underground stuff as raw honesty in relation to a commercial pop culture that was interested only in marketable inanities. in retrospect, i can see that the "inanities" were often a fascinating & sophisticated form of play, and that the angst i so prized often reads as reactionary masculine drag - but not always in a bad way. big black and killdozer, for instance, tended to be humorously ironic about the tough-guy shtick.

"angst i so prized often reads as reactionary masculine drag"
How would you compare that against actual reactionary masculine drag as practiced by hair metallers?

I can't say for certain how real all this realness was, floating around in 89 - 94, but there was at least a huge change in marketing.

You see it in the commercials, where everything became Xtreme, and exploding on skateboards; and Sprite ads where Grant Hill wasn't going to kid you cause you knew it was a commercial, and he knew it was a commercial, and Sprite knew it was a commercial so let's just be REAL about it.

And I still do see a difference between RHCP and Green Day and Sublime, Mighty Mighty Bosstones and all the fun 90s bands, compared to all the fun party 80s bands. It's a difference that's hard to explain but I can sense it none the less. Maybe it's that the 80s had irony and the 90s had sarcasm? A sarcasm that Chandler from Friends was designed to embody.

I think that by the 90s, the average fan had a bit more insight into the realities (and iconic motifs) of life in a rock band. So bands had to posture differently because the audience wouldn't fall for the same smoke & mirrors (ie The Beatles drink milk and eat jellybeans/Michael Jackson is a benevolent god/Kurt Cobain is an indie-rock martyr). It's a continuum that stretches back decade after decade and the only solution for the really fabricated artists is to go after the youngest and least cultured paying demographic available. Everyone else (the bands that are "keeping it real") is stuck justifying their existence in whatever sense works best for the time and place (and allows them to sleep at night).

Well there was dialog *on MTV* about all of this, when Green Day broke they had their little soundbite interview where Billy says "You know everybody talks about 'alternative' it's like alternative to what?" because so many of these bands were playing clubs and doing the punk/cred/fanzine circuit, whatever you thought of their commercially polished material. The Offspring are a very interesting case, because they were possibly the most "credible" group of folks to come through, yet one of their breakthrough hits ("Self Esteem") was a complete "Smells Like Teen Spirit" knock in all respects, down to the video. And they endured in the mainstream for a while, during a window where it seemed Green Day would not (of course they bounced back in frighteningly conservative garb, to address that line of thought, and won stupefying mainstream acceptance).

Totally not getting the irony vs sarcasm dichotomy, tbh. (But then, I never got the Chili Peppers either. Or the Bosstones. Or Friends.) (I want to say, compared to hit rock from previous decades, that what distinguished all those '90s bands -- even Green Day and Sublime and the Offspring, all of whom I liked a lot at the time -- was their clumsiness and smarminess, but that's just probably just me being cranky and old. I still sense it though. And obviously, say, the Eagles were no less smarmy in the '70s. They were just a whole lot better.)

Or maybe you just Uzi Suicide wasn't a legit label in the first place? (I've never thought of this before, but did they even put out any other records? Triple X obviously did, over the years, albeit sporadically.)

what I had always heard was what it says in the G'n'R wiki (though yeah again: it's WP, who knows)

Geffen Records released an EP in late 1986 to keep the interest in the band alive while the band withdrew from the club scene to work in the studio. The four song EP Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide came out on the ostensibly independent "Uzi Suicide Records" label (which was actually a Geffen subsidiary.)

thought I read something about this in that Restless Road book, I'll dig it out later if I can find it.

So, we can all still blame Jesus Jones for all of this, right?

xp Though eh (one 45-minute bike ride later) it's not as if Motley Crue weren't just as smarmy-clumsy as Green Day or the Offspring etc. And those bands were definitely better than, say, the Outfield, or the Hooters, or (fill in some shitty '70s band I can't think of right now.) So I shouldn't have implied all "hit rock from previous decades." (Motley Crue's best-of CD is no better or worse than STP's or Soundgarden's or Soul Asylum's or the Counting Crows' or the Black Crowes', maybe a little worse than the Offspring's and a little better than the Spin Doctors'. Not saying the '90s invented mediocrity, even if mediocrity is what distiguishes the decade in the long run.)

Motley Crue = jocks
Green Day = nerds
Offspring = nerds
Counting Crows = nerds
Soundgarden = nerds
STP = jocks with nerd singer? (Weiland is into Devo and wimpiest pop possible)

90s is the ascent of nerds occupying positions previously held by jocks
in the 80s, nerds are consigned to the novelty ghetto with B-52s, Weird Al and Thomas Dolby.

scott weiland = quarterback of his high school football team and also on wrestling team

believe me the jock/nerd thing is always always way more complicated IRL when you get into it.

also robert pollard from guided by voices is/was an excellent athlete...and gibby haynes from buttholes was an athlete to iirc and in a fraternity in college

Wasn't Britney Spears also a big-deal basketball prodigy, once upon a time in Louisiana?

Top music jock of recent decades would probably be Nelly, right?

"believe me the jock/nerd thing is always always way more complicated IRL when you get into it."
oh yeah there are definitely mountains of doctorate theses you can mine from unpacking all this (like rise of nerd thugs in 00s)
but butthole surfers helmed by jock is not surprising...

yeah, i mean, the wrestling team -- loaded with super nerds bound for MIT who could also kick your ass.

Technically, Kurt Cobain's poor scholastic performance and his participation in high school wrestling would make him more jock than nerd, but c'moooon.

Motley Crue = jocks burnouts who smoked behind the shop class
Counting Crows = nerds hippies
Soundgarden = nerds preps

Didn't I see Tommy Lee palmsmash LL Cool J in the face in MTV's Rock & Jock B-ball challenge, cementing his team's threepeat?

vince neil was good at baseball i think...

lots of burnouts were jocks and jocks were burnouts and nerds were jocks and jocks were nerds IMO

yeah, i mean, the wrestling team -- loaded with super nerds bound for MIT who could also kick your ass.

― tylerw, Tuesday, December 22, 2009 6:07 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hmmm..i think this is more my area but yeah that was not true for me at all, but we were close enough to iowa where wrestling was more of a glamour sport, more popular than basketball tbh

but wrestling is a weird subculture for sure.

lots of burnouts were jocks and jocks were burnouts and nerds were jocks and jocks were nerds IMO

and nerds were burnouts, too

that too

it's like we learned nothing from carlos the dwarf.

or randall "pink" floyd

"gibby haynes from buttholes was an athlete to iirc and in a fraternity in college"

yes! He went to my college about ten years before me. I know the frat he was in (we only had local frats, not national ones, so naming it isn't going to be helpful for you guys)...it was the frat for rich, athletic, good-looking party kids---jocks, basically. I was in another frat, for nerdy drunks, but we'd go to his frat's parties...sadly there were no xrays of girls passing gas there.