I don't think any band can kill a genre. What kills a genre is not enough mass appeal product to keep the interest of the buying public. When everything starts to sound the same or similar for a few years people start to pass/ignore it. There wasn't anybody in the hard rock genre that was really putting out anything special at the time grunge came along. There was some really good stuff but not really all that unique or different than what was already saturating the market at the time.
I agree. Also, the late '80's/early '90's are hard to pin down. Rap/ hip-hop was on the upswing. Brit-pop hardly made a dent in the US. Also, AOR radio stations were still ratings kings playing the old 60's/'70's formula and they never integrated newer bands into it. If they had, I'm sure things would have shake out differently...
The Oil's were big here in Toronto and "Earth and Sun..." got some airplay here on CFNY with Truganini and My Country. Rob Hirst, the drummer, admitted that the 'tougher' "live" feel of the material was influenced by the 'grunge' stuff that was popular at the time.
The Replacements played their last gig on July 4, 1991, so they were done well before the grunge explosion.
I worked in radio when Nevermind was released. The amount of promotional swag that we received for that album was unprecedented in my radio career. Geffen pushed that album very hard. Geffen gave me tickets to Nirvana concerts in hopes that we'd play the record. Geffen continued to mail us freebies long after we had the record in heavy rotation. Bleach, its predecessor, was barely a blip on the radar for us. In fact, we didn't even play it, and we weren't alone. In fact, we were the norm in that regard. Tons of people who flocked to Nevermind, buying Nirvana albums, shirts, posters, tickets, etc., believed that it was Nirvana's first album. On a regular basis I heard people say, "They had an album before Nevermind?!?!?!" Bleach was a niche release with relatively few copies pressed and it did not cause the success of the band's sophomore album. Nevermind sold because of the exposure it received due in large part to Geffen spending large sums of money on promotion. I don't aim to be rude, but in this case you don't know what you're talking about. Your comment "It got no push from the label at all" is the opposite of reality.
i was talking about the poison/warrant albums released after nevermind broke. i guess you missed part of my quoted posts. poison/warrant were selling a few million copies. nirvana broke. the albums by both bands right after nirvana made it big went gold only because they were such popular bands before that but the labels put just about zero promotion into them because nirvana was already big.
Okay, my apologies. Context is everything--I see what you mean now--thanks. You're on the money with your assessment of the Poison/Warrant stuff.
i don't think those bands could have remained big but i think its odd their labels just gave up on them after nirvana even though they were proven million sellers
As much as I like Nirvana,and some other grunge bands,I wonder if the success of Nirvana and Grunge didn't play a big part in keeping Shoegaze,and Ride in particular,from breaking in America.
? Nirvana was part of the grunge movement. How could they be killed by it when they were instrumental in creating it?
I really like Faith No More. It's a shame they didn't stick it out. Metallica hasn't done much for me since "The Black Album".
I don't think they ever saw themselves as being the leaders of a movement - or didn't want to be anyway. Which created a lot of tension and, like noyoucmon said, contributed to the problems that led Kurt to take his life.
We aren't talking about the literal sense of the word here guys. Also please read the OP and the title. It says "bands which were "killed" off by grunge/Nirvana". Killed was in quotes and Nirvana is the band doing the "killing" off here along with grunge. I don't disagree with what either of you are saying but it isn't relevant to this conversation.
I'm guessing the labels thought the already established bands could remain successful while they poured their promo budgets into what they percieved to be the next big thing. This sort of backfired because bands like Poison, Warrant and Ratt all lost key players around the same time and the over saturation of so called "hair metal" by this point made people turn away in droves at the sniff of something different. Of course history has proven that the vast majority of the 80's bands resurrected themselves to varying degrees through the 00's and many are still doing quite well.
I'm not sure this was the case in the UK. I remember that when Nirvana got big there was a change in who came to alternative club nights. Prior to Nirvana becoming big they were frequented mainly by an alternative type of crowd (that could include punks, indie kids, goths, crusties etc) but no one into metal what so ever. Over a period of a few months a new breed of metal fan appeared head banging to the likes of Nirvana and Soundgarden. Many of these new metal fans wore Faith No More and Metallica T-shirts and slowly but surely these bands crept into the play list. Rage Against The Machine were very popular at this time as were other metal/hardcore - rap cross over bands (RHCP, Body Count etc) and Faith No More seemed to fit into this Zeitgeist.
Faith No More didn't give themselves much of a chance. They only released 2 albums between 1990 and 1996
It wasn't Nirvana, Sub Pop or grunge that damaged other bands. It was the UK critics. UK bands like Ride and Slowdive were virtually ignored after the arrival of grunge in the UK. At that time, critics held the keys to success. Thank God they no longer do.
