Were Pop-Metal bands more to blame for their own demise, then Grunge?

a lot of those bands were no joke mate. They may have looked ridiculous and campy, but they could seriously play. They would wipe the floor with a lot of bands of modern times. More than likely some that you think are "great" . People always underestimate the musicianship of many of "those"bands.

 

Partially the bands and partially the record companies packaging and marketing them.

 

Your right some of the band's after Van Halen and Motley Crue were very good like LA Guns, Poison, White Lion, Extreme and Ratt to name a few were good bands but what I was trying to say was the marketing of these bands got lame and made the genre of these bands seem campy. I think the supposed grunge era has some great bands but the decline of glam metal hard rock had less to do with the quality of grunge or even that grunge became cool for a time but more that these glam bands and their record companies kept doing the same thing over and over again.

 

Interesting that there's a mix of styles there - grunge, indie-dance (including U2's take on it), goth...

I think grunge bands (and American alt rock bands in general) were lucky that Pop-Metal bands AND UK indie bands (especially indie/dance) made some real miss-steps between 1989 & 1994.

Previous posters have gone into the poor moves that Pop-Metal acts made, but equally there's the bad decisions by the likes of the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Blur etc that killed the chance of an early 1990s British Invasion.