Bands that survived the Grunge apocalypse?

To my college era ears I thought grunge killed new wave, but it was later that I realized that was already dying by the late 80s/early 90s.

The Grunge erae was admittedly a wasteland for me - lots of Big Black and New Zealand pop for me back then. Only later did I learn about Britpop and Shoegaze.

 

Yup. Trends come and go in music. Yet people are very insistent about this grunge vs. hair band myth. You don't have folks making endless threads on music forums about how rock 'n roll killed bebop or big band swing music, for example.

 

No festivals...I'm talking clubs that hold 1200-2000. Of course the US were the one's who jumped on the grunge bandwagon more than any other country so it makes sense people are still clinging on to whats left of that scene if indeed there is anything left.

All I'm saying is that all these so called washed up hair bands people like to denigrate aren't doing bad at all. I personally know of many who aren't trotting off to a 9-5 every day and are living comfortably off music and still touring the world.

 

Exactly.

 

I've got both "grunge" and hair band albums in my collection. And sorry if it offends anyone but Winger and bands of that ilk are washed up as far as I'm concerned. The clubs they play here have way less capacity that what you quoted. The venue they are playing next week maxes out at 400 people, and it probably won't get full. Bandwagon? I find that funny since both hair bands and grunge are U.S. exports. Again, music fads come and go.

 

Johnny Cash flourished during this era, even after being dropped by Columbia.

 

Nu-Metal seemed to reach the saturation point pretty quickly. Lots of truly awful stuff around that time.

 

They are grunge.

Along with Green River and Soundgarden, the Melvins are among the first bands to have acquired that categorisation.

 

Motörhead.

 

Speaking of Tom Petty (and the Heartbreakers). They had a legendary career thru 1989's 'Full Moon Fever (solo).' Here's what they released during the grunge era & beyond;

Into The Great Wide Open - July 1991 (Pearl Jam 'Ten' released Aug 1991, Nirvana 'Nevermind' released Sep 1991)
Wildflowers (solo) - 1994
She's The One - 1996
Johnny Cash 'American II: Unchained' (backing band) - 1996
Echo - 1999
Johnny Cash 'American III: Solitary Man' (backing band) - 2000
The Last DJ - 2002
Highway Companion (solo) - 2006
Mojo - 2010
Hypnotic Eye - 2014


Not too shabby

 

Said no one, ever.

Wasn't Neil Young proclaimed the father of grunge by Pearl Jam?

 

The bandwagon being the US media pushing the grunge thing as the be all and end all when it emerged. Surely you saw that - I did from the other side of the world...

 

Queen's last LP was '91. Queen+PR or Queen+ isn't the same thing at all.

 

I definitely remember the change. In the UK, for me, it was accelerated by the change from us getting MTV Europe to MTV UK. In the MTV Europe years there was much more mainstream rock played, as well as european pop and dance. With MTV UK you had more of a focus on grunge and later britpop, and the level and variety of pop played changed to a huge degree. The whole indie scene was changing too at the same time. MTV UK looked much more to the US than the European music scene I felt. It lost something, I missed seeing the European chart in particular.

 

They understandably sound very 80s, definitively of their time, but I'm not keen on using 'dated' as a criticism because it can apply to almost all pop and rock music. A Hard Day's Night sounds totally 1964 and Houses of the Holy is pure 1973. It's comes down to whether people like the era and it's sounds or not. A lot of rock fans and 'keep music live' bores don't like the 80s as a lot of it was a backlash against the rock culture they loved. Make up, drum machines and synthesisers were evil to them. But, these don't come up with the ideas or write songs and you can guarantee that there would be loads of synths on Beatles and Zep songs if they were around then. Both were already using what was available anyway.

The 80s are very popular with young people and the likes of Def Leppard are still going well, with their 80s albums never out of print, being reissued and still selling. This isn't what happens if a band is dated to the point of general irrelevance.

 

Naming Winger is like using the most unintelligent, too late bandwagon jumping band of the grunge era to represent the whole thing. Of course the lesser bands are washed up. They were lucky to ever be in the water. The big so called 'hair metal' bands that are still going are having no problems making a good living. Hair Metal was never a common term anyway, not even during the grunge era.

 

What did the forum used to be about? Was there a time before like/ dislike / top ten lists?

 

Disco had a far bigger impact than punk. They both sort of ran in parallel

 

Yeah, I guess those guys from Soundgardan will agree.

 

The Offspring
Green Day
Bad Religion

 

Black Sabbath - the Godfathers of Grunge?

 

You seem to have missed the point. Winger is a great example to illustrate the saturation that hair metal reached by the early 90s. I could name a band like Nitro, which is even more embarrassing and much more obscure, but I didn't.

"Hair metal", "cock rock", "hair bands", "glam metal", and "pop metal" were all common terms here in the U.S. during the early 90s - where most of the bands were from. I can't speak to what you called them over in England or Europe.

 

I really didn't witness a grunge apocalypse ... I saw rock take on a harder edge for a couple of years, as had happened many times before, and then it drifted off into the dark regions of the music industry.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds skated through the grunge era, completely unscathed.... I would imagine leering with contempt at yet another fashion sliding into the distance.

 

I was in a hair-metal band. But this was in 2007, so we were not affected by grunge in the slightest.

 

Sure, as sort of ironic retro revivalism thing. Look at "synthwave", 80s themed throwback movies, etc. As someone that lived through the 80s and 90s there are acts that I personally think held up better than others. It's a personal taste thing. And I'm not knocking Def Leppard at all, as I said I like them, I just primarily stick with the early stuff these days.