Was the late 90s post punk revival the last great rock movement?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by humanracer, Jan 6, 2021.

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  1. Tristero

    Tristero In possession of the future tense

    Location:
    MI
    I'm not even exactly sure which bands we're talking about here. As others have noted, the White Stripes were certainly not post-punk, though to be fair, that term itself was always a nebulous, ad hoc label. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a lot of the alternative/indie (or whatever you want to call them!) bands that emerged out of the late 90s and beyond, but I'm not sure if this can be considered a recognizable "movement", much less a great one.
     
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  2. Neonbeam

    Neonbeam All Art Was Once Contemporary

    Location:
    Planet Earth
    :doh: Why don't you start a dedicated thread about it then? Ideally after doing some research about things you consider to be "the aftermath". :uhhuh:

    What if it all is just an aftermath? One enormous aftermath?:biglaugh:
     
  3. Kingsley Fats

    Kingsley Fats Forum Resident

    My vote also goes to Britpop.

    The real issue is that this was 20 - 25 years ago & although there has been plenty of great music released over those years nothing has stood up as a "movement".
     
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  4. dmiller458

    dmiller458 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Midland, Michigan
    You're throwing me off here. First you say that Hot Fuss was the last rock album that made a huge commercial impact when the album's only RIAA 3x platinum and BPI 7x.

    Then you say that Nickelback and Kings of Leon had a huge cultural impact? I don't know that they've had any cultural impact beyond selling a lot of records.
     
  5. Kerm

    Kerm Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    By this logic isn’t punk just glam without the make up, along with swapping in some vague political messaging instead of aliens?
     
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  6. dmiller458

    dmiller458 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Midland, Michigan
    A while back I was spending some time at my cousin's house. A friend of one of the younger relative was talking about how the 90s was greatest decade in rock history. This guy knew his stuff and he almost had me convinced. I told his I though grunge and Britpop were kick@$$ but that outside of their massive commercial success they didn't seem that groundbreaking to me.

    He said that's because I was too old to be a part of the movement.
     
  7. Purple Jim

    Purple Jim Senior Member

    Location:
    Bretagne
    Well I created this thread all about punk 9 years ago:
    Defining "Punk"

    Not really. There are BIG changes, followed by permutations. :doh:Post punk/New Wave/New Romantics/synth-pop/grunge certainly weren't BIG changes. :biglaugh:.

    No. Glam was a follow on from the psychedelic/folk/hard rock era with music still rich in arrangements and guitar solos etc. Quite different to the far more simplistic approach of punk (even though the odd glam toon could be more basic rock).
     
  8. Neonbeam

    Neonbeam All Art Was Once Contemporary

    Location:
    Planet Earth
    That's actually true. Bands like the White Stripes had been around but it took 2001/2 - with The Strokes and The Libertines - to kickstart something which then got injected around 2003/4 - through the likes of Franz Ferdinand and Killers - with a dancey and glamorous element until it went through bands like Bloc Party and Arcade Fire and slowly lost steam.

    Definitely so many different bands with so many different styles, agendas and abilities that one would be hard pressed to call it "a movement". The unifying element was an approach of anything goes and everybody can do it.
     
  9. Neonbeam

    Neonbeam All Art Was Once Contemporary

    Location:
    Planet Earth
    Maybe your definition of "Punk" is the problem? How is punk a "BIG change" but post punk and new wave are not? When they are clearly influenced by different things like Bowie, Ferry, Moroder, soul, disco or Kraftwerk? You seem to be talking from a typical male white rockistic perspective.

    The ultra defining, most seminal single from 1977 is not by the Sex Pistols. It's "If Feel Love". By Donna Summer. This was a clear cut, this sounded futuristic and made punk suddenly sound very old.
     
  10. Evethingandnothing

    Evethingandnothing Forum Resident

    Location:
    Devon
    Yeah, but not every basement band could afford to buy colossal banks of synths, at least not in '77.
     
  11. James I

    James I Forum Resident

    Location:
    Mallorca, España
    I think synthpop is the style/genre that has left the least legacy and influences. When I was a child of 6 or 7 years old in 1998 or 1999 I hardly remember bands that played on the radios except DM or Eurythmics. Instead, postpunk has continued in the 90s and 2000s. Even nowaydays it is alive, because it was a great influence to dreampop and shoegaze.
     
  12. Purple Jim

    Purple Jim Senior Member

    Location:
    Bretagne
    Perhaps you are too young to have witnessed the sea change that was everything punk at the time. It wasn't just a permutation of something that had already been established (even if it had trace influences - Velvets, Iggy, Dolls...). The other genres detailed certainly didn't cause anywhere near the cultural shift that punk did, no matter how much you want them to.

    It was a good single and I loved it and bought it (it's still in a box in the garage) but it certainly didn't trigger an entire genre. We'd already had ELP, Yes, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Suicide, Bowie,... using synths in very original ways. The fact that Moroder used one on a disco song was fun, a novelty, great but... that's about it. "I Feel Love" was in a totally different genre and we loved it like we loved punk. It certainly didn't make punk "suddenly sound very old". Punk evolved, mutated in all sorts of directions (it was so huge an influence in rock).
     
  13. Elliottmarx

    Elliottmarx Always in the mood for Burt Bacharach

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Sorry for throwing you off.
    Yes, originally the last rock album that I could think of that was hugely successful was Hot Fuss. That's my first post. Then you reminded me of Kings of Leon and Nickelback - I agreed that yes, those were huge and yes, came after Hot Fuss. You helped to jog my memory.

    In spite of those later albums success, Spotify numbers show that a song from Hot Fuss has double the amount of streams - and may be the only rock song with a billion stream. Likewise Seven Nation Army also has astonishingly high streams.

    Seven Nation Army is the go to lick (now with Smoke on the Water, or whatever) for a preteen walking into a guitar shop. High school marching bands know it. Likewise it is chanted in football stadiums globally - the vast majority of the people there won't even know it is a White Stripes song, and only a teeny tiny minority have the Elephant album. Somehow that song crossed over from being a rock song, to something more than that - recognized culturally as something more.

    As far as cultural impact - it was soft. Kings of Leon and Nickelback may have been the last gasp. They did not have a lasting impact but for a moment there they made a difference and shook up the charts.

    Sex on Fire or How You Remind Me remain beloved (perhaps) songs on classic rock radio (or wherever) but haven't made it into the amateur marching band greatest hits. Those songs have failed to transcend the genre - again, it is a fluke that Seven Nation Army and Mr. Brightside did - and this isn't qualitative, it just somehow happened.
     
    Last edited: Jan 7, 2021
  14. Spazaru

    Spazaru Angry Samoan

    I'd say late 80s/early 90s garage from SF, England, Tokyo, Seattle (YFF, Fastbacks, Supersuckers, not grunge) and NYC for me. After that there's been relatively little that I really like
     
  15. ARK

    ARK Forum Miscreant

    Location:
    Charlton, MA, USA
    I don’t know. Movements are completely irrelevant to my enjoyment of music. I continue to read threads like this one on this forum to get an understanding why it’s so interesting to others. I never seem to get a clear answer though.
     
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  16. cyril sneer

    cyril sneer Forum Resident

    Location:
    Exeter, UK
    Huh, I always thought it was called garage rock revival? And that it was at it's peak 2001-2004....before it then got swamped by indie landfill.

    In answer to the question - yes, I now consider it being the last gasp of rock music in the mainstream.

    Looking back it though the only ones I will still listen to are The White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Libertines.
     
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  17. Its About That Hat Rack

    Its About That Hat Rack Active Member

    Location:
    Cedar Rapids, IA
    I'd like to believe that Rock will never die, that there will always be a revival every decade or so but the other day, while I was giddily rocking out to my new vinyl copy of SCIENCE by Incubus, my 15 year old game in and said "eeeewww guitar is old people's music." SAY WHAT! never occurred to me that an instrument, especially one as prolific as guitar, could go out of style! What's next? DRUMS?!
     
  18. Andrew J

    Andrew J Forum Resident

    Location:
    South East England
    Perhaps to claim that any motley collection of adolescents who happen to be in a similar place at a time, playing a few chords on a stage as a 'movement' is slightly ignorant. I guess if someone wishes to call a few groups who happened to be playing indie guitar music at the turn of the millennium a movement, it's up to them.

    But anyway, I agree, with what you are saying here. I've said it before, but Donna Summer in 1977 with Giorgio Moroder producing was as or more influential on music and culture than anything offered under the guise of 'punk' in the same year.

    The assumption that punk was some stand alone cultural force, any more than whatever came after is also a bit short sighted, yet somehow predictable to those who look back to The Sex Pistols and the Clash in 77 as a golden era. Those groups were massively influenced by what had gone before. To assert that synthpop was just the 'aftermath' and that 'punk' was otherwise (as someone commented here) is as you say in your first sentence.

    But don't take my word for it. Jon Savage, and Greil Marcus all noted within the limitations of their own particular preoccupation that 'punk' - whatever that was (but I guess by implication here is seen to be white guys from the UK in 1977 who sounded a bit like the The Ramones and the New York Dolls), was really part of a stream of consciousness from the past up to that point.

    If anything, the successive post punk climate was far more interesting and diverse than the meat and potatoes of punk. The Clash obviously realised that, or they wouldn't have gone on to do London Calling or Sandinista.
     
    Last edited: Jan 7, 2021
  19. Kerm

    Kerm Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    It sort of just sounds like you're discounting the evolution every movement after punk made while downplaying the similarities of what came before? Sure, I get it. It was a shock to the system. But you're acting, first of all, like punk had one sound. A simplistic one, apparently. When the CBGB scene was wildly varied and had bands that today, young people are surprised to hear classified as punk because they don't sound like the Sex Pistols or the Clash. And that shock to the system didn't come out of the blue. It *was* an outgrowth of the scene/sub-culture of glam and the outsider rock that begun springing up in the 70s. Yes, a certain strain of it became highly simplified and more reflective of early rock - 50s style song structures. But even then, by your logic, I could just write the entire movement off as derivative of that period. I've ready highly interesting takes on the 70s punk scene that do just that - argue it was the first completely self aware genre of rock music that was more overtly a return to a previous form with a new twist. That's not a critique. I love punk music. But the pedestal you're putting it on is a little absurd.
     
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  20. Django

    Django Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dublin, Ireland
    Indie landfill...it's one of those awful terms, probably coined by the nme, when they still had some clout. I've been meaning to do an indie landfill compilation. Most of those bands had at least one good song.
     
  21. bad_penny

    bad_penny Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brooklyn
    What about the current post-punk revival? Fontaines D.C., Idles, The Murder Capital, Black Midi, Preoccupations and Protomartyr.
     
    Last edited: Jan 7, 2021
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  22. altaeria

    altaeria Forum Resident

    So we have a unanimous consensus! Great!
     
  23. Hatchet Jack

    Hatchet Jack Forum Resident

    Location:
    Europe
    Yes, i believe that the the last great rock movements were the two simultaneous ones of the late 1990's/early 2000's called "Garage Rock Revival" and "Post-Punk Revival" (aka New Wave Revival). Bands like The Strokes, The Hives, The Libertines, The White Stripes, The Killers, Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, etc. Some of these bands fall into both styles (The Strokes), but others fall only into Garage Rock Revival (The White Stripes) or only into Post-Punk Revival (Interpol). Those (and many other from the same period) were the bands of my teens, and i'll always remember them with fondness. That being said, i don't listen to them anymore. They're not bad by any means, but my taste changed, just that.

    Garage Rock Revival Music Genre Overview | AllMusic

    Garage Rock Revival - Music Genres - Rate Your Music

    New Wave/Post-Punk Revival Music Genre Overview | AllMusic

    Post-Punk Revival  (aka New Wave Revival) - Music Genres - Rate Your Music
     
    Last edited: Jan 7, 2021
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  24. Jmac1979

    Jmac1979 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Louisville, KY
    The problem is that a lot of these groups end up going too pop (Imagine Dragons, Maroon 5, Twenty One Pilots) because of a fear of actually sounding rock
     
  25. Hatchet Jack

    Hatchet Jack Forum Resident

    Location:
    Europe
    Believe me, it was a movement! I know because i was there. ;)
     
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