I went to the 4 Seasons to give up my soul What I need I just don't have (more votes) First I curse, then I sweat oil till it hurt They say, Rudie can fail
I read that to see if he mentioned the poetry reading where I and a few friends opened for him. He did not.
It was a "spoken word" thing. My instrument was my vanity, which in those days I could play like a virtuoso.
My son got a turntable for Christmas so I was in mall the other day & saw Rubber Soul. Let's see what it's going for...$37!
There is no end, there is no end (there is nooooooennnnnnd) woo woo woo wooooo The willow turns its back on inclement weather
I am not saying they weren't big band - i was a huge fan Big new popular bands happen every year. I just don't believe Nirvana were part of any special wider cultural thing. When we look back now, that is much more obvious IMO.
Totally disagree, rock music before and after them was completely different, and “alternative rock” became the mainstream in their wake. And they’re far from the only artist responsible for that but they were definitely the biggest. I think it’s easy to take that for granted now.
Nirvana changed everything. Before Nirvana rock music had become a ridiculous parody of itself. Bands like Cinderella, Warrant, Poison, Motley Crue, Whitesnake and Bon Jovi had taken over the airwaves and dominated MTV which was still how we discovered new music and consumed it back then. It was awful. The only saving grace for several years had been Guns n Roses who kind of looked the hair metal part but the music was good. Then came Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit, there it was on MTV, in all its stripped-down glory, and almost immediately hair metal was dead and garage rock was ushered back in. It was extraordinary and wonderful. I remember the relief I felt at the time. Then came all the other Seattle bands, and STP, RHCP's, Ministry, Green Day, etc., etc. Rock music dumped all that spandex, hair spray and utter crap music, in favor of stripped down, back to basics, garage rock. People called it Grunge, which they still do, and that encapsulates the heavy hitters of the day: Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, etc., but it was great rock music that had stripped away all the fluff and pretense. Nirvana shook up the rock world and changed everything, and it happened almost overnight.
I agree with the history of this take, but I want to defend glam rock. It's big and dopey and simple and frivolous, but that doesn't make it foolish. It's a joke, but it's in on the joke. And that makes it fun. Nothing wrong with smiling while singing a song.
Anyway I always thought “glam rock” was a much more appropriate name the first time around. I guess because some of the 80’s hard rock bands used hairspray and makeup they were able to co-opt the term?
I think glam rock was great if you’re talking about bands like Mott the Hoople, T Rex, Bowie, New York Dolls, Roxy Music, etc, that music was great so it worked. I think of hair metal as something completely different, it was all the glitter but the music was mostly terrible. Bands like Ratt and Quiet Riot were in heavy rotation…Skid Row, Warrant, Mr Big… …the Unskinny Bop! It was terrible. I shudder just to think about what we were living through. It’s one thing to be outrageous, but the music still has to stand up.
I had buddy who was into Steel Panther though, but then he also loved Iggy and Lemmy, X and Black Flag…never really understood how Steel Panther fit in, we even saw them once in Santa Cruz, I’d say they were more of an intentional over the top parody band in the Spinal Tap vein.
Replace cocaine with weed and you should have every musician's perfect scenario, regardless of genre..
Ohh this post is so far into my wheelhouse I almost need to do research and reread some books before replying I 100% agree that change happened - mostly because MTV created it. Indeed Nirvana's zenith IMO is the unplugged session - which was an actual new format I highly recommend I want my MTV by Rob Tennenbaum on these shifts. And yes that music shift happened - leading to Oasis etc etc - we experienced it very much as a comeback of indie music as techno was so big at the time. But again - i don't think Nirvana particularly caused any of this, or have more than a couple of significant tracks. Indeed at the time we were listening to Smells like Teen Spirit, we were already listening to Mudhoney, Dinosaur Jr, Bob Mould and of course Sugar dropped their indie chart topper Copper Blue just a year later. I'd agree with you to the extent that the break out success of Nirvana created opportunties for those bands i guess. But to get back to my original point, I just don't seem them as some musical watershed in the same way that the german techno producers were at that time. So called Franfurt beat was an entirely new type of music never heard before
Glam Rock was a function of the format. These were essentially stage acts, and thus have more in common with theatre. Everything has to be big and over the top to be seen. There was no native video content in the early days - because there was nowhere for it to be watched. When MTV created an outlet for actual native videos, the format still had to be invented which is what you still see in the mid 80s. Lots of the content is just a straight port of stage or fake stage performance. And they dress like they would on stage because that is how rock stars dress since years now. You also see the first attempts at what I would call native content - and many of these look more like concept art than a music video. A lot of this stuff is just a direct lift of club culture from the time. But it really is only 5 years until you see the nirvana video - but they didn't create that - there is a host of videos from the time that are way more deconstructed, rapid edits, fun graphics, much more gonzo etc than what we saw in the 1980s I see the early 90s as the peak of the format and a big part of it was actually the camera tech. Guys i knew were making indie music videos on the Sony DV for $5k. That camera changed everything
One of the big ideas that came to pass by the end of the 80s, is what if we stop shooting music videos like television commercials, and just shoot cool stuff, do some cool graphics, and then edit to the music. This approach was more closely aligned to the new cameras and editing kit whereas before stuff was shot more like a film. We actually did this a lot at the time. You'd grab the DV - shoot stuff - then 48 hours later you have a 2min music video. It's seems trad now, but you just couldn't do this before, This video is how we shot everything. If you didn't have 3 cuts per second you were failing. You'd get stuff back and ask what happened to the story board and the editor would be like "this just cut together sweeter". Then you'd try to explain to the client how this new edit was simply cooler. Because what Gen X kid watching cares about a storyboard?