Quote:
Originally Posted by Soulflower
Hey Music banter I am feenin for some music knowledge. As you guys know Rock is not really my forte so I wanted to get some info. I commonly hear Nirvana is the blame for the decline in Hair Metal in the late 80's and I wanted to know your opinion on it. I always thought Hair Metal was a fad that had already declined by the time Nirvana really became popular which was in the early 90's.
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Let me explain this by way of my firsthand experience: I started high school in the fall of of 1991 and at that time the biggest, most popular new music among my classmates was Guns 'n Roses simultaneous album releases of
Use Your Illusion I and
Use Your Illusion II and the Van Halen song "Right Now". Nobody in my high school except myself and my friends listened to alternative music at all. Then Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came out, and at first it was only popular among my friends, but suddenly it spread like wildfire, in a way that was completely unprecedented for an alternative type song to do at the time, and by the time winter rolled around everyone at my school loved Nirvana. After that came groups like Pearl Jam and the hair metal and hard rock that had totally dominated the consciousness of my classmates rapidly began to fade away. It was really pretty incredible how fast it happened. In retrospect, hair metal
was kind of running out of steam, and changing to be a lot less flashy, by the time Nirvana came along, but it's definitely true that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was the thing that really knocked it out of the game.