Today, in 2018, rock songs almost never get anywhere close to the top 10, whereas from the 70s to about 1993, hard rock regularly topped the charts. It's an incredible failure to market the music.
And it wasn't really too little, too late. In the middle of the grunge era, freakin' Meat Loaf managed to have one of the biggest albums of the year and a #1 hit. There was still demand for melodic rock. So what if the kids were only interested in alternative? SOMEONE was buying melodic rock CDs, and requesting them on MTV. The demand didn't dry up, the supply did.
So what ended up happening is that almost every melodic rock fan just went back to their old CD and tape collection and gave up on new music. I'm sure most of you have dealt with this before, a metalhead who listens to Iron Maiden and Megadeth and Metallica, but as hard as you try, you can barely convince him to try listening to something new, because he gave up on new music 20 years ago! I only focus on it because I'm wondering what MTV and the labels were thinking. There was no reason to stop playing traditional hard rock, but they did it with only a few exceptions.
It's very unusual behavior for the industry to just summarily end what worked for 20 years and then switch to something totally different. And although it isn't written about much, I think they did realize their mistake, because around 1998 we resumed what I'd consider a normal evolution of the pop music industry.
Hanson, N'Sync, Britney, and the Backstreet Boys came out, and all of a sudden the industry realized, "Hey, they still do love shallow, happy, poppy, sugary pop!"
That 1992-1996 period is just such an aberration, it's as if the whole music industry and quite a few fans went insane for no particular reason, rejecting everything that had come before and becoming totally devoted to what became a pretty short fad. Grunge didn't just lead to the death of hair metal. It led to the death of melodic hard rock and heavy metal in general, at least for a decade, and took hard rock from a widely popular and diverse fanbase to a niche market. Personally, i don't consider GNR hair metal. Even though they came out of that scene and might have looked like a hair metal band at first, musically, they took more inspiration from blues and punk as opposed to pop and glam that many hair metal bands featured in their music. lyrically, i think they were more sophisticated than any hair metal group, and Axl is a much better singer than any hair metal group. So because of these reasons, i think that GNR is hard rock, not hair metal in which they are commonly categorized as. what do you think? The narrative, largely created and driven hard by rock critics, that grunge killed hair metal is a complete myth. Many of those bands were already on their death bed, and bands like Guns N' Roses, Def Leppard and Bon Jovi still did well after grunge exploded.
And what's great is that hair metal has aged well as a fun part of rock history, while grunge, by and large, died a quick death, and ended up having no more than a handful of bands that are still looked fondly upon. Iron Maiden to me, is one of THOSE bands that fills multiple musical needs for me. Metal, melody, and prog are all filled out in one convenient British package. I have enormous respect for that band. They have held up remarkably well through the years, never becoming caricatures of themselves. Their material may have aged better than Priest. Heavy metal over it's 50 years of existence has branched out into many sub genres.
But Metal is falling. After 50 years it has become nothing but distortion and screaming about death, sex and anti-religion. This is pathetic. And so metal is decaying and falling to pop music. Unless the next generation of heavy metal musicians have something NEW! to offer the genre it's going to become a thing of the past.
The metal we hear today has no distinct qualities. It's just this band trying to be as good as all the other bands, and so they end up sounding almost the same. There's no creativity involved. This saddens me to see metal die. I want to be able to enjoy newer music. But I can't unless new bands actually offer something original. Rock music in the 80's/early 90s was awesome! There were great bands with awesome talent like Guns n Roses, Motley Crue, Def Leppard, etc. The music was fun and full of energy! Bands actually knew how to play their instruments well.
Then along one day came Nirvana and a new revolution of no-talent boring depressing whiny music started. These "grunge" bands barely even knew how to play their instruments, but somehow got popular. I remember the first time I saw one of Nirvana's videos , I thought to myself "Is this a joke?" "How did these guys with no-talent actually get a music video?" "This just sounds horrible!". But little did I know that was the beginning of the destruction of rock music.
When I was looking at the charts I didn't see what I expected to see. I got to the point in 1991 where Smells Like Teen Spirit peaked at #7, so then I was like, "Okay, here we go, this is where the grunge era begins and melodic rock ends." But then for the next three years, I see no grunge hits and still quite a few melodic rock hits, although not as many as in the late 80s.I'm sure a lot of people would be surprised that melodic rock still had commercial success long after the record companies and MTV officially declared it "dead".What I don't understand is why the labels gave such shoddy promotion to the followups to the most successful releases from 1990-1993. The Scorpions had a huge smash with Crazy World, they were practically the Rolling Stones of metal, and Face the Heat just got a "meh" promotion and no MTV airplay. Props to Arsenio Hall for having them on though. Extreme followed up Pornograffitti with the amazing III Sides to Every Story. Meh again from the industry and MTV. Mr. Big followed up the smash hit Lean Into It with Bump Ahead. Double meh even though it was a great album. Wild World got a little airplay. Firehouse did VERY well as late as 1995, and then they just were quietly disposed of anyway. Why? These were all fantastic albums, without the ridiculous image, and the industry decided not to push them. What kind of a label stops promoting a band that's still producing hits? This ONLY happened to melodic rock bands! It would never happen in a million years to a country, R&B, or rap artist. You have to fail before getting dropped or not promoted. It's almost as if the industry was angry that people still wanted to listen to this kind of music and decided to just cut out the pretense and FORCE people to accept the new sound by taking away the old sound.
