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Ragging on Zoomers’ taste in music has become common among older generations. Spend a few minutes sampling tunes that are popular with Gen Z, and you’ll soon know why. Every generation from the Boomers to the Millennials was raised on rock & roll. The quintessential American music genre wasn’t just an intergenerational pop culture mainstay, it defined the American identity for more than half a century.
These days, browse the most listened to tracks on streaming sites popular with the youth, and you’ll have trouble finding a track by a contemporary rock band. Instead it’s autotuned, quantized dance, pop, and rap all the way down. What happened?
Related: Ground Zero
I and others have written volumes on how the Low 90s were a disaster for the arts. Among the casualties of Cultural Ground Zero was heavy metal.
The Zoomers out there may find it hard to imagine, but metal used to be a cultural phenomenon. Bands like Metallica, Van Halen, and AC/DC each sold multiple diamond records. Even Millennials remember nuMetal act Linkin Park, whose Hybrid Theory went multi-diamond. But now, metal doesn’t even make it into the top 20 most popular genres.
Related: More Music Ground Zero
Heavy metal historians have chronicled how the genre’s downfall happened in the 1990s.
The remaining audience not alienated by metal’s extreme diversion followed the exodus created by the Grunge movement in the early to mid-1990s. The emergence of Grunge truly signaled the death knell for hair metal. Led by Seattle’s Nirvana (Smells Like Teen Spirit), Soundgarden (Outshined), and Alice in Chains (Them Bones), Grunge picked up where hair metal left off: a simplified musical approach. However, the comparison ended there. Gone were the theatrics and upbeat lyrical subjects, replaced with a stripped-down, progression-driven approach coupled with lyrics obsessed with disenfranchisement and angst. Coinciding with the global recession of 1990-1993, Grunge resonated with the masses preaching a message of resigned despair. Speaking of resignation, the early to mid-1990s saw much turmoil for some of metal’s most successful acts. In 1992, Rob Halford abruptly left Judas Priest, which entered an extended period of dormancy. Likewise, 1993 saw Bruce Dickinson quit Iron Maiden, which carried on with increased irrelevancy (Man on the Edge). The aforementioned mainstream turns by Metallica (Until It Sleeps) and Megadeth (A Secret Place) continued into the mid-1990s with similarly-veined follow-up releases to their commercial breakthroughs. With the original metal bands long since defunct (or enduring a non-stop carousel of lineup changes), heavy metal’s future was not bright. For all intents and purposes, as a mainstream commodity, heavy metal was dead. Thankfully, there’s always the underground…
Related: The Music Men
They’re not wrong about the underground metal scene. It’s the reason for the drastic divergence we see below:
Related: Y2K Music Curse
As evidenced by metal’s slumping mainstream popularity and the steep decline of the genre’s flagship band coinciding with more album releases than ever, the underground metal scene is just that. Underground and under most people’s radar. That’s not to diss the current metal scene. Many of my readers belong to the underground fiction counterculture. But it is to illustrate that metal lost its place atop the pop culture mountain.
And that fall happened in the 90s.
Related: The 1990s: Decade of Despair
Which brings us to the 500-pound gorilla in the room.
During most of the 1990s, heavy metal languished in obscurity while Grunge and Alternative Rock dominated the modern rock charts. Ironically, heavy metal’s waning mainstream popularity was actually a blessing in disguise. Although the masses abandoned heavy metal in droves, the die-hard fans remained as loyal as ever, eagerly anticipating the next evolution of the genre. Luckily, metal bands enjoyed increased freedom to pursue new and unconventional directions, owing to their absolution from the expectations and obligations inherent in big-time record contracts. Left to its own devices, many original and avant-garde interpretations (often the synthesis of multiple subgenres) exploded on to the scene: Symphonic (Kamelot – March of Mephisto), Folk (Amorphis – Sampo), Melodic Death (aka Gothenberg-style) (At the Gates – Slaughter of the Soul), Progressive Death (Opeth – Blackwater Park), Technical Death (Meshuggah – Bleed)…well, you get the idea.
Related: Who Killed Rock and Roll?
No offense, but that paragraph reads like a load of cope. If a genre falls out of favor, leading artists take the chance to indulge in esoteric audio experimentation, and the genre stays unpopular, that says something about those experiments’ success.
As an example, here’s “March of Mephisto” from The Black Halo by American power metal band Kamelot, mentioned in the quote above.
It’s a familiar story:
- New genre emerges.
- Genre gets popular.
- Genre stagnates.
- Genre’s popularity slips.
- Someone decides to deconstruct the genre to learn what makes it tick.
- No one bothers to learn why the genre worked in the first place; instead everyone just keeps deconstructing it.
- Genre self-ghettoizes.
Related: The Corporate IP Death Cycle
No wonder Gen Z thinks of all rock as Boomer music.
Or as an object of nostalgia for a place and time they’ve never been.
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Metal will always have a special place in my heart. The majority of bands I listen to are out of Europe (primarily Sweden), but it’s nice to see Kamelot be mentioned. I’ve seen them live and they are fun.
As mentioned toward the end, metal found itself experimenting a lot. This is what appealed to me greatly. You get melodic, symphonic, power, folk, etc. Take a genre of music and add the core essence of metal and you have something uniquely entertaining.
However, I will admit, the genre does feel self ghettoized. I feel like there are few left who can appreciate the genre and far fewer artists who are producing something worth listening to. I’ll give an example; Amaranthe is a melodic-dance metal band. When they first came out a number of years ago, the techno-dance metal fusion was unique and fun to jam out to. I found their most recent album from last year and while it’s good, their core sound strikes too much similarity to their old stuff – nothing new, just regurgitated sound. It’s a shame.
Then you also have the problem of band members leaving who gave their music that unique sound. It’s a part of the creative cycle.
While I’ve lost track of my favorite bands I used to listen to, I still listen to their old stuff from time to time.
Do we know what made the genre popular?
For myself, I have three closely related criteria for whether I will listen to a metal song:
1. The sound of the music must not be ugly.
2. The sound of the voices must not be ugly.
3. The content of the lyrics must not be ugly.
Unfortunately, a lot of metal I’ve heard violates criteria 1 and 2, so I don’t even get to the lyrical content.
You might enjoy the earlier metal of bands like early Saxon, British Steel-era Judas Priest, or Power Slave-era of Iron Maiden. I find this material appeals to people who like rock or prog more than the well known tropes of the genre.
Yep. This “Classic Metal” style is really the only type of heavy metal I like.
The whole reason rock managed to survive for so long was because it used to be run by people who didn’t want to make it their whole personality, and because they loved what they did. Early rock was meant to be fun music to pick you up after a long day. Chuck Berry’s “School Days” is the best song to really show what it began as.
The first time the genre truly stagnated was The Day The Music Died, which destroyed the growing idealized illusion of a rock star being an immortal figure. The result of that were bands going back to basics, finding what worked, and pushing forward again. Even without the British Invasion (which was an astroturf campaign, good music or not), the work of people like Tommy James or the Sonics proved that there was still plenty of life. But I would say that a lot of it was overshadowed by the record companies learning how to advertise their own material and creating what were in retrospect artificial controversies like the record burnings. This would only grow as they attempted to make rock n roll’s image about “rebellion” instead of the tension release it actually was. You see this happening all the way up into the ’90s, regardless of what musical trend they’re trying to create.
The next stagnation was the early ’70s, about a decade later. This period is regularly considered rock’s nadir before the ’00s. By this time, prog bands were still figuring out where to go after Beatlemania bit the dust, mainstream music was aimless because they had relied on their “leaders” for too long, and the genre started feeling like “yuppie music” before yuppies even existed. It took around the middle of the decade for punk, prog, and metal, to really hit their stride, or finally reach wider markets, to inject new life into rock. This snowballed into the glam, post-punk, hardcore, and new wave movements of the 1980s which both fed into the more underground college scene and the mainstream rock industry, pulling them in different directions.
This changed by the 1990s when record labels realized they could tamper with trends and started creating “genres” like hair metal and grunge (neither of which are real genres) which not only crippled the mainstream, it demolished the underground at the same time. Before the 90s were even over, every form of rock that wasn’t nu metal was erased from radio and all the bands on majors were ejected. Again, within the decade. Nu metal was chased out in record time because it was entirely astroturfed and was never actually popular. It says something that Linkin Park is the only band from that entire wave to not be retroactively mocked over their material from back then.
The last attempt at a new movement was the garage rock movement in the early ’00s that came through the last traces of alternative radio before they were swallowed by Clear Channel. I already wrote about what happened to that through my piece on The Hives, and how before the 2000s were even over, the industry had run out of money and was already a walking corpse. They now had their team of writers, producers, and mixers, as well as their lazy late ’90s bubblegum mutation forever spitting out lame Steve Buscemi meme-level Boomer rebellion slop, and they were going to just squeeze pocket change out of teenagers that way forever.
So they chased rock out of the majors while sealing of the minors with Clear Channel. And that’s why you’ve never seen a major rock band do anything big since the middle of the ’00s.
This is why I say rock’s death date in the mid-00s, giving it exactly a 50 year lifespan. It ended where it started: the garage.
The only way it comes back is if the genre unites the various subgenres and mutations again in order to form a new sound that still has its roots in where it started from. Until then, it will just be vaguely-related sounds floating in a void for aged Gen Xers and Ys to argue about which one is actually better than the other. All while kids have no distinction between subgenres.
As of now, though, rock is a museum piece, and will remain so for a long time.
I also wanted to add a general thought.
Metal has the same issue as ever subgenre that spun off from rock. It started as an exploration of one aspect of the sound and eventually ended up shedding any influence of the greater whole, eventually becoming totally divorced from where it originated. This leads it to get stale and the remaining people left keep reinventing the wheel instead of going back to basics and starting from there again. The end result is that less and less of the audience cares about the hyper-specific fetish you have and you are left with a small audience of fanatics you continually cater to that will never actually grow in any significant way.
That’s a long way to say that early metal is more blues and hard rock based, like Black Sabbath or Motorhead. Even in the 1980s, the “hair metal” stuff was actually based on glam rock from the 1970s, and had bands like Def Leppard actually try to bridge the gap between metal and glam. You can see this in reception to the album Hysteria, which is rightly considered a masterpiece by everyone except metalheads that will only accept one type of “pure” sound. And that type of purity testing is what eventually made metal (and every other rock subgenre) irrelevant.
The reason I don’t tend to like a lot of modern metal (and every other rock-related subgenre, to be fair) is because, at this point, it’s just bands playing to the same expected tropes I’ve heard my entire life. No attempt to do anything interesting or try to expand beyond Saturday Night Live punchlines from 30 years ago.
There might be an audience to that, to be fair, but I’m not it.
I’d encouraged listening to/reading more carefully the lyrics to “American Pie”, written by a raised Catholic. (Not sure of his practicing status.) It’s predicting the death of pop culture music, along with the collapse in faith in the West.
I wish I could take credit for noticing. It was my Gen Z son who was pointed out “Mom, the music really did die.” When I looked up the lyrics, it’s full on prophecy, as there’s a “lost”/final verse cut from the radio version that predicts when the music comes back.
Anyway, I get every Boomery Boomer out there wants “American Pie” to be about the death of those 3 rando music stars at the time. It may have been even written with them in mind. The actual lyrics are not about them.
“Silent Running” by Mike and Mechanics is also a pop song with a prophecy in it. It’s imagery is so strong that the makers of music video couldn’t bring themselves to really use the contents of it, beyond a boy without a father.
It’s funny how you rarely ever hear about the song’s references to John Lennon spouting commie bs, the Manson murders, or the disastrous Altamont concert. It would mean admitting that perhaps not all was right with the Beatles and the Stones (and, to quote Mott the Hoople, how they never got it off on that revolution stuff; at least not the revolution that they were looking for.)
When that industry guy Rick Beato had on to refute Last Megastars theory said the likes of Muse and Pearl Jam would fill the void when acts like U2 and the Rolling Stones finally retire, I had to laugh. The former two have been around for 30 years. If they were going to break out into the stadium level, they would have years ago. There will be no next Biggest Rock Band in the World.
Alice in Chains started out as Alice in Chainz, and were and are a metal band, full stop. Unlike Junkie McSweaterface and his three man garage band, Layne Staley could sing, and Jerry could shred. They happened to get lumped in with “grunge” because their label and their manager saw that late 90s metal was on its way out and hitched AiC to the bandwagon.
That being said, what killed metal was the fact that the next generation of metalheads got sucked into the vortex of chasing trends instead of making them, and, of course, drifted into rap because of that retard Marshall Mathers. The farm system dried up.
That is one reason why, if you look beneath the surface, there is no such thing as the grunge genre.
Alice in Chains is a metal band. Soundgarden was a hard rock band. Nirvana was a punk band. The grunge label was an ad hoc fiction invented by record company marketing departments.
I have a theory that had Andrew Wood not overdosed in 1990, “grunge” would have been very, very, different. Rock and metal might not have started down the path to extinction. Mother Love Bone, not Nirvana, was supposed to be the Next Big Thing. That alternate timeline means MLB gets huge, and they played basic hard rock with a showman for a frontman, that hearkened back to glam. Nirvana probably becomes a footnote in this path not taken, and Pearl Jam never exists. Stone Temple Pilots would have been much bigger and more comfortable in their obvious hard rock roots. Guns n’ Roses might not have imploded when they did either.
I wonder if it isn’t better for metal to be underground. After AC/DC got really big with _Back in Black_, they could occasionally crank out some great singles like “Who Made Who” and “Thunderstruck,” but they never really recaptured the energy of the Bon Scott years. Van Halen was more popular out of the gate, and those first five records were great, but _1984_ and “Jump” in particular stripped out everything that had made the band great (okay, “Panama” was a good song). Sure, they were more popular than ever once Roth left, but does anyone really prefer Van Hagar to the real version?
Metallica followed a similar arc. After four great, seminal records, “The Black Album” catapulted them to a level of stardom and success previously unimaginable. And it nearly destroyed the band. They certainly wandered in the musical wilderness until 2008’s _Death Magnetic_. The same thing happened to Guns N’ Roses, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Anthrax….
Heavy metal languished in obscurity for a lot of the 1990s because a lot of the big bands of the 80s imploded or forgot how to write songs. Metallica was basically on tour from Black to Load (and made millions. Is that obscurity?). Megadeth went from the heights of the brilliant _Rust in Peace_ to the truly emetic _Youthanasia_. Maiden, Priest, and Anthrax lost their iconic lead singers in the early 90’s. Def Leppard and Poison misplaced their pop smarts (Leppard got them back; who knows/cares about Poison? Their arc from “Talk Dirty To Me” to “Unskinny Bop” is pretty telling). Ratt disintegrated. Tom Kiefer of Cinderella blew out his voice. Vince Neil literally killed Hanoi Rocks, one of the more interesting glam rock bands. Bon Jovi struggled in the mid 90’s but bounced back by the end of the decade.
I’ve been a metalhead since 1988. By that point “hair metal” may have still been selling records, but the writing was on the wall. There were just too many power ballads and too many cookie-cutter bands with big hair and razor-thin production. Warrant? Bulletboys? (I still have my first Bulletboys record, but come on. They were not a band with a long shelf life.) Whatever the record companies did with “grunge,” by the late 80’s metal fans were looking for harder sounds, and we found them in bands like GnR and Jane’s Addiction — all before grunge broke. People forget what a wasteland for hard rock the charts in the late 80’s and early 90’s were. The biggest “rock” single before grunge broke was “Everything I Do (I Do It for You)” by Bryan Adams! No thanks. So when you heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the radio in late 1991 and early 1992 it sounded like (a) good hard rock was back on the airwaves and (b) the logical next step after R.E.M. and Metallica had hit it big earlier in the year.
Did the Bulletboys and Warrant get dropped after Nirvana? Sure. But I can’t get too upset about that (and the big metal acts kept their major label record deals). Of course the “grunge” of the 90’s was a media creation (but there were great grunge bands: Melvins! Screaming Trees! Mudhoney!) but the radio of the early 90’s was more interesting than it had been for years. I’ll take that as a win, even the variety and excellence largely went away once the boy bands and Britney Spears arrived.
And ever since the 90’s the metal underground has been thriving.
Good write-up, though I’m not sure I entirely agree with the idea that metal is dead or even doing poorly. The atomization of genre goes for all music, not just metal. Metal doesn’t appeal to the masses, but then again, few things of any sort of quality do. If this is ghettoization, so be it; but I don’t think any of it is self-inflicted.
And in it’s own sphere, metal is thriving. Stryper is still putting out bangers with the same vim they had 40 years ago, Judas Priest’s last two albums, “Firepower” and this year’s “Invincible Shield” rock just as hard as anything they ever did. Ex-priest members like Ripper Owens are killing it as KK’s Priest. Plenty of dependable acts like Beast in Black, Kissin’ Dynamite, Powerwolf, Eclipse, going from strength to strength. Symphonic Metal has only grown (Within Temptation, Nightwish, Imperial Age etc.). Babymetal is playing to sold-out mega-sadiums in Japan.
I think the future for metal is bright.
Thanks. FYI, the context of the post is metal as a cultural force. When a style of music that used to dominate can’t make it into the top 20 genres anymore, its mindshare has slipped. Like you said, it’s lost mass appeal.
But why does that matter?
If there’s a description that fits Heavy Metal, it’d be a Genre that has always been fucked with, whether we’re talking about the astroturfed concerned parent groups, or the studio executives that went out of their way to ensure they didn’t pay what the bands were owed, and neutered their sounds just to get the needed radio air time. So rather than seeing it as some fall from grace, i more see it as an ascension that wasn’t able to even start. I’d say things are better in the sense that there’s more avenues for a band to get noticed, but it’s also got the usual music issues, along with a simple issue of a lack of idea of where to go from here.
Personally, I would prefer it if metal were to stay underground. I have always seen it as an elite form of music reserved solely for those who are able to comprehend its nuances. (Yes, I am an elitist. Thank you for noticing.) The only way you can make metal popular is by watering it down to the point where it becomes indistinguishable from rock music, and I don’t want that. Sure, Master of Puppets has sold over six millions copies, but Metallica has always been the exception. Also, Metallica died when Cliff Burton died.