Members of older generations have taken to lamenting the musical taste – or lack thereof – displayed by Generation Z. It’s easy to understand why. Every generation from the Boomers to the Millennials was raised on rock & roll. That definitive American music genre not only served as a cross-generational pop culture touchstone, it was foundational to the American identity for more than half a century.
But the Zoomers seem to have moved on. Take a look at the most listened to tracks on the streaming sites popular with young people, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a song by a contemporary rock band. Instead it’s autotuned, quantized, vacuous Hip-Pop all the way down.
What happened?
I and others have written volumes on how the Low 90s and their consequences have been a disaster for the arts. A recent discussion on Gab brought up a case study mentioned by my fellow authors and pop culture coroners David V. Stewart and JD Cowan. That being, the death of heavy metal.
For the Zoomers reading this post, it may be hard to imagine now, but metal used to be a titanic cultural force. Bands like AC/DC, Metallica, and Van Halen sold multiple diamond records. Even Millennials will fondly recall nu/rap-metal band Linkin Park, whose Hybrid Theory went multi-diamond.
But now, metal doesn’t even make it into the top 20 most popular genres.
And as documented by heavy metal historians, 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…
They’re not wrong about the underground metal scene. It’s the reason for the discrepancy we see below:
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 rag on the current metal scene. Many of us here could claim to be part of an underground fiction writing counterculture.
But it is to illustrate that metal lost its place on top of the pop culture pyramid.
And that fall happened in the 90s.
Which brings up the elephant 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.
No offense, but that paragraph reads like a lot 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 the fruitfulness or otherwise of the experiments.
As an example, here’s the lead track from Destroy Erase Improve, the breakout album by Swedish group Meshuggah, who are mentioned in the above excerpt.
Here’s how the band’s bio describes the album:
It’s an old 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.
Where have we seen this pattern before?
Anyway, it’s no wonder why Gen Zed thinks of rock in all its forms as Boomer music. Or at best, a source of nostalgia for a place and time they’ve never been.
Primitive synth-driven 80s tracks may sound corny now, but at least they had some human craftsmanship and heart.
For a military thriller that hearkens back to the golden age of Zeta Gundam and VOTOMS-era anime, read my hit mech adventure novel:
Funny that the sources fail to point out that metal got a pillow across its face before grunge got popular.
The story I hear from knowledgeable, working musicians of Gen Y and older is that the big labels killed off metal and invented grunge to cut costs.
Others argue against that take, but a look at contracts from the time show that grunge bands were woefully underpaid compared to their hair metal predecessors.
“the big labels killed off metal and invented grunge to cut costs.”
I would agree with this. It’s kinda self evident in how items charted. So many “one-hit-wonder” alt-rock/grunge acts from the 90s appeared, they’re even still played on the radio today which is astounding.
It’s incredibly more cost effective to sign smaller bands with 1 or 2 “catchy” songs and a dozen or so mediocre-to-bad songs (the overwhelming majority of alt bands in the 90s) and artificially boost their “hype” through radio play, than to pay a big name act for a multi-album contract.
It’s also significantly more cost effective to record/produce these albums. The songs are a couple power chords, basic 4/4 with a standard drum beat. For example, In Utero was recorded and partially written in less than two weeks. The overhead on that is next to nothing.
It’s still a Pop Cult blasphemy to say, but Pearl Jam was a prime example. They only ever had one song that resonated with the mainstream (hint: It was the only one they made a video for) yet, the industry refused to let them fade out gracefully.
Why anyone would brag about listening to late ’90s metal is bizarre to me. It was terrible then and still is now. “Diehards” willing to listen to that instead of a good record in a different genre are just proving they are being Fanatics. But I’ve never stuck to one genre, so I just don’t get the mentality.
People left the scene not only because of “alternative” but because the genre was in a slump. It regained its footing after nu metal died off, but lets not forget that its also partially the bands’ fault for putting out garbage. Every genre has made this same mistake, metal isn’t alone here.
Once you go insular, that’s it for growth.
It’s striking how mired in an aesthetic dark age Millennials and Zoomers are. On a stream I caught the other day, the hosts and chat were listing their favorite metal bands. Low 90s acts like Alien Ant Farm, Limp Bizkit, and Linkin Park featured prominently. About the only time they spared for classic groups was to roast Metallica over the poor reception of Load.
Which does point the finger in the direction you suggested.
The metal band which has the best chance of going mainstream is Sabaton. Straightforward song construction, blood pumping tempo, lyrics which can be grasped by pretty much anyone but allow a lot of deeper analysis for those interested in history. Also related to this is the frequent attempts to place them as one of the foremost “European Style Power Metal” bands only for them to respond and say “Hey, we just do metal, and anything unique beyond that is due to our own quirks, talents and weaknesses. Don’t get so hung up on genre classification.”
But on another note, I’ve thought for a few years now that if the new generation is going to develop something new and unique to them it will be some outgrowth of synthwave/darksynth/retrowave/whatever the hell it’s being called this week. The funny thing though is that many of the artists involved in the genre and the fans think that the core is 80’s throwbacks, while most of the songs really don’t sound like what you’d hear in the 80’s (not even the remixes of 80’s songs.) At most they sound like something someone in the 80’s might think future music would sound like. (Or maybe what someone in the 80’s would compose if he listened to nothing but Vangelis, Giorgio Moroder and Jan Hammer.)
Somebody in my circles always mentions Sabaton when the subject turns to heavy metal. From what I can gather, people think the band’s based or Christian or something.
Which is why they’ll never be allowed to go mainstream.
The fact that they’ve been active since 1999 bears this out.
They made a song about the siege of 1527, celebrating the Swiss Guard’s defense of the Pope on an album themed around last stands. It became the theme of the Deus Vult meme, despite not actually having anything to do with the crusades (a fact which Sabaton themselves has poked fun at.) Beyond that there hasn’t been anything explicitly Christian about them (even Blind Guardian is more of a “Christian” band in that they made a song explicitly about the Passion.)
I agree that they won’t get mainstream in the sense of being celebrated on entertainment programs and the like, but their last three albums have been getting a lot of traction. All three topped the charts in basically all of North, Central and Eastern Europe (though not in the US or UK and on an anecdotal level there seems to be more people online familiar with songs like “The Last Stand,” “The Christmas Truce,” and “Winged Hussars.” I take this to mean that if we lived in a world were metal could go mainstream they would be there, but this is not that world. And if they’re not doing it, no one will.
Makes sense. Thank you for explaining.
I had a conversation with a friend about this.
The true core of Synthwave isn’t 80’s nostalgia, it’s Cassette Futurism. Cassette Futurism is the future (or the 2020’s) as seen from the 1980’s. The bangers of the genre port the 80’s sound into the 2020’s with modern composition and song progression.
Yes, that to me is the key to the genre’s success. It isn’t replicating 1980s music, it is attempting to show the future the 1980s imagined before Cultural Ground Zero killed off imagination and hope in what could be. As a result, it is very much its own thing, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it is enjoyed so much by younger generations.
The whole 80s aesthetic was the 70s vision of the 2000s, so synthwave has brought us full circle.
As a metalhead who lost touch with the genre in the 90s (I wasn’t tuned into the underground, so I simply missed most of what was coming out) and then got back into it in the late 2000s, what I found on coming back was that the whole scene had become sort of polarized between the extremes of cookie monster death metal/shrieking black metal and the toothless operatics of European power (flower) metal. There aren’t many bands that really get how to do hard-driving, aggressive songs with vocals done by people who sing – like, actually sing – from their nuts (as Dio used to say). And there’s the endless hair-splitting of sub-genres, where you have bands whose entire catalogue is literally inspired by one specific Black Sabbath song.
There are definitely some new(ish) bands I like, though. It just takes a bit more effort and searching to find them.
That’s a key observation. We’re supposed to have a bumper crop of up-and-coming metal bands, but nary a good singer among them.
I’ve got to admit that this is a discussion I feel kind of lost in, since metal has never held much appeal for me (or if it did, I had no idea that it was metal). This is probably a byproduct of growing up after the era (I was four years old when Music Ground Zero hit, so I never really got to experience music that I genuinely liked on the radio). About the only thing that I actually know about metal is that some subgenres, like Black Metal, are explicitly Satanic, and when that’s about the only thing you know about the scene, it makes you leery.
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.