Were the 1990s a bad decade for American rock music?

[athenian200]

I mean, I've been thinking about it recently, and noticed that very little of the American rock music I listen to comes from the 1990s. There's a lot from the 1980s and 1970s, and a lot from the 2000s and later, but almost nothing from the 1990s, and I'm not sure why.

The only thing I can think of is that it's because grunge became so popular. I'm not really a big fan of stuff like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and it seems like that's what everyone was listening to back then.

I mean, it's true that some parts of their songs aren't that bad (some of the guitar parts sound okay), but overall they seem really depressing, slow, and distorted somehow. If that makes sense? I'm not a music guy at all, so I can't really explain what I'm talking about in the proper technical terms.

It's like the more guitar-focused parts are okay in isolation, but the glue that holds them together is all wrong, and the parts don't seem to build up to anything. It's so anti-climactic and unsatisfying.

Of course, I think it's only fair if I admit that I strongly prefer the sound of Styx and Billy Joel. There's pretty much never been a song by either that I didn't like, and several songs that I loved or considered favorites.

 

[jang]

The rock music of the 90s was definitely a different sound than anything that had come before it. My favorite band is Pixies and I'm also a huge fan of Soundgarden and The White Stripes, but I can also see why a lot of people dislike or even ignore the style from the decade. Instead of the standard chord progression and rhythms in rock music that most musicians had used through the 70s and 80s, the 90s took a more experimental turn. I'll admit, the 90s isn't my favorite decade for rock music, but I don't think it's bad in the slightest. Just my two cents.

 

[Dio]

I dont think any era is inherently bad as such. It's just a matter of preference. There is good and bad music produced in every era it's whether you find the general sound pleasing or not.

For me I'm not a massive fan of the 90's rock music. I don't mind a bit of Nirvana and other similar 90's bands but it's certainly not my favourite era.

 

[athenian200]

I'm getting the impression that even people who didn't like the era's music are going to vote "no," simply because bad is too strong a word for most people.

If I'd known how reluctant people would be to judge a creative work that isn't to their taste harshly, I probably would have asked the question a bit differently. Oh, well.

 

[Castle]

Oh Boy! Somebody talk'n bout Rock n' Roll. It's not the Ol Timey Rock n' Roll. You know! The Kinda Music that Soothes the Soul but that's what I'm going to compare 90s rock to so YAY!

In my honest opinion (which is the correct opinion) 90s rock was 'meh' to "Good God Make It STOP!! Gouge My Earballs out with a Spoon if It Means I Never Have to be Assaulted By This Again!!!"

Anyone who's actually bothered to look at my posts in Lyrics of the Day or sometimes links to my music playlist on YT in the sb ought to know that I greatly prefer the classic rock era of the 70s. The 80s were the last decent decade for music, and even then we started to get rap and the pop trash that comprises the vast majority of popular music today after the music industry did itself in.

Most of the 90s was pop rock, punk rock, or various varieties of [hipster] metal. You know, pretty much everything that personifies 90s teen culture. There are a few songs from the 90s that I won't bother to turn off if I happen to hear playing, I can only tell you what these songs are if they happen to be playing, and I have no clue who performs them. They just don't do it for me. That's as good as 90s rock gets for me.

I like Green Day's Good Riddance, of all things - because come on who doesn't? Only contrarian hipsters and Green Day fans dislike Good Riddance. But I can't stand the rest of Greenday's junk. I like Train... all three of their hits. Probably because they sound the most similar to anything you'll hear written c1975.

The big difference between 90s rock and classic rock is harmony. Modern music doesn't have harmony. It has a cacophony of actual instruments all banging in tandem or it has a pre-programmed series of synthesized beeps and boops (that's mostly pop) with a single vocalist and rarely any backup vocals and almost never in harmony. The vocalist is almost always either whiny or more likely Gravely McGravelvoice or SCREAM EVERYTHING AAAAAAAAAAAH!! Even the screamers of the 1970s knew how to carry a freaking tune and hold a note. I also think the lyrics to even the few songs that remotely interest me are dull or inane. Classic rock lyrics are some of the most beautiful and brilliant ever written. 90s rock lyrics are mostly whiny hipster self loathing teen angst melodrama.

 

[Turo602]

Anyone who thinks 90s Rock was bad or anything less than great, either has bad taste in music or didn't listen to enough music from the decade.

 

[Vanessa28]

Being born in the early 70s, a teen in the 80s and a twen in the 90s, I can compare three decades of music. Heck, almost even 5! Like @Castle I also prefer the 70s classic rock and even the early 80s. The 90s had some good songs and also some bad songs. But that's with every era. The 70s also had tons of songs that were meh and so did the 80s. But I prefer the 70s and 80s more. Maybe it's mainly nostalgia for me to like the other two eras more but the 90s never really grew on me back then and not now and probably never will.

 

[DekuNut]

There's no such thing as an objectively bad decade. Just one youre not a huge fan of.
Am I a huge fan of Nirvana? No. But songs like Enter Sandown, Black Hole Sun, Mr. Jones, Creep, Open Your Heart, Good Riddance... there were lots of good songs that dont necessarily fit the stereotype of the decade. And even aome that do. While the 90s is far from my favorite decade, there was lots of great stuff to come out of it

 

[Spirit]

Yes?

If the only band and i can name is Nirvana then probably.

Though i was always more of a euro metal girl so american rock was pretty much the opposite thing for me.

 

[athenian200]

I should point out here that I'm not saying there was no good rock in the 1990s, but that it seems like there was less of it than in other decades due to grunge taking over as a dominant trend in the US.The only American band I can think of that I like from the 1990s is Matchbox Twenty, and that band didn't really hit its stride until the 2000s.

There was a good Styx album released in 1999, but that's from a band that's mostly thought of as an 80s/70s band, and it only came after the decade was practically over. There was also a Billy Joel album released in the early 1990s, but he stops making new albums with new songs shortly after this for the rest of the decade, and it doesn't seem up there with his previous works.

It seems like a lot of the bands I listened to from the 1980s either broke up or went on hiatus during the 1990s, and the bands I listened to in the 2000s were just getting started and hadn't released their best work yet.

I mean, I get the point you're all making, but it does seem like the 1990s were a bit of a fallow period for people who weren't big fans of grunge. I mean, there may have been some underground bands during that period that were okay, but by definition, their music would be obscure.

If you look at the Billboard Top 100 for years after 1993, the charts are dominated by bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, etc. It's only really broken up by pop music of various kinds, and the issue appears even if you look at "Mainstream Rock" charts for the period.

 

[YIGAhim]

Apparently alternative rock was good in the 90s, but I wouldn't know.

I don't listen to rock, but I listen to what my dad listens to a lot on car rides, and I've gotten my fix of lame sports radio, and rock and roll from the 70s 80s and 90s.

None of it really appeals to mme, but I think the 80s was the time when rock and roll was the most popular, and it died a bit in the 90s, although it was still widely popular, so the quality could very well have gone down in the early ninties, or late 80s

 

[Turo602]

Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Weezer, Blink 182, Aerosmith, and tons of other non-grunge bands had lots of hits in the 90s. Far from underground or obscure stuff.

 

[Mellow Ezlo]

Musical tastes are 100% subjective. Each person's opinions on what is good and what is bad are going to be different. There's no one decade of music that's "bad", just some people may be more into music from different decades than others.

Someone who is born in the 90's or 2000's, or even the late 80's, may have a lot of exposure to 90's era rock, and less exposure to that which came from the 60's/70's/80's. These people, having grown up listening to music from the 90's, probably think 90's rock is the best. I personally prefer 80's and 70's rock, but only because that's what I was raised on, and not because I think it is necessarily better on an objective level. There is some 90's rock that is genuinely amazing.

The Foo Fighters are a great example of a band that came from the 90's and made it big. They're actually one of my favourite bands. Same can be said for other bands, such as Billy Talent, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, the Chili Peppers, etc. While these bands may not have made as much of an impact on the music industry as others, such as Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, etc, they're still great rock bands who produce solid rock music. A lot of what these bands come out with sounds a lot like classic rock too, lots of people just seem to choose to ignore it because it's not what they think of when they think "classic rock". Learn to Fly, by the Foo Fighters, is a song that I can easily imagine having come from the 80's. Same can be said about lots of their songs as well, such as Everlong, or The Smashing Pumpkins' Cherub Rock.

I agree that rock music from the 90's didn't make as much of a cultural impact as it did in previous decades, this can partially be because of grunge having taken over the mainstream during that time. But is that a bad thing? No. Music has to evolve in order to stay interesting. If 90's rock sounded just like 70's rock, it would quickly become really boring to listen to. Genres evolving and subgenres being created are is what keeps the music industry from dying. This being said, too, Grunge is simply a subgenre of rock, so where you draw the line for what you consider "rock" music is also entirely subjective.

So, to answer the question, no, I definitely do not think the 90's were a bad decade for Rock music. They were simply another step in the evolution of the genre, and the music industry in general.

 

[athenian200]

Okay, I think I screwed up making the thread... what I meant to ask was whether people liked 1990s rock as much as rock from other decades. But because I used the word "bad," people are interpreting it as me asking a much more objective question than I intended to ask. But the discussion is interesting nonetheless. I was thinking of "bad" here as less in the sense of "that's a bad design," and more in the sense of "this food tastes bad."

Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Weezer, Blink 182, Aerosmith, and tons of other non-grunge bands had lots of hits in the 90s. Far from underground or obscure stuff.

Metallica is technically a heavy metal band, though. I mean, "metal" is even in the name. If you count metal as a form of rock, then that does open up more possibilities like Megadeth and Metallica. But I was thinking of metal as a separate genre from rock.

Yeah, actually I do like Aerosmith. I didn't realize they were still active in the 1990s, but it looks like they had some good songs from that time as well. They really didn't adopt the grunge sound at all.

I still think that grunge overshadowed a lot of music back in the day, though. I definitely heard people saying that they were sticking to classic rock because they didn't like grunge on a regular basis back then. I was born in 1988, so I do remember at least the last half of the 1990s.

So okay, you seem to have won the argument here, Turo. I like Styx, and they released the Edge of the Century and Brave New World albums during the 1990s. I also like Aerosmith, and they had a couple of albums with good songs during the decade as well.

The impression I'm getting now is that ultimately it depends more on the band than the decade. A band I like probably won't lose their touch just because the calendar rolls over. For instance, I'll probably like songs by Styx or Aerosmith regardless of what decade it was when they produced it. Doesn't matter if it's the 1990s, 1980s, or 1970s.

 

[Turo602]

Heavy Metal is a sub-genre of rock, so yeah, Metallica and any other heavy metal band would classify as rock music. But to answer your question, yes, I do enjoy 90s rock music just as much if not more than any other decade. I also don't see how grunge was overshadowing anything. Sure, it was new but only like 5 bands were extremely popular and the genre itself died before the decade even ended. I actually really liked grunge so I don't see that as a problem either, but there was definitely more than just that. I'd also say the 2000s were a pretty good decade for rock too.