Minichan

well it barely bubbled above ground, in terms of money

and that's what talks to the people, money

the press had the gall to say Nirvana's success was the "year that punk broke" meaning became financially successful, and major labels started making deals with independent labels and bands

and then it crashed when the business decided to cater to little girls with the boy bands and singing whores

Why

@1,042,104 (Sheila LaBoof)
Good point, laughable that Nirvana was punk, or invented punk

@1,042,105 (Kook !!rcSrAtaAC)
hippies were about freedom and free love and no rules, punks were/are about burning society to the ground

@1,042,107 (Dark !HLa610O9S2)
yeah when I heard Nirvana for the first time, I thought, wow this is like really catchy hard rock from the 1970s

@previous (Sheila LaBoof)
haha it really does have a 70s vibe to it

@1,042,109 (Sheila LaBoof)

I've always thought of Nirvana as the Led Zeppelin of the 90s.

@1,042,107 (Dark !HLa610O9S2)
But the point is which is a bigger change from the last generation

@previous (Kook !!rcSrAtaAC)
good point, not sure. hippies came from white 50s culture, punks from disco 70s

@1,042,107 (Dark !HLa610O9S2)
I always thought of it as the Gen-X version of punk. They didn't have to get angry to prove they didn't care about society's rules. They just had to not give a fuck. There wasn't any point to getting excited or rebelling or fitting in or even really trying because it all truly didn't matter. And garbled lyrics over bland music was the perfect anthem. I'm not quite sure how Nirvana pulled off that magic trick of creating shitty music that perfectly expressed how much you didn't care about everyone's shitty opinion, but they did it.

Then it all went mainstream and turned meta. Much like the punk scene, people were suddenly trying too hard to not fit in and caring too much about how one should express how much they didn't care. Music executives were trying to figure out just how much teenage rebellion they could market while maintaining a thin veneer of disrespect and contempt for the system. Proto-hipsters were desperately trying to convince everybody that liked the earlier stuff before it went all commercial. In the end, I think grunge was just an aftershock of punk that hit a more cynical generation. The big punk sellout years of the mid 90s probably got a boost from a bunch of moody teens who didn't think they cared about anything suddenly getting mad about grunge selling out. Some kind of weird rebound effect as kids groped around for something that really expressed their angst.

More on topic though...

@previous (Dark !HLa610O9S2)
Hippies actually seemed to spur some social change. Punk never really birthed anything close to the kind of social movements that hippies embraced. The distrust of mainstream authority that flared to life with 60s counterculture spread into the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, environmentalism, feminism, and politics. Maybe it was just lucky timing that they came along when they did, but I would guess that echos of hippy flower-power have had far more impact on us today than early punk ever did.

(Edited 32 seconds later.)

also consider that the grunge/altrock wave was concurrent with the growing techno rave acidhouse etc stuff with the media going nuts about naming imagined subgenres to the point that today, if you use a new synth effect, some shithead declares that a new electronic genre has been made and names it

@previous (Sheila LaBoof)
dopewave is chill my man
I just made that up but it's probably a thing

hyah probably, just lately I find youtube is full of space dub acid reggae or something

@1,042,131 (Sheila LaBoof)
There was a lot of experiemental stuff going on that labels didn't quite know how to categorize. I remember being so confused every time I looked for anything Al Jourgensen had worked on because someone somewhere had decided every other thing he did was a new genre.

Huh first time ive seen cogent sheila laboof posts and 10/10