Round of 64: (27) Weezer - Weezer (The Blue Album) vs. (38) Manchester Orchestra - ABMTTS Bracket • Page 3

OH OKAY

see i wasn't sure if you meant like Choruscore or 90s indie rock. the former is a much lower bar haha.

 

i mean, he’s also a better guitarist than people like Cobain and Billy Joe Armstrong etc. lol but yeah i meant specifically the more pop-punk/emo leaning side of things

 

Also Rivers’ lyrics are good and Teal is good, have you ever heard of humor and have you ever heard of levity?

 

I was thinking less Cobain and Billy Joe and more like Thurston Moore and Doug Martsch haha. Out of the big pop punk guys yeah he's absolutely better than most. People were playing Weezer in high school and Green Day in middle school haha.

 

Rivers joining Algernon Cadwallader

 

If I were to make a list of the most tired music takes in the alt/rock/indie/pop-punk whatever scenes, the "Weezer only has two good albums and then everything else sucks" might rank #1 (though, depending on my mood, the "Nirvana instantly killed big rock" and "The Strokes/White Stripes totally shut down nu metal" are also up there as equally irritating)

 

some of those are objectively true.

 

I have a demography question,

When they say grunge killed hair metal, is the implication that hair fans migrated to grunge?

Andecdotally, it seems like the hair casualties I know tend to like Nirvana and Pearl Jam

 

the implication is that they supplanted those bands on the charts which because it was the 90s essentially stopped new bands in that genre from popping up, which is, again, objectively true.

 

More so, they they killed the genres getting any airplay and buzz.

 

again, plainly true

 

For sure, though I do like to think that most knew the genre jumped the shark with "Cherry Pie" and were just wanting something clearly different after that trash song.

 

Meaning hair fans started requesting Pearl Jam?

Or did a previously dormant alt rock audience activate, buying piles CD’s at the same time as hair fans, hearing no Crue on the radio, forgot they existed?

Kurt anecdotes and Krist stage banter about jocks in the crowd suggests to me hair guys bought flannel.

I dunno, I’ve never seen that cliche discussed with any specificity

 

It’s Weezer y’all.
I love the MO album, but I feel like it’s a little less consistent and had some clunky moments while the Blue Album is a lean set of bangers. There’s a reason that people still talk about Weezer and hope they’ll put out good albums.

 

A little of both. Without hearing the new Winger or Ratt single on the radio or MTV you didn't know it was out. Couple that with Gen X becoming of an age to drive taste, they started buying music that appealed to them and rejected the glam and lifelessness of the 80s music, that they were too young to buy when they were getting pushed.

For sure some hair metal fans made the switch, just like pop punk fans made the switch to emo, and then to indie rock as those genres rose and fell through the 00s.

 

Weezer has three good albums.


Never heard that the strokes ended nu metal though. Add that to the list of reasons that band sucks

 

1. Allegedly killed Nu Metal

 

Oh yeah i know they didn't. Deftones have like 5 better albums post-Strokes than any strokes record

 

Deftones







stink

 

I'll agree with that. Deftones > The Strokes all day, but I would argue that those albums are NOT Nu Metal lol

 

all three of our statements can be true

 

Another side of it is, after Nirvana and grunge exploded a lot of those hair bands tried to keep up and change their sounds to match the trends. Motley Crue put out a grunge attempt, GnR spaghetti incident was noticeably harder, KISS made and shelved and then released a grunge album. Very few bands of that genre didn't attempt it, and honestly those albums were all terrible and further drove what fans they had left away for good

 

That’s how all genre turnover has been in rock history until (and this is my own very passionate personal theory) major labels eviscerating emo in a gold rush killed rock music as the lingua franca of popular music. Genres have their time, eventually stop innovating, and kids come up hating it and wanting something new. Arena rock gave way to punks. Hair metal gave way to grunge. Nu metal gave way to emo.

But when the majors scooped up every emo band with a pulse and then dumped them after one (or less!) records because they didn’t sell like Fall Out Boy, the genre didn’t have enough time to dominate and produce the pushback response.

 

Your thinking makes lots of sense, and I think I agree, but it’s hard to find supporting information.

I pulled up a half a dozen Hot 100 charts from 1992-1994 and I’m surprised to see very few grunge songs. As in, a few Nirvana songs, Ugly Kid Joe, Soul Asylum, Radiohead, Breeders. But across 6 random weeks, not much grunge, and half these bands aren’t really even grunge.

Meanwhile, hair metal also-rans like Saigon Kick have songs in the top 20. And there are mountains of song by bands like Extreme, Skid Row, Damn Yankees, Firehouse as well as hair adjacent bands like Black Crowes, Guns N Roses, Aerosmith etc

I don’t think this is a great metric though. I’ve been told by old heads in the business charts at that time were highly payola’d, and because Billboard has the worst website on the internet I couldn’t find rock charts, but it doesn’t exactly suggest the sudden shift that has become the narrative of the era

 

Coincidentally, I’m looking this up in between transcribing lyrics for an unreleased Smithereens album from 1993, that they recorded after they were dropped by Capitol in 1992, and that’s coming out in September