I think most of us could agree that the Bush Sr/Berlin Wall/Desert Storm era, and perhaps the tail end of the Reagan era after the stock market crash could be thought of as a hybrid of both decades. 1993 is most definitely the 90s though. I think 1992-93 is a pretty big change, or perhaps you could say by the end of 1992 the 80s were pretty much totally gone and buried. Nirvana was a part of that but I’d say many things in early 1992 still had a cheesy neon vibe to them. It’s more of a urban 1989esque kind of 80s though, I’d say the early 80s already seemed pretty old in 1992 though I was too young to remember.
But then again I thought 2005 still had a surprising amount of leftover 1990s culture too. After all Mariah Carey had the biggest hit of her career that year at the age of 35.
I agree with the others that Nirvana was mainstream by 1992. I was a senior in high school from '92-'93, and Nirvana and Pearl Jam was HUGE at the time. Singles came out around then, and I remember grunge culture already being well established by that time. My musical tastes at the time were fairly mainstream or rooted in classic 70s rock, so I wasn’t part of any ahead-of-the-curve music culture. I mean, hell, Weird Al was parodying Nirvana by early 1992, so that’s a sign that it was pretty well engrained in popular culture.
That’s a good question. I became vaguely aware of the Pixies around '92 - '93 through a friend of mine that listened to alternative music. He was our go-to guy for the “weird” college stuff. I mean, I knew stuff like the Cure and U2 and the B-52s, which used to be college-y, but were mainstream enough by then. I don’t even remember hearing the Pixies on the radio until much later, but that could be because I didn’t know who they were at the time. When I entered college was when I really started hearing the Pixies, but even there, they were not part of my memories of a college music playlist (but I suppose that would be because they were pretty much done by then.) I was certainly far more familiar with the Breeders.
The Pixies never got anywhere near the popularity of Nirvana but are widely thought of as having a big influence on other bands.
“I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band—or at least in a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.”
-Kurt Cobain on writing “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.
movies like Wayne’s World (1992) had more to do with that trend.
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Jeez, are you suggesting that “Wayne’s World” wasn’t merely reflecting an already entrenched part of youth culture? . . . That people dressed in flannel/torn jeans because of the movie?
Popularity is not everything. Sure, they were a band’s band, never a mainstream success, and you can say they got more popular after breaking up than they were when active, but they were massively influential, and if we are going to pick one band to signal the end of New Wave synthesizers and Hair Metal, that’s my pick.
Maybe I’m mistaking the point of OP’s thread. I haven’t disagreed that Nirvana was out there in mainstream radio which any high school student would be familiar with by 1992. The OP cited watching “YouTube videos of old malls”. Wayne’s World, Nirvana and other mainstream bands like Blind Melon hit in 1992. That would leave a few years for the dress codes to take hold in suburban shopping malls en masse, so I’m not surprised that his YouTube videos of early 90s “old malls” wouldn’t be full of flannel-attired people other than some high schoolers. The 90s neo-hippy dress code stereotypes are from the mid-90s.
It takes a few years for fashions to disseminate from the source to the populace. 80s pop culture was actually mid-late 70s pop culture gone mainstream. The Clash were huge on the charts in 1977, but it took a few years for mainstream culture to move away from bell bottom jeans and Star Wars hairstyles to more 80s punk dress codes (and for prog rock in its original form to die off).
I think it must depend on where you were. To me, the height of “grunge” attire around here was around '92 and '93. I remember Gap selling ridiculously overpriced flannel shirts that you can just go the local K-Mart and get for $10. I don’t remember a lot of “grunge” style clothing in my college years from '93-'98. By 1994, I felt like grunge’s influence on pop culture was significantly fading. At least those are my memories (backed up by pictures of myself) from the Chicago area in those years. Of course, those weren’t the only fashions at the time. You still had plenty of “metal” fashion in my neck of the woods, hip hop fashion, J Crew Abercrombie & Fitch preppie fashion, etc., co-existing. I don’t remember a time where grunge was anywhere near the most popular fashion. It was always just one out of many.
I thought I saw their tour plane at Chicago Ohare in August 2011 when I was flying to Iceland but it turns out that was our plane. The one with the giant Iron Maiden World Tour logos. It was kinda weird, but the inside of the plane was a pretty standard commercial flight type. The airline was Iceland Express.
Yep. And on their original run the biggest venue they ever played in Chicago was the Riviera Theater (2500 capacity) and on their reunion tour they sold out four nights at the Aragon Ballroom (4500 capacity).
Having grown up in that time, I think there’s a bit of a difference between culture defined as “how people actually acted and dressed” and culture as “what set designers and wardrobe people put in movies and tv shows to let you know what decade they take place in.”
I started college in 1991. While bands like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam and so one were extremely popular, it’s not like everyone constantly dressed and acted like extras from Reality Bites all the time.
Me too, and you’re right- people didn’t start wearing flannel shirts all of a sudden; it gradually came on.
Plus, grunge wasn’t dominant in the pop music scene; songs like “November Rain” by Guns & Roses, “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot, “Dreamlover” by Mariah Carey, “Nuthin’ but a G Thang” by Dr. Dre, and “Insane in the Brain” by Cypress Hill just to mention a few songs were popular in the early 1990s.
Hell, by the time I should have graduated (1995), Blues Traveler, Hootie and the Blowfish, Notorious BIG and Tupac were bigger deals than any grunge bands.
Interestingly enough, I recall an interview show on MTV from about a year before Nirvana broke, where the MTV talking heads (all the usual suspects, none of whose names I remember) were talking about Guns & Roses killing off hair metal. And at the time, that seemed to be a pretty solid argument to make.
The theme of Nirvana crushing what went before was captured by (and perhaps to some extent originated from) a famous interview of the lead singer of the band Loverboy.
He told MTV that “Nirvana killed my career.” Basically, his band had been cruising to fame and fortune with pop confection like “Working for the Weekend,” and then “it was all negative lyrics – and people dressed up like they’re lumberjacks. The Seattle grunge thing just took over everything.”
“Weekend” came out in 1981 and Loverboy’s last album before grunge and Nirvana broke was in 1987 (and their next after that wasn’t until '97) and that 1987 album only reached #42 on the US charts (and 21 in their home country).
I always thought Guns & Roses WAS hair metal, or at least that’s how us metalheads back in 1985-1991 thought of them. Maybe a hair (heh) better than Motley Crue or Poison, but still firmly hair-bandish.