I blame the fucking Judgement Night soundtrack (1993) for all this shit!
I saw this coming and tried to warn people about mixing rap and metal back in college, but no one listened! Sure, we all loved “Walk This Way” by Run DMC and Aerosmith back in high school. And if Anthrax and Public Enemy want to get together to redo “Bring the Noise” or Ice-T wants to record a thrash-metal song about a “Copkiller” before taking on a decades long career as a movie and TV cop, that’s fine. As a novelty act in small doses.
But wholesale mixing of the genres? Teenage Fanclub and De La Soul? Faith No More and Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E.?! WTF! It’s like everyone was trying to eat a bunch of shit and crap out the next Rage Against the Machine!
Look, I get it. The early 90s was a time for experimentation. You have these guys like Beck and Trent Reznor and the Beastie Boys building these phenomenal albums by mixing all sorts of stuff together. Bands like Primus and Red Hot Chili Peppers funking things up so much, it makes you feel like a duet with Snoop Dogg is so close! But all you need to do is listen to any track deeper than “Jump Around” on a House of Pain CD to tell you “this must never happen!”
Fair enough. I was perhaps erroneously lumping nu-metal, late 90s alt metal, post-grunge and industrial into “nu metal” as a catch-all for turn of the century rock music.
I see Nickelback and Creed as extensions of the style of music created by the Stone Temple Pilots…possibly falling under the description of “grunge” but more accurately expressed as “low-voiced anguished growling with heavy guitars at a moderate tempo.” The STP pulled this off well, imo, their successors didn’t.
Unless stuff like Poison and Warrant is considered traditional metal, i’d never really heard or thought about this before. I’d often read/heard that it killed “hair metal.”
Then again, I have a different perspective than a lot of people. I also hear that “rap/hip-hop” dominates pop these days, but when I listen to pop radio I rarely hear what anyone growing up in the '80s or '90s would call rap or hip-hop music. I hear a lot of EDM and the usual boybands and pop diva stuff, just with different backing music. I am just as likely to hear a pop rnb cover of a '90s alternative rock song (I guess like Diddy covered '80s hits in the '90s) as anything resembling a hip-hop beat or rapped (not sing-song autotuned caricatured warbling) lyrics.
As far as nu metal goes, when I listen to what is programmed as “mainstream rock” radio, I might not hear stuff like ‘90s heyday Korn (they still play their new stuff and Jonathan Davis’ solo stuff) and Limp Bizkit but a lot of what gets played has similar vocals and guitar sounds as what you would hear in the late ‘90s. It’s probably more like P.O.D. or Saliva than Korn, but it’s still there and a lot of those bands’ hits would sound right at home with Five Finger Death Punch and whatever else they play. There are Christian Nu Metal bands on mainstream rock radio these days. I guess maybe there is less crossover these days, but Korn spent a lot of time not exactly getting pop love. Their first (best) album sold from touring and word of mouth, their 2nd album got a little bit of radio and MTV, and the 3rd/4th albums really broke through into TRL land but even many of their best known songs did not chart at all on the pop charts or very low and some didn’t even get enough spins to chart on alternative or rock. It’s not like they had a “Cherry Pie” or “Every Rose Has its Thorn.” I don’t remember how high Fred Durst and Co. charted with songs about Nookie and buttholes, though.
ETA: BTW Sevendust and some other bands mentioned negatively in this thread are still going strong and doing respectable business.
Well you must not be listening to much pop radio. Artists like Drake, Migos, Cardi B and Khalid dominate the airwaves. EDM? Boybands? What kind of “pop” radio are you listening to?
