I don’t think I’ll see a music tree like that ever, ever again.
Wow. Talk about covering all the bases.
The logical progression in some of the metal areas was a little wonky. (Safe to say that Misery Index should not be the immediate correlation to AxCx.:p)
Quibble aside - impressive.
I don’t know enough about music whether that site is bona fide or not but it is impressive. There is another site that’s similarly mapped and much better but I haven’t found it (yet).
the ramones didn’t get political until the mid 80s and even then not too much…although I was the weirdo that discovered bad religion and epitaph records stable … while everyone else was on pearl jam and nirvana
Can only speak for what I seen in Toronto, High school and then Clubs. Metal seemed more blended with Hard Rock, than Punk.
Definitely in the video and artwork side of the genre. But I don’t think I would have classed it as Dungeons and Dragons, like the game, but more like Tolkienesque warrior imagery.
Heavy leather jacket and jeans, most tended to be a motorcycle jacket with a zipper that went diagonally, rather than north south direction. Hair was usually an English Mullet, but straight at the top and not a brush cut like the Billy Ray Cyrus.
The older guys were more into Floyd, Zep etc. Scorpions, Leppard, Bon Jovi and the majority of the eighties bands started coming into their own, if it had a sound, it was listened too, but you might hear bubblegum rock occasionally from someone.
The club scene is constantly evolving and bar owners play what the paying public ask for, so I’d have to say that Grunge started blending in with the other rock genres, but I don’t recall if it ever dominated. It really did not help that most of the rock venues had more or less dropped off the map anyways, in favor of dance music.
I guess I pretty much stuck to my 80’s and early 90’s metal for a long time, not really listening to too much new stuff. Then around the Napster file sharing period I started to find a lot of new european fantasy based heavy metal, and it was becoming a big thing.
Adaher, also check out Valkyrie. Run playlists for Valkyrie and The Sword on google play or YouTube and you’ll get a lot of proggy sounding metal.
I wasn’t involved in the 70s, but there was very much a political aspect to the mid-to-late 80s scene. Remember, this was the Reagan and Bush era. We had plenty to be political about.
Oh yeah.
As others have said, people wore what they wanted, but there was a definite punk look: spikey/mohawked hair, torn jeans, piercings, Manic Panic hair dye etc. I don’t think kids today appreciate how out there this was at the time - you would literally get loads of abuse on the street, in your school, etc, for looking like this. And if you were in some place like a suburban shopping mall and you passed by another punk you would smile and say hello, or stop to chat, even if you didn’t know each other. I have fond memories of that camaraderie.
For most people I know, grunge was seen as more of a descendant of heavy metal than punk. Green Day would mostly be seen as a cartoon punk band but I have to put in a caveat here because I was involved in the Berkeley punk scene that they came out of. They were genuine punks in their early days and that pop-punk style was the Berkeley punk style. Yes they “sold out” after a while but it’s inaccurate to suggest that they were never really part of the punk scene at all.
Answering for heavy metal - I came into the ‘scene’ a few years later, but it was in Australia, which was always a few years behind the times anway (and makes the fact I’m a few days late to the thread almost futuristic 
)
There was hardly any crossover between metal and punk in the mid-late 80s, except for a specific group of people who were into what was literally called ‘crossover music’. This was still an issue in about 1992 when I started listening to punk, and had friends from the metal scene looking at me as though I had betrayed them.
Fantasy was a big part of the metal scene, but not so much in the form of role playing games - more so with particular movies and books (Conan; Lord of the Rings; Alien). I was mostly into Power Metal, and lyrics, artwork and general imagery drew a lot on what I would call the ‘fantasy aesthetic’.
Again, talking about a few years later, but there was very much a uniform - torn jeans, sneakers and black band t-shirts. Wearing non-metal t-shirts was transgressive (or at least would get you a second look from people), but not unheard of.
The ‘true’ metal fans hated hair metal (but then, there wasn’t too much friendship between the ‘metal’ fans - eg of Maiden/Priest/Sabbath, and the ‘thrash’ fans - eg of Slayer/Metallica/Bathory). Guns and Roses were an interesting exception to the rule, but even they were looked at with suspicion when they started.
From memory, metal and thrash completely died when grunge came along, and aside from Black Metal in the early 90s, heavy metal became a tiny niche/nostalgia market until later on in the 90s when they started to get revived again.
Green River, who later became Mudhoney, were around before Nirvana/Soudgarden/Pearl Jam, and were much more rooted in hard rock and punk than metal.
Well, then amend what I said to read “more of a descendant of hard rock than punk”. Point is, the punks I knew wouldn’t have felt much of an affinity with that scene.
I’m a little more on the later end, say 84 - 88?, for what it’s worth.
The people I knew were certainly aware of political and social issues, there was a lot of frustration with the current state of affairs. At most of the live shows we went to, bands would often use their platform to talk about specific issues or injustices. I feel like it was hard to find an outlet – we were teenagers, we didn’t have the internet, so other than expressing that frustration, I don’t think there was a lot of organized action. Happily, some of the people I know now who are very active in social justice trace their activism back to the ideas that they were exposed back in their teen punk days (so we didn’t all become old and jaded).
Oh, definitely, there was a lot of creativity and personal expression, plus no one I knew would have had the money to spend on the (very limited selection) of retail offerings. There was a lot of experimentation, while a few had an established personal look, a lot of people would mix up their style and I remember getting ready to go out involved a lot of girls hanging out together and swapping pieces to try out different effects, or repurposing clothes.
Pretty much what you would expect, but with a lot of individual looks. As has been mentioned upthread, you could wear just about anything and it was your attitude that carried it, including “straight” clothes (which is what we called mainstream fashion). Where I was, there wasn’t a critical mass in any one specific scene, so it was a lot of punk/goth/thrash/rockabilly, even a little old glam, fans combining in one large(r) group, so much of those aesthetics blended together. When Courtney Love hit the news later on, her look was old news for us – the tattered up party dresses and leather jackets and boots had already been a staple for years.
Combining elements from different looks was big, too – a guy with ripped leather pants and combat boots wearing a preppy button down shirt and suit jacket on top, which I realize is hilarious to think about it NOW, but honestly back then people would stop and stare at how absolutely out there that was. ruadh is totally correct in how that is how you would find your people – you could be in another town and see those kids wearing those clothes, and bee-line right over.
I was already kind of old by the time that happened, so Green Day seemed really cute and fun to me, like “awww, look at the little kids!”
In general though, a lot of the punks I knew were people who just really liked music, and even though punk was the focal point, a lot of different music got listened to, so grunge didn’t seem to come out of nowhere. For some reason, punks always liked bands like Metallica, probably because they seemed to be full throttle all the time, which was very much a part of the punk mentality, and I remember the first Beastie Boys tour, the audience was full of punk kids (even though we essentially completely ignorant of the rap and hip hop that influenced them).
Here in Texas, there was a lot of crossover. By the late 80’s a metal band could do a Dead Kennedy’s cover and half the audience in a metal club would recognize it. I learned about Slayer when someone played them at a party that was mostly punks.
As pointed out above, it depends on the particular person an the particular band. There were certainly bands that mined fantasy for lyrics, and bands that wouldn’t touch that stuff with a 10 foot pole.
In Texas: Jeans, sneakers, t-shirt. For the 3 months out of the year where you could use a jacket, a light leather or jean jacket.
They were largely contemporaries, actually. Thrash developed at the same time as Hair Metal. I never liked the Hair Metal, but still ended up playing a bit of Dokken in a cover band or two. :rolleyes:
See below.
I wasn’t involved in the 70’s portion of that, so I can’t really comment other than to say that the punks in the '80s were more political than any other culture I dealt with at the time.
Again, I can’t comment on the comparative question, but there was plenty of DIY in the 80’s and on into the 90’s. That’s where I learned how to print shirts, make a decent flyer, record music and distribute it.
In Texas: Jeans, sneakers, t-shirt. For the 3 months out of the year where you could use a jacket, a light leather or jean jacket. Yes, it is the same as the Metal uniform above. If you want to be extra cool, wear plaid pants. The bigger the plaid, the better.
There’s really two stages to Grunge, to me. The period before Nirvana broke, and the period afterward. The pre-Nevermind period was pretty diverse, the only real common factor was that you had to be willing to be loud, and the bands on Sub Pop fit just fine with the craziness of the Texas Punks such as the Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid and the Dicks. To be honest, at that point it wasn’t really anything new to me, it was always the stuff I loved under a new name. They had called it Psychedelic, then Acid Rock, then Heavy Metal, then Punk, then they called it Hardcore, and now they were calling it Grunge. Oh well. As long as I get to play loud rock and sing about what I want, I don’t care.
After '91, it got strange. I’m not going to say that the style that people were calling Grunge became a lot more narrow, but the folks who came out expecting all three bands on a bill to sound like Nirvana or Pearl Jam were often disappointed.
Interesting.
Sounds like we had quite disparate experiences back then.
Back around in '85 when Green River started coming to Victoria (and then a bit later The Melvins, Mudhoney, Coffin Break, Tad, Soundgarden, and all those other flannelled, hairy shrubs) they were always on bills with straight-up punk bands.
Unfortunately it wasn’t until the 90’s that any truly worthwhile metal acts came by our neck of the woods, so, up until then, any metal gigs were just isolated clusters of local metal bands, and they rarely shared bills with punk bands (nor with the aforementioned grunge ones).
While it could be argued that the heaviest bands out of that whole shebang - Melvins and Soundgarden - had metal underpinnings, (AND that wiki has multiple references to grunge being a hybrid of punk and heavy metal), I’d still contend that, overall, punk edged out metal as a much stronger base from which the whole grunge thingie arose from in the first place.
The fact alone, which I think (ha!) speaks volumes, was Kurt Cobain’s somewhat eclectic taste in music, especially growing up as a young skater enjoying way more rock and punk, than metal.
80s Punks were to Metalheads what 60s Mods were to Teddy Boys. Punk’s look was encoded very much by Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm MacLaren’s wife, who personally styled the Sex Pistols with the whole neon hair and safety pin look. It was also rooted in London’s working class Ska fan community, hence the shaved heads and work boots aesthetic.
Metal was, I would say, more rooted in LA’s skateboard community, with a big visual input from KISS and the New York Dolls (spandex and scarves on men). They would dress so in-your-face effeminately, they were daring you to say something about it. Punks wore Doc Martens, Metalheads preferred Frye boots.
To paint with an even broader brush, punks were generally better read, but metalheads were likelier to be employed.
On the metal side:
I’m not old enough to have traveled with the scene (being 10 years old in 1990), but how I read it is: what dried up in 1990 was glammy hair metal. The big boys like Metallica & Slayer kept their fan bases and scenes, and groove metal started take center stage, with bands like Pantera & Sepultura hitting their zenith in the mid 90’s.
As time went on I think there started to be a lot more of cross over between metal fans and punk fans. It always seemed to me that post hardcore bands had one foot in the punk scene and one foot in the metal scene. Then when metalcore grew in popularity it brought a lot of punk fans with it.
This is my understanding as well. I’ve also read that people in the scene saw Green River as being split into two camps - the guys who went on to form Mudhoney were punk fans (primarily), and the guys who went on to form Mother Love Bone/Pearl Jam were metal fans. As far as Pearl Jam goes, Mike McCready is definitely more of a hotshot/metal guitarist than a punk guy, and although Eddie Vedder wore punk t-shirts, his singing on the first Pearl Jam record is pure classic rock.
:eek:
I even took away your rolleyes emoji just to make your quote even worse!!!:p:p:p
Hey, but…but…but…yeah, I was playing Dokken bass parts.
You are so mean…<blows nose on his spandex cape>
Yeah, that’s how I felt at the time.
As I wrote above, I had spent the late 80s listening primarily to metal, with a side dish of punk. I enjoyed both, but I was more drawn to the metal sound.
When I first heard Smells like Teen Spirit, the punk influence was immediately clear to me, and it was one of the reasons why it left me kind of unimpressed at first. It was basically punk with a heavier sound to me, in other words an interesting but not particularly innovative take on a genre that I was already well familiar with and from which I was moving away anyway at the time.