Little pig little pig let me in!
Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!
Yeah, I might have overstated that. I was mainly focusing on the fact that from a fan/listener point of view REM and Nirvana were not really in the same genre the way most people thought of it at the time. I means it’s pretty laughable to lump TMBG and RHCP in the same club though the RIAA has done more laughable things in it’s day I suppose.
We definitely thought of grunge as a very distinct sub-category under the alternative umbrella.
It’s got to be an age thing. I first heard of REM when I was 19, the day Murmur came out. A friend of mine called me up (he knew I was off that day - I was waiting to ship out to boot camp) and said I had to hear what he just got at the record store.
We called that alternative at the time, and not alt-rock. REM was lumped in with other bands that got going at the same time, and were roughly influenced by the British New Wave and Punk bands that had crested in popularity a couple of years earlier.
Nirvana and Pearl Jam and their peers were called grunge at the time, with the term ‘alternative’, to the best of my memory, not invoked until after many many corporate radio stations added them to regular rotation. Alternative was considered less threatening and more listener-friendly sounding than grunge.
But I agree with the gist of this thread - Nirvana wasn’t the first, but they were the ones that pushed it over the edge.
It appears that they sold roughly the same number of albums as Nirvana – except that Depeche Mode has been making albums for 20 years, and Nirvana only lasted like four.
I will meekly admit, that I actually did buy that album on cassette, back when they were called Green Jellö. Actually, it might be kind of fun to revisit that album, because I remember nothing of it minus the “Three Little Pigs” song.
Yeah, back in those days (pre 1991), there were really 2 categories: Radio played music, and everything else. (not including rap /R&B/hiphop)
Radio music fell into 3 main categories: Pop, which was characterized by stuff like Color Me Badd, Paula Abdul, C&C Music Factory, and the like, and then there was hair metal / glam metal, which was a term for more radio-friendly metal acts like Motley Crue, Guns 'N Roses, Poison, Warrant, Winger, etc…
And then there was everything else, which sort of divided up as best as I can recall like this:
There was thrash metal, which was pretty much Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer.
There was a sort of nascent grunge movement with Soundgarden, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains out there.
Stuff like They Might be Giants, Concrete Blonde, REM, Sonic Youth, Violent Femmes, Siouxie and the Banshees, etc… fell into more of an “College Music / Alternative” label than the more metal styles like thrash metal and grunge.
In about 1991, the landscape changed- REM, Nirvana, AND Metallica started getting serious radio airplay, and continued to do very well for a few years, with other bands who were active also becoming popular at about the same time.
Yes, but.
Unless you lived in an area with college radio, you really had to seek out punk, New Wave, Goth, etc. Maybe via 120 Minutes on MTV. I miss that show.
Nirvana broke that in a way by being played on regular rock radio.
That said, my POV is someone from Jacksonville, FL, which had a whopping 1-hr show on the weekend for “new music”. There was one teenager/early-20s (no alcohol) club that had cool music and bands, and 1 over-18 club. None of it got on the regular radio.
Oh hell, I’d forgotten that song. Now it’s stuck in my head! :smack:
No, not really. And I say that as a fan 
They had a decent radio hit with “Birdhouse in Your Soul” in 1990 (that album, “Flood” also had the novelty song “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”) but after that they sank back into relative obscurity from the mainstream. “Apollo 18” was too random and fizzled; “Factory Showroom” never got the love it deserved sob.
TMBG weren’t very “serious” and basically never wrote love songs* That’s why people liked them, and also why they never stuck with the general public, I think. The Barenaked Ladies started to gain interest in 1994 and ate their lunch, pretty much, by combining the playful attitude with relationship songs.
*“Ana Ng” is the only exception I can think of.
Pearl Jam’s early singles have much lower chart positions than one might guess because for their first two albums they did not release singles commercially in the US. Radio stations received “Jeremy”, etc., as singles, but if you went into an American music store in 1992 the only way you could get “Jeremy” as a single was if they had the foreign import. Chart positions for singles are based on both radio airplay and sales, so since Pearl Jam wasn’t selling singles in the US a song like “Jeremy” would have a much lower chart position than others songs that received exactly as much airplay.
A few years later the early Pearl Jam singles were all released in the US, so “Jeremy” actually reached its highest chart position on the Billboard Hot 100 (#79) in 1995.
Don’t Let’s Start
Lucky Ball and Chain
They’ll Need A Crane
I’ve Got A Match
BIYS is a love song, albeit metaphorically.
They were just very silly, and we’re never quite as “serious” as even Barenaked Ladies.
These are not even remotely love songs.
Yes they are. They’ll Need a Crane is open to interpretation, and lucky ball and chain is about love gone sour and how he laments the fact that his partner left. They are songs about love, even if they aren’t odes to new love. If the latter is what Hello Again meant, then that’s fine. I just took his post to mean that TMBG didn’t write many songs about traditional love topics.
Admittedly, that certainly isn’t what they’re known for.
One day I noticed that the alt section on the OnDemand music selections seemed to be just every video from every other section (except country) lumped together. Thus I concluded that alt rock is pretty much a meaningless term.
20? Try 33 years.
I was right into the whole Sydney inner city alt music scene from the late 1980’s through to the mid '90’s and yep Nirvana was the one that broke alt or grunge into the mainstream. No doubt about it, we did have Sonic Youth on high rotation before then but it was seen as a derivative of punk.
We cottoned on the alt/punk very early on is Australia, it matched our love of hard core pub rock bands, punk and “FU” attitude. There was already a big following of the Brit punk scene here at the time but it was starting to wain and when we heard Sonic Youth and then Nirvana we knew it was going to be big.
Bands like U2 were never really seen as “alt” in Australia.
This, except, I wouldn’t have called them New Wave - The Smiths were Indie Pop, Joy Division and The Cure were Post-Punk, Depeche Mode was Synthpop…
Of course, we’d fight for hours about the distinctions! Like, “Are the Cure Goth? Only post-Seventeen Seconds but pre-The Top, you uncultured swine”
But alt-rock was something I only really heard of in '89/the 90s (and the usage was synonymous with college rock) - R.E.M. was likely the first band I heard it used for, around the time of Green, especially Stand.
To answer the OP, I’d say it was R.E.M. that made alt-rock popular, not Nirvana.
You’re just helping him make his point. Just look at the comparison…
Nirvana sold eleventy billion records while Billy Mumphrey was in grade school.
Depeche Mode sole eleventy billion records during Billy Mumphrey’s entire life.
Billy Mumphrey’s dead? I remember him as a simple country boy. You might say a cockeyed optimist, who got himself mixed up in the high stakes game of world diplomacy and international intrigue.
I was going to make the same 20 years / 33 years point, but I considered it a nitpick. Not intended to counteract his point, just making sure the facts are straight.
For reference, Depeche Mode’s Violator went triple platinum (3 million copies) in 1990 in the US while Nirvana’s Nevermind went diamond (10 million). I’d say that Depeche Mode was already definitely popular and visible in the mainstream by 1992, but Nirvana was something else altogether.