Based on my somewhat hazy college recollections, the song had a particularly interesting claymation video, and it got a LOT of MTV rotation, and in those days, MTV kind of drove, or at least was ahead of what was popular on the radio. The song itself wasn’t anything special.
I agree with RickJay with the sentiment that people’s social clique and musical tastes weren’t nearly so lock-step as the movies of the time would indicate.
I mean, I knew people who were not in the least bit alternative/goth/etc… but were the hugest Depeche Mode fans I’ve ever known. I also knew metalheads who were short haired and were jocks (I was one).
And grunge was particularly funny; granted I was in college when it hit big, but beforehand, it was kind of something that either alt music types heard, OR metalheads heard, since it was kind of a fusion of the two styles in a sense. Then, when it hit big, everyone listened to it, and some people even went down the Docs and flannel fashion route, but the music wasn’t really limited to those folks.
Sure. And I can think of all sorts of exceptions, too. But my recollection in my area at my time was that most people had fairly compartmentalized tastes. Basically, you can pretty much name anyone in my high school class, and I can tell you the type of music they mostly listened to. I think tastes are far more fragmented today, though.
Tangential story #2. In 1987 I saw Guadalcanal Diary, a band from Marietta Georgia, and one that was considered part of that whole Athens GA alternative music scene, play at a club in Norfolk Virginia on a Sunday night. The band came on stage just as 120 Minutes started broadcasting (midnight? I think so), and played a few songs. The club would usually turn off the TVs when the bands played, but that night they kept them on. We asked the bartender why they were still on, and he told us that the band wanted them on.
At about 12:15, the band stopped playing in the middle of a song, and then started playing their newest single, “Litany”. Because it was debuting on 120 Minutes right then and there. So I saw that band play along with their video the very first night is was ever aired.
Apollo 18 has Fingertips, so it can’t be that bad. And most of Factory Showroom is in my TMBG playlist.
I think there’s quite a serious streak there, it’s just hidden under deceptively cheerful melodies and seemingly silly lyrics.
They’ll Need a Crane is probably the first one I’d think of when trying to think of a TMBG love song. Of course, it’s TMBG, so a traditional love song is unlikely (on their newest “adult” album they have a song called “Never Knew Love” which seems pretty cheesy, but maybe it’s got more to it). Instead you have beautifully depressing songs about love gone wrong (which applies to both “They’ll Need a Crane” and “Lucky Ball and Chain”, in my opinion. “I’ve Got a Match” has a similar theme).
Other TMBG love songs:
Probably “Hotel Detective”, “You’ll Miss Me” and “She’s an Angel”, possibly “Cyclops Rock”, and almost certainly “Withered Hope”, “Another First Kiss” and “Pet Name”.
Also covers like “New York City” and “Maybe I Know”.
Can we call “Metal Detector” a love song?
Oh, and since this thread is supposed to be about Nirvana (sort of), here’s a cover TMBG did of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. They were taking requests on a radio show, and obviously didn’t care whether or not they knew how to play the songs…
Whenever my father walked into the living room and saw that Mtv was on he’d ask “Is the piggy song coming on soon?” It was heavily rotated, but, like most novelty songs, it’s popularity didn’t seem to last very long.
What I remember in the wake of the “grunge revolution” was how severely the whole (broad umbrella) alternative genre “contracted” in a creative/diversity sense. Those artists who hewed closely to the grunge formula got all the airplay/big tours; those who didn’t but might have enjoyed a modicum of popularity pre Nevermind sunk back into obscurity. I recall how one reviewer of REM’s 2001 album Reveal said they had no radio format the US that would play them now. Those periodicals which covered the pre-grunge artists didn’t last long (thinking of B-Side here if anyone remembers).
That all fell into the “Be careful what you wish for” category for sure, for long term new wavers/postpunkers like me.
I do recall that, as well. The more “power poppy” types of bands seems to have been negatively effected by the popularity of grunge. For some reason, I seem to remember Redd Kross being poised to break out (and maybe it’s wishful thinking on my part) with the son “Annie’s Gone,” but being overrun by the more grunge sensibilities of the time. There were a few bands from the Pacific Northwest, too, that I think could have done well, but were a bit too poppy or punky, not close enough to the formula. Bands like The Fastbacks, Flop, Young Fresh Fellows, etc.
Nirvana was definitely the first “indie” band to achieve mass popularity.
In 1987 my then-girlfriend and I visited a friend of hers who was attending The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. I had recently graduated from Reed College in Portland, OR, and was familiar with most of the Northwest indie bands at that time. That weekend there was a dorm party at TESC, and the band was some awful rag-tag outfit named “Nirvana” that played a lot of CCR covers and Pixies tunes. We hung out with the band, drank beer, and smoked pot.
A year later we ended up moving to Olympia, and I soon became familiar with the band as one of several local bands that regularly played the dive bars of Olympia and the surrounding South Sound area.
A few years later I was at my girlfriend’s parents’ house on a Friday night. Someone had left the TV on in the TV room, and I walked into the room to turn it off. MTV’s Friday Night Videos was on. As I walked over to the TV, a video came on that caught my eye/ear. I remember thinking, “This sounds awfully familiar … kinda like that Nirvana band in Oly.” My next thought was, “Wow, this is really good.” A few moments later the video credits appeared on the screen: “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Two weeks later Nirvana was the biggest thing in the world.
In 1989 the Cure had a Top 10 Album and a #2 Pop Single in the U.S. They were also in heavy rotation on MTV. So I would hardly consider them a niche band. I DO think that bands like the Smiths were less popular in the US and have more of a revisionist legacy reputation now.
REM was an MTV staple as early as 1986/87 and they had huge pop hits by 89/90
I always took Nirvana to be the band that put over “Grunge” and not necessarily “alternative” as a movement, and most of the bands that got signed in Nirvana’s wake were of that specific brand of “alternative.”
They definitely were not, as has been demonstrated in this thread. They may have gone farther than bands like REM, or the B-52s, but they weren’t the first.
Heh. The Breakfast Club came out just after I graduated high school. And it was the very first movie that I paid twice to see in the theater. I was definitely Brian, but I wanted to be Bender. I was into every kind of music (hell, my senior year I played sax in the Wind Ensemble, bassoon in the orchestra, and guitar in the jazz ensemble), but in my spare time I played metal.
Istanbul (Not Constantinople), barbershop style:
For what it’s worth, I spotted the comma and understood exactly what you meant. And I’m drunk. But “drunk” cannot defeat “reading comprehension”!
Anyway, I love Nirvana. Not for their music, though. I never really got into it.
I love Nirvana because, like the boys in Nirvana, I grew up in Western Washington. And those guys got up on stage, dressed the same way I’d dressed all of my life. And suddenly, I was “fashionable”, because all of the grunge/alt-rock fans across the country started wearing flannel.
One thing that I do think is revisionist is this idea that Nirvana came along and just like that, 80s metal was dead and alternative was taking over the world. Sure, MTV spent the next four years acting as if that was the case, and a lot of rock radio stations followed suit. So to the average listener, it sure seems as if this was the case, so the myth has held on.
However, the business end of things went a lot differently. Alternative didn’t just kill metal. It killed rock almost entirely. Rock fans either bitterly clung to their old CDs and bands, or they went country. Looking at the Billboard archives from 1992-1996, you see some interesting things:
There were only a few successful alternative bands. The 80s produced a lot of hair bands who could sell albums, but the alternative era produced mostly commercial failures other than the big boys: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, STP, Soundgarden…
Country albums from about 1984-1991 rarely crack the top 50 on the Hot 200. Once the grunge era got started, country started to rule the album charts. When Nirvana debuted, an even more important artist, at least commercially, also had his breakout: Garth Brooks. Brooks proved to be far more consequential for the music business than Nirvana ever was. Nirvana killed rock, while Brooks revitalized country, and country is stronger than ever commercially today.
THe idea that hair metal was no longer commercially viable is the biggest myth. While it’s true that most bands dropped back into the black hole of obscurity, this was mainly because labels never gave them a chance or they decided to change their sound, become something no one was interested in hearing. Grunge fans weren’t going to buy Slaughter or Winger doing alternative. Hair metal fans weren’t all that interested in the idea either. But when a band produced a “hell with it, we are who we are, the fans will buy our stuff”, they tended to do pretty darn well. Firehouse had a top 40 single as late as 1995, a feat that almost no grunge bands ever achieved even when grunge was supposedly “hot”. At the height of the grunge era, Meat Loaf had the biggest album of the year. And classic rock bands enjoyed some of their best tours ever during the period, providing evidence that there was plenty of pent up demand for non-alt rock music. Demand which the industry declined to meet, and so most rock fans stopped looking, thinking the music was truly dead. The reality is that alternative didn’t rule the world at all in the early to mid 90s. Country, R&B, and hip hop became the dominant music, and rock became niche music.
Grunge only survived one “cycle”. What I mean by cycle is that a band that normally wouldn’t be seen as mainstream breaks out huge, bringing bands that are somewhat related along for the ride. That’s what happened with Nirvana, and Nirvana’s success lifted other Seattle bands with them. Record companies respond to this success by finding other bands of a similar style, get them signed, and get them into the studio. So you had two HUGE albums in 1991, Nevermind and Ten, and then around this time other bands are being signed and rushed into studios to crank out more product, which started to hit the scene in 1993 and 1994. In addition, the older rock acts that were still on labels were under pressure to also create music that was “relevant”. So from 1993-1996 you’ve got the market flooded with second rate crap. This also happened with the hair bands, but the second rate crap was catchy enough that fans were willing to keep on buying it for a time. WIth alternative, the crap fell flat immediately and the whole thing was pretty much all done by 1996. After this point, alternative survives in a more commercially viable format, kind of a hybrid of mainstream rock and alternative rock, as seen with bands like Creed, Staind, and 3 Doors Down. And pop punk becomes the most commercially successful rock genre in America after this point thanks to what Green Day wrought and Blink 182 capitalized on.
I saw bands like the Clash and the Ramones in 1979, XTC and the B-52s in 1980, REM in 1985, Soundgarden as early as 1986, and was very involved in the US “underground” music scene throughout the 1980s. I played in bands, went to hundreds of shows, and was a college radio DJ from 1981-1986. Yes, there were indie/alt bands that achieved a measure of success before Nirvana–but nothing close to their success. If the question concerns which indie/alt band first achieved success on a massive scale, then the answer is clearly, “Nirvana.”
I can’t say anything about Depeche Mode’s popularity in the US but they were definitely big in Europe as of 1987 and already well-known before that. When I was an exchange student in Canada in 1989, the daughter of the family I was staying with had several posters of them in her room. IIRC, when I asked her about them she said that lots of her friends loved them, too. I got the feeling that it was a cool but fairly mainstream band to listen to, like it was in Europe.
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But my recollection in my area at my time was that most people had fairly compartmentalized tastes
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Agreed.
I was into metal in the late 80s/early 90s and of course I hated everything that was on the radio and/or that didn’t have nasty guitar riffs. But when I first heard Nirvana, I was underwhelmed. Sure, it had big distorted guitars but to me it wasn’t “the right kind”.
Basically, most people in my age group listened to pop stuff, a sizable minority listened to electonic pop like Depeche Mode, a very small minority listened to metal and there were a couple of losers who listened to classical music. That was it. When grunge appeared, there was some hesitation among us. No one knew what to make of it. After a couple of months, we were all playing Smells like Teen Spirit (except for the weirdos who liked classical :D)
Just wanted to point out that REM had a pretty big hit with It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) off their 1988 album Document. Most people of my age knew, at the least, when to yell, “Leonard Bernstein!” Up until Losing My Religion (which was a hugely popular song and video), I’d always heard of REM classified as College Rock.
I really don’t remember anything called Alt Rock until the mid 90’s. I think the term “Modern Rock” was more prevalent in the late-80’s, early 90’s. Alternative was stuff like The Cure and New Order. Kiss Me and Disintegration-era The Cure was more popular that other posters are suggesting.
Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, et al, were most definitely called Grunge, not Alt Rock. There may have been some nascent Alt Rock umbrella under which Grungy things thrived, but in the language of the time, the music was called Grunge.
I might be a little younger than most. “Nevermind” came out when I was in 7th grade. In 1991, I mostly listened to mainstream yet not pop hip-hop. Stuff that sold well, but got little/no “white” crossover (like say EPMD vs. Hammer). I am white and I had mostly black friends (mostly due to location and sports), but we never discussed music at all. In school, the metal heads (like people who were Metallica fans pre-Black album, not “hair metal”) were the most self-segregated and snobbish when it came to music. I remember a lot of kids who really had no identifiable music genre embraced Nirvana.
My dad occasionally wandered downstairs past the TV while I was watching 120 Minutes. He’d look at the TV and get this expression like he’d just seen the previews to the Apocalypse.
RIP Ray; you done good.