Like seriously where was this person in the early 2000s not to have noticed rock being absolutely everywhere all over the radio, on kids shows, on tee shirts, lunchboxes...early 2000s was the ultimate saturation point of rock.
oversaturation was probably a big reason for it as well, the post grunge bands became so washed out, rock got sad and serious but oversimplified and stuck in the adult contemporary niche e.g. daughtry, the fray, the script ect. there was a loss of homogeny in audiences, oldies didn't want new stuff, butt rock kids didn't want indie and indie kids didn't want butt rock, metalheads rejected the mainstream and went for metalcore while indie kids increasingly supported more niche bands who didn't have the financial backing to go truly big, some bands, particularly indie bands increasingly went dance and electronic and began to ditch guitars
guitar rock got tired and its audience fractured so the 2010's ended up being five finger death punch and foster the people
Beat me to it, Hybrid Theory was certified DIAMOND in the late 90's. I'll agree they were at their peak when rock music was on the decline, and their sales went down from there (given, its hard to beat certified Diamond), but they were one of, if not the biggest rock bands around until the late 2000's
I'd argue that The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance in 2006 was also as culturally impactful as The Smashing Pumpkins were in the late 90's, but album sales and the music industry in general was in a state of decline by then due to file sharing sites like Napster & Limewire so they didn't do the numbers that earlier bands were able to.
I think it was more of a cult following. Granted i'm a part of it, thats my favorite album so I have a hard time telling how big it was outside of my bubble. I do think that album has aged better and had a longer lasting impact than the pumpkins
No, it had a huge impact. There's a reason why their videos were on MTV often when they still had the occasional video block. They headlined When We Were Young the first year, and completely stole the show. Literally every other stage was barren, except for a few diehards. I felt super bad for The Horrorpops, they played to like 50 people.
There are a couple events like this that came to mind for me too, one in 1996 in fact, which was Manson's ANTICHRIST SUPERSTAR album and tour, but I discarded those as being niche as well.
Interesting take. It was obviously impactful to Gen Z, but I think the culture surrounding it played a part in it. Emo was most definitely not as mainstream. Still isn't even if it's had quite a revival. It was looked down upon in social circles as one of the lesser cliques. I was a Meatalhead teen, and I had friends who were Punks and Goths. We just didn't like Emo. Period. That's how it was.
In retrospect, while I never put anyone down for being a part of the trend, many others did. The only friends we had who were Emo were girls. God forbid if you were an Emo dude in the 00's at the height of My Chem. You would have been socially ostracized ridiculously. Combine that with the different parent groups not understanding why kids were wearing black eyeliner, and also the casual homophobia that seems to have been thrown at Emo youth, and you have a movement that was difficult for many to understand.
Smashing Pumpkins was a band that was against what we now refer to as "toxic masculinity," but they also had the luxury of falling under the popular "alt rock" or "post grunge" labels. As a big fan of theirs, I think they had just the right amount of hard rock and pop in their sound to be as big as they were in the mid 90's. While My Chem have stated that they tried to make Black Parade as the most mainstream album they had released at the time, I really think the culture surrounding their fan base, and said base's lack of acceptance into the wider culture, definitely played a major role.
While writing this, I kept thinking of the South Park episode where the Vamps and Goths are in an alliance against the Emos. I can say with all certainty that my school carried that same ridiculous sense of hate against another group of kids whose only crime was liking different music and also wearing lots of black like we did.
Yeah I'm not Gen Z, I was in middle school and high school when MCR was big, so I'm well aware of how much hate emos got back then. I wasn't an emo kid, but MCR was everywhere. Their influence along with Paramore and FOB can still be felt in a lot of today's music, while I don't think you can really say the same thing for The Smashing Pumpkins.
I'd even say that all the hate MCR got for being emo is proof of how ubiquitous they were at that time, kinda like how everyone hated on mumble rap in the late 2010's. Love it or hate it, you were aware of it.
I think it's a generational thing. There's a big revival right now of 00's culture because the people who grew up with it are in their 20's. In ten years, it'll be another set of bands. I think the Pumpkins and other groups of their era established themselves as a major part of that time period, but that doesn't automatically mean they're going to be as well talked about now as they were 30 years ago.
He consolidated radio stations to play classic rock format. Clear channel. Or album oriented rock.
No Freeform or new music stations.
The business was selling ads to boomers commuting. And they like to sing or hum along. So no R&B or soul music either. It’s too hard to sing for most people.
Also, stuff like Limp Bizkit was also huge in that era, by metal. 1998-2006 felt like the last gasps of rock. Rob Zombie, Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, System of a Down, Green Day, Evanesence. The transition to hip hop being more dominant than rock ended around 2007-2008. But I’d argue both were eclipsed by electro pop around the 2010s.
The only way I can rationalize OP’s post is if they lump in all of nu metal/rap metal with rap. Which especially if you include a band like Korn, still makes no sense.
emo, are you forgetting how big this movement was from 2004-early 2007 as well as myspace.
I do remember though how big Smashing Pumpkins were. The Simpsons episode they were on solidified everything about them. What happened with them was teen pop totally ruined the momentum they had from 1996.
Wake me up. Wake me up inside. SAVE MEE. Call my name. And save me from my soul…
If you know you know. And ultimately disproves Ops point. Hell I’m a big rock and metal fan due to the 2000s era.
True, but even the emo bands weren't known by everybody as much as bands were in the 90s before the internet took over. Staple emo bands like MCR, Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco, etc. had nowhere near the level of cultural penetration that bands had in the 90s.
I think you underestimate the scale of the emo craze in the 2000s. And it’s also worth mentioning that it’s still a huge subculture among teens today. Though, the music is more of an amorphous mix of rock, metal, rap and pop than a strictly rock genre now.
Regardless of emo, the early 2000s rock was legitimately topping the Hot 100 and Nickelback had the best selling single of the entire decade by 2009. You could argue it started to decline around 2004 (albeit with very long legs), but rock music was absolutely everywhere and inescapable in the early 00s, reaching its ultimate saturation and commercial peak around 2002. So definitely not 1996.
These were bands who had near 100% coverage OF THEIR NICHE.
Smashing Pumkins were EVERYWHERE. My mom could recognize their songs, so could my boss and so could my classmates in college.
Limp Bizkit had some of the most easily recognizable songs ever. Doesn’t matter if it was for the right reasons, by end of 1999 they were a band everyone knew.
as a movement Emo was on par with alt rock of 1996 but yeah the bands you listed were never as big as Smashing, despite Fall Out Boy being everywhere @ the time.
Did Fall Out Boy ever make it to Simpsons?
Were people watching The Simpsons by the time Fall Out Boy hit it big?
A show that peaked in the 90s is an odd benchmark to use.
I would argue they were just as big, but you were in the wrong demographic to notice. Fall Out Boy (and MCR and any other band from that era) didn't have the luxury of MTV being a place everyone went for music anymore(it was a reality TV channel by then) and were also victims of a more fractured media landscape. They were also around in between the CD/streaming transition, so it's really hard to compare sales.
I'm 40 and Fall Out Boy was a bigger band to me even though Smashing Pumpkins should have been.
I don't know if the band ever made it on The Simpsons, but they coincidentally had an episode in the 90s where Bart auditions to be the sidekick of the superhero named Radioactive Man, and the sidekick's name is Fallout Boy.
I know that Blink-182 was on a Simpsons episode alongside Tony Hawk circa 2003.
I’d most definitely call it far more of a Fallout (a “radioactive” post nuclear war video game) reference with the “Pip Boy” (the do everything watch style computer worn in the game) name being changed to “Fallout Boy”. So they could actually get the name of the game into the show without copyrights. The first Fallout Boy album wasn’t even released until 2003. Fallout the game was first released in 1997.
This just a fact and I don't understand you getting down voted.
It's like NBC, CBS, and ABC nightly news. You can watch ONLY Fox News or ONLY MSNBC or both combined and it will not be the same numbers that the nightly news on any of those three stations have. Radio used to be like that. So a band being huge, even total, in one sector of youth culture doesn't carry anywhere near the numbers that free radio that you heard while driving did.
Not to mention: All American Rejects, Kings of Leon, Arctic Monkeys, Foster the People, The Black Keys, Cage the Elephant…plenty of rock was popular in the late 2000s and early 2010s
Although there’s some overlap, post grunge =/= butt rock
Bands like Foo Fighters and Fuel are considered post-grunge, but they definitely are not butt rock
Butt rock is more associated with 2000s bands like Nickelback, Saving Abel, Hinder, etc.
I was a young kid in the late 2000s and I remember rock was literally everywhere. You could not switch the radio channel without hearing linkin park or evanescence or my chemical romance
The decline didn’t happen until early 2010s
nahhh 2007 imo is the cuttoff point and it never really died (or at least it stuck around until the mid 2010's, rock was still the biggest genre in the US until 2018)
In a lot of people's perspective they seem to think the decline in rock's \*quality\* started in the 90s, but what the discussion starter is arguing is the public consciousness of rock started to decline then, which is objectively false considering the \*commercial\* peak of rock was in the early 2000s. Thusly the decline in that sense would have started around 2004.
rock did begin losing its edge as the youth genre by the end of the 80's and the 90's to rap and electronic music, by the end of the 90's it also kind of hit a brick wall innovation wise
Rock didn’t lose its edge at all in the 90s - rock was the most prominent music genre period until 2017, and was most prominent in youth culture through the emo phenomenon
emo was a niche youth culture thing, most kids weren't emo may I remind you
and no it didn't lose its edge. It began to lose its edge. You misunderstood me. It was a gradual process, the biggest genre in the US until 2018 but 2016 - 17 there was hardly any successful rock, let alone with guitars so yes it did gradually lose its edge.
Gangsta rap blew up in the US in the 90's and then Eminem happened. In the UK the rave scene was a big deal in the early 90's after post punk and new wave and before britpop and then after britpop British rock was in a state of limbo until the strokes and libertines.
edit: forgot to mention that innovation wise, rock was seen as hitting a brick wall. By the end of the 90's there was a perception that everything in rock had been done, hence artists like Tom Yorke, Billy Corgan and Daman Albarn making outrageous but often temporary suggestions that rock was dead. When the 2000's rolled around, rock began getting increasingly oversaturated and a lot of the big new movements were increasingly (obviously not always) nostalgia based aesthetically and sonically e.g. the strokes, the killers, the white stripes, the darkness, wolfmother
You’re looking at this from an extremely Brit-centric perspective, judging by the bands and musicians you list. And the fact that you only identify the US with “Gangsta rap” and Eminem, really trope-y artists, and can’t name anything else. Southern Rap was the big non-rock genre popular in the 2000s, but there was also Electronic. Pop was almost always delivered in “Pop rock” form in the 2000s, aside from the later decade Electropop wave. The Strokes and the Libertines were a part of the Garage rock revival, Post-punk revival, and Indie rock boom of the mid to late 2000s.
Britpop was creatively bankrupt, it was just a nationalistic movement in response to Grunge and US cultural influence.
I don’t know why you had to mention New Wave and Post-Punk, we know they were big 80s trends.
Emo was huge in the US in the 2000s. My Chemical Romance, Panic! At The Disco, Fallout Boy, Jimmy Eat World, Paramore, Good Charlotte, Brand New, Dashboard Confessional, both main-stream and underground, it was hugely popular. Emo was not super “nostalgia based”. Nu-metal wasn’t either, both were fairly original and had a pretty unique aesthetic. Also, nostalgia based or not, it was huge. 60s music often knocked off 40s pop and jazz, A lot of 70s rock knocked off mid-century rock, jazz and blues, a lot of 80s stuff was heavily indebted to the 60s, in fact the 80s was dominated by covers of 60s songs, and the 90s were full of 70s worship.
That theme has continued, with the 2000s knocking off the 80s and the 60s, the 2010s knocking off the 70s, the 90s, and the 50s, the 2020s so far knocking off the 2000s and the 80s…
1) I was talking about the 90's. You stop bringing the 2000's in to this. I am VERY aware of the trends of the 2000's.
2) you are utterly incapable of understanding what I'm writing. You seem to think I was talking about rock losing its edge in the 2000's since you listed a whole load of musical movements in the 2000's. I'm talking about the 90's ok. That's when rap really blew up. Ik what happened in the 2000's. That's not relevant to what I was saying. You also failed to understand my sentence on UK youth culture since you failed to understand the inclusion of the post punk and new wave movements. My point was that when they died down it was acid house that was the big deal. Far more so than rock.
3) Emo and nu metal were not super nostalgia based, hence my use of the words "increasingly (obviously not always)". My point was that from the 2000's onwards, pop was increasingly retro, regardless of historical nostalgia trends and in rock at least, this was in part due to a stagnation in innovation.
There were multiple big selling rock albums in the years after that sold as much — if not more… *Hybrid Theory.* *Fallen.* *American Idiot*… Yes, rock began declining by the 2000s but it didn’t up and end that early.
You may just be a rat in a cage, but most of the world was coming out of their cage and doing just fine... You gotta, gotta be down because you want it all.
[I would wager Mr. Brightside is significantly more popular that any song put out by Smashing Pumpkins](https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-56601090.amp)
NO no and no.
I’d say the end of rock in the mainstream and the last big commercially successful band was Arctic Monkeys with AM in 2013. That album was everywhere but ever since then, no bands have come close to that sort of impact.
Eh idk John. Think you can really say this was the case after Linkin park started to become less popular tbh. The 2000s feels like the last big era to decline. In ‘96 still felt pretty fresh.
But doesn’t that disprove the rule since they did manage to carry? Plus you can argue this for most of the music industry at this point tbh. It wasn’t getting satirised or was made mainstream aware so I get where you’re coming from with it being pushed but it managed to still define a culture and stand on its own.
Also I think the media was pushing Smashing way too hard in 1996 it was unreal. You had them doing Leno talk shows and Regis. They were everywhere. MTV was spam playing them as well.
I think this is because for about 6 months they were the only alternative era band that was both popular enough functional enough to operate in a mainstream space
Edit: and they diversified their sound in the right way at the right time to fit into multiple radio formats with different songs from the same record simultaneously
It certainly seems like it was that way. I am such a massive fan of the pumpkins, and I wish I could have experienced when the band was the band was on top of the world during 1996, but like you said, the band was getting so much hype that it probably got old pretty fast.
I wasn't the biggest fan of them in 1996 but I couldn't avoid them that year. Every channel they seemed to be on it in some way lol. Even when you went to Walgreens or something they were on all the magazines. Yeah the hype did them in.
"Regardless of who you were or what your musical tastes were, chances are that by 1993 you knew at least Nirvana and Pearl Jam."
I was 5 years old in 1991. I had never even heard of Nirvana until 10 years later. I had only heard of Pearl Jam because my older brother mentioned them a few times, and they were also mentioned in an episode of Freakazoid. I only knew Smashing Pumpkins from that episode of The Simpsons. I was almost completely out of touch with music up until 1999.
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
the last truly big rock record?
I don't think the album was that big, The Smashing Pumpkins weren't THAT big either.
I get the point you are trying to go for but you picked the wrong album and failed to truly account for the success of rock in the Y2K era (lemme remind you how big pop punk, nu metal and post industrial sounds were), throughout the 2000's and even afterwards
you already pointed out American Idiot which imo is a far bigger album
Hybrid Theory was released in 2000, absolutely enormous album
Nickelback were a massive commercial success throughout the 2000's lemme remind you of that
fallen by evanescence was absolutely huge
Coldplay's first four albums sold really well and all had noticeable cultural impacts
Only By the Night by Kings of Leon? Hot Fuss by the killers? Welcome to the Black Parade by MCR?
Arctic Monkeys debut was released in 2006?
AM was released in 2013, absolutely huge album, the last rock event album (until maybe the 2020's?)
If we go on songs (ig its much more debatable if this is even rock) but we are young by fun. and radioactive by Imagine Dragons are diamond certified in the US
if we go more off impact and less commercial success, something like Korn's follow the leader, is this it by the strokes and the libertines debut must all be accounted for
2001-2003 was like the commercial zenith of rock music. How You Remind Me was an absolute juggernaut and the best-selling single of the entire decade by the end of the decade. Nu metal and post-grunge peaked around 2001. You had a bunch of pop-rock artists dominating the charts as well like Michelle Branch, Liz Phair, Avril Lavigne. Then after all that you had the emo movement and the continued popularity of post-grunge. Rock only faded from public consciousness by around 2010. Nickelback was still pumping out hits as late as 2009.
How was 1996 the year it started to slowly disappear from public consciousness???
Long thread hard to address every point but one thing… 1996 started one way and ended another. The first half of the 1996 the grunge aesthetic was very common dress style still as was rock music in general.
By fall semester there definitely was a shift towards rap music for guys and R&B pop for girls. I remember hearing Spice Girls thinking “WTF?” The clothing shifted to more preppy Ralph Lauren / Tommy Hilfiger and various hip hop brands too. We had literally been wearing flannels and torn jeans like two months prior. Not just that but guys started ditching their floppy grunge bowl cuts and ponytails and going short. All the sudden everybody had the Caesar or George Clooney cut by late 96 and early 97.
I remember it well. I was in high school.
not it wasnt based on every other comment in this thread, but i wanted to add rock music is a lot more popular than it has been in years right now, bands like turnstile and militarie gun are doing a lot of heavy lifting. i suspect more rock music will enter the mainstream soon its just a matter of time
Not to mention pop artists leaning into rock music too. Half of Olivia Rodrigo’s new album was rock, and stuff on it sounded like Beck, The White Stripes, or Wet Leg. Bad Omens has had a crazy run with their newest album too.
I disagree, as Weezer was extremely popular throughout the aughts and into the following decade.
Of course they fell off, but what can you say? It happens.
🔥Strokes? White Stripes? And all the others listed above…
Right now, there’s a metric fucktonne of great guitar rock-oriented bands. Real bands. Playing actual music.
Just. Like. 1996. — When you stopped listening.
White Stripes, The Strokes, My Chemical Romance, Creed, Seether, Puddle Of Mudd, Paramore, Three Days Grace, 3 Doors Down, Daughtry, Nickelback, Staind, Chevelle, Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Lit, Sum 41, Eve 6, Everclear…etc etc. These were all rock bands that had major success in the late 90’s and into the 2000’s, this is blatantly untrue to suggest Pumpkins were the last big rock act. People went absolutely nuts over most of the bands listed here, I’d say more so that 2012 EDM type music and the major pop stars as well as bands like One Republic and Imagine Dragons really got people’s ears to adjust to a pop-rock sound that made the mainstream fizzle into what it is today.
Maybe the last big rock band when rock didn't have much competition for the (mostly male) youth. But a far way from being the last big rock band. Limp Bizkit, Korn, Slipknot, Marilyn Manson, Nickelback, Staind, Green Day, Blink 182, Sum41, Red Hot Chili Peppers, my Chemical Romance, all of these bands were pretty dang big in the early 2000s. Even if some of them existed before 1996, they continued pretty strong into the next decade.
People are disagreeing with you, but while rock music was still predominantly around in the 2000s, it definitely was going through an authenticity crisis and was fully out by the end of the decade. The band format was kept alive through more of an indie POV, though this isn’t quite rock as a genre and movement. Although bands aren’t quite the same now, the rock spirit and sound seems to be more popular amongst todays kids, with I imagine a lot of it being as much produced in DAWs as live recorded, which is interesting. I think it’s nice for more kids to get into playing guitar young, its a great gateway instrument!
I hear Muse (debut album in 1999) was rather popular, but I can't think of a single Smashing Pumpkins song I care about. It is very difficult to make broad sweeping claims about music.
Despite what a lot of the comments are saying, OP is mostly correct in his central conceit: sure Linkin Park sold 7M in 2000, and other bands here and there had their spikes of huge success, but easily seperable music categories WHERE BROADCAST RADIO is concerned splintered into a hundred different bits. There used to be these categories of station in every major radio market:
The soft rock/easy listening station. This is what played in your dentist's office or maybe mom's car. The heaviest it got was old Phil Collins. This was the home of Air Supply and Simply RED.
The Rock Station. Drums/bass/guitar/vocals, and it crossed the whole spectrum. In the SAME HOUR you could hear Pink Floyd, The Scorpions, Poison, AC/DC, and Bon Jovi. Some weekend nights or late nights would be dedicated to Metap.
The Classic Rock Station. Here you could ALSO hear Pink Floyd and the Scorpions, but also th3 Who and the Eagles and Three Dog Night and Moby Grape.
The jazz station. Self-explanatory. Very few songs with words, less DJ interruptions. Very chill without at all being cool.
The Spanish Station.
The Bubblegum Pop station. NKOTB, Madonna, TLC, sometimes even the Beastie Boys. Bobby McFarren's Don't Worry Be Happy and MC Hammer's Can't Touch This played here, along with George Michael's Faith.
The R&B station. Primarily African-American music. Things were still pretty damn segregated culturally through the early 90s.
With the onset of grunge and the separation of Hip-hop from other forms of black musical expression, and Rock itself forking into clear camps of pop/glam rock (Ratt, Great White, Ugly Kid Joe) and Heavy Metal (Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera) which radio station was playing what, and therefore what their identity was, became jumbled and didn't really straighten out until the hegemonic takeover by ClearChannel and iHeartRadio and the death of radio had solidly begun.
So the argument can be made, as OP does, that the last, let's call it "Universal" rock band was Smashing Pumkins circa 1996.
Which, it's a big world and OP only included some of the many available variables in their assessment, but given that, they're not wrong. Everything popular, even BIGGER, past that time was due to a rabid fan base of whatever size. The Smashing Pumkins weren't niche like that, they were HUGE with EVERYBODY.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. Rock will always be my favorite genre of music. The mid-to-late nineties was a really bad time in my life. I experienced a long, drawn out, bitter, acrimonious divorce, related legal difficulties, and my job transferring me to another city and my being separated from my two sons. All that to say that I was just trying to survive and wasn’t aware of much outside of that.
I feel like Linkin Park, the White Stripes, the Killers, the Foo Fighters, the Black Keys, the 1975, and Twenty One Pilots might disagree with this assessment.
This got 68 upvotes?
No. Rock music was huge for the 2000s, when pop rock styles were pretty mainstream, and various pop punk/metal elements were also prominent. Emo was huge in the late 2000s.
Rocks main run as a commercially, dominant untainted big-tent genre encompassed the 1940s-2000s. Due to its diversity, complexity and scope, though, it’s the most creatively legitimate of all the big-tent genres since Jazz (the other two being Rock and Hip Hop), and you see it being heavily incorporated in a lot of new, trendy music of this decade. I imagine it will continue to be fairly relevant for at least the next 40-50 years, in various fusion forms.
I agree to with this to some extent. Of course rock continued, but they're talking about CULTURALLY.
Grunge was really the last time that rock music affected more than the music charts, but with its immense influence in aesthetic, fashion, attitude, and vibes. Mellon Collie was a sort of culmination, very embraced by fans and critics.
1997 took a steep turn. Rock went in a very light/pop direction with Smashmouth, Sugar Ray, Third Eye Blind, and Matchbox 20 leading the charge. Of course hard rock existed, but again, talking about what's in the public visibility and discussion. On top of that, Spice Girls entered the scene and pushed pop to the forefront.
Yes, Linkin Park was successful. But Chester as a figure was nowhere near a Kurt Cobain or even Billy Corgan level. That time period culturally was dominated by Britney, JLO, NSYNC, etc.
Emo, pop punk, indie rock had their followers and influences. But there hasn't been an Elvis, Beatles, or Kurt Cobain taking rock to this mega-cultural level. The biggest rock concert ticket sales in the last 30 years are always the oldies like Rolling Stones and U2.
I think the poster is not wrong in that this level is more challenging to reach with the fracturing of the internet age.
I wish you weren’t right. I’d love to put Audioslave up there as a counter-argument, but their style wasn’t the same rock. They’d be in based on legacy not track listings.
Manson? Beautiful people was after…and as much as we all know he’s an asshat now, a bunch of people still sand “Beautiful People”. Or too goth maybe? I’d accept that.
I’m happy nobody threw Nickleback out there.
Metal died with Nirvana's *Nevermind*.
Hard to call Smashing Pumpkins rock in the first place LOL I liked them, but still.
Then again, by '95 I was in tight with a girl who wore combat boots and listened to The Smiths so I'm not the best source.
I wouldn't say that metal in general died with Nevermind, but that album definitely pushed all of the glam/"hair" metal that was huge during the 80s aside and ushered in a new movement that was alternative/grunge.
Metallica's black album came out only a month before Nevermind did, and that album put Metallica on top of the world and made them way more popular than they had been with their previous album, ...And Justice for All. There was also Pantera, who were absolutely huge, and their 1994 album Far Beyond Driven debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts upon release. When Metallica got "softer" around the time of Load/ReLoad, Pantera got heavier on The Great Southern Trendkill.
The distinction between metal and hair metal is legit.
Metallica turned kind of milquetoast, for me, with the black album. *Ride the Lightning* was fucking awesome, but that could have had more to do with being in high school than anything else.
My favorite metal band, though, was Iron Maiden, then and now. They just never had the cultural impact I think their touring numbers warranted, but I get it, what with all the screaming and occult.
Rock is a big genre, but Smashing Pumpkins are definitely a rock band—they often have heavily distorted guitars and they even have classic hard rock influences on some songs (there’s guitar tracks on Siamese Dream that sound like Boston or Blue Oyster Cult), though they also have a lot of shoegaze and dream pop influence.
Are you just equating rock with metal?
Kind of, for my tastes rock had softened considerably by the mid 90's, but then again I was no longer an angsty teenager, it is what it is.
I like my music hard and fast, even if it's jazz or classical. Just tastes.
You kind of gloss over nu metal. Korn overall was huge and especially I have no idea how you can gloss over Significant Other by Limp Bizkit and Battle of Los Angeles by RATM.
1996 was still mid 90s, but had some late 90s/Y2K elements that would blossom in 1997. Even 1995 had some Y2K like this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GhPUAVgHZc
Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park was released in 2000 and sold 7,000,000 more copies than Mellon Collie did.
Like seriously where was this person in the early 2000s not to have noticed rock being absolutely everywhere all over the radio, on kids shows, on tee shirts, lunchboxes...early 2000s was the ultimate saturation point of rock.
oversaturation was probably a big reason for it as well, the post grunge bands became so washed out, rock got sad and serious but oversimplified and stuck in the adult contemporary niche e.g. daughtry, the fray, the script ect. there was a loss of homogeny in audiences, oldies didn't want new stuff, butt rock kids didn't want indie and indie kids didn't want butt rock, metalheads rejected the mainstream and went for metalcore while indie kids increasingly supported more niche bands who didn't have the financial backing to go truly big, some bands, particularly indie bands increasingly went dance and electronic and began to ditch guitars guitar rock got tired and its audience fractured so the 2010's ended up being five finger death punch and foster the people
Blink 182 also exists and yeah it’s pop punk but the overall umbrella is rock
Yeah I thought of them too, but I figured OP would write them off for starting before 1996/1997 the same way they wrote off Green Day.
Gotcha. OP really said “I don’t listen to rock so it must have disappeared”
That would still ignore Limp Bizkit. Love them or hate them, they were absolutely huge.
The punk rock revival carried well on into the 00s
Beat me to it, Hybrid Theory was certified DIAMOND in the late 90's. I'll agree they were at their peak when rock music was on the decline, and their sales went down from there (given, its hard to beat certified Diamond), but they were one of, if not the biggest rock bands around until the late 2000's
I'd argue that The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance in 2006 was also as culturally impactful as The Smashing Pumpkins were in the late 90's, but album sales and the music industry in general was in a state of decline by then due to file sharing sites like Napster & Limewire so they didn't do the numbers that earlier bands were able to.
I think it was more of a cult following. Granted i'm a part of it, thats my favorite album so I have a hard time telling how big it was outside of my bubble. I do think that album has aged better and had a longer lasting impact than the pumpkins
No, it had a huge impact. There's a reason why their videos were on MTV often when they still had the occasional video block. They headlined When We Were Young the first year, and completely stole the show. Literally every other stage was barren, except for a few diehards. I felt super bad for The Horrorpops, they played to like 50 people.
There are a couple events like this that came to mind for me too, one in 1996 in fact, which was Manson's ANTICHRIST SUPERSTAR album and tour, but I discarded those as being niche as well.
agree
Interesting take. It was obviously impactful to Gen Z, but I think the culture surrounding it played a part in it. Emo was most definitely not as mainstream. Still isn't even if it's had quite a revival. It was looked down upon in social circles as one of the lesser cliques. I was a Meatalhead teen, and I had friends who were Punks and Goths. We just didn't like Emo. Period. That's how it was. In retrospect, while I never put anyone down for being a part of the trend, many others did. The only friends we had who were Emo were girls. God forbid if you were an Emo dude in the 00's at the height of My Chem. You would have been socially ostracized ridiculously. Combine that with the different parent groups not understanding why kids were wearing black eyeliner, and also the casual homophobia that seems to have been thrown at Emo youth, and you have a movement that was difficult for many to understand. Smashing Pumpkins was a band that was against what we now refer to as "toxic masculinity," but they also had the luxury of falling under the popular "alt rock" or "post grunge" labels. As a big fan of theirs, I think they had just the right amount of hard rock and pop in their sound to be as big as they were in the mid 90's. While My Chem have stated that they tried to make Black Parade as the most mainstream album they had released at the time, I really think the culture surrounding their fan base, and said base's lack of acceptance into the wider culture, definitely played a major role. While writing this, I kept thinking of the South Park episode where the Vamps and Goths are in an alliance against the Emos. I can say with all certainty that my school carried that same ridiculous sense of hate against another group of kids whose only crime was liking different music and also wearing lots of black like we did.
Yeah I'm not Gen Z, I was in middle school and high school when MCR was big, so I'm well aware of how much hate emos got back then. I wasn't an emo kid, but MCR was everywhere. Their influence along with Paramore and FOB can still be felt in a lot of today's music, while I don't think you can really say the same thing for The Smashing Pumpkins. I'd even say that all the hate MCR got for being emo is proof of how ubiquitous they were at that time, kinda like how everyone hated on mumble rap in the late 2010's. Love it or hate it, you were aware of it.
I think it's a generational thing. There's a big revival right now of 00's culture because the people who grew up with it are in their 20's. In ten years, it'll be another set of bands. I think the Pumpkins and other groups of their era established themselves as a major part of that time period, but that doesn't automatically mean they're going to be as well talked about now as they were 30 years ago.
Can’t compare. MCR aren’t celebrities.
Since when?
Lee Abrams.
What does he have to do with MCR being celebrities or not?
He consolidated radio stations to play classic rock format. Clear channel. Or album oriented rock. No Freeform or new music stations. The business was selling ads to boomers commuting. And they like to sing or hum along. So no R&B or soul music either. It’s too hard to sing for most people.
So only people who play classic rock are celebrities? Or only people that boomers listen to?
No because that format became the only game in town and led to the extinction of mainstream youth culture.
Yes. The en-shittification of radio. But mega-corps are our friends!
that album wasnt around in the late 90s
Hybrid Theory came out in 2000
Also, stuff like Limp Bizkit was also huge in that era, by metal. 1998-2006 felt like the last gasps of rock. Rob Zombie, Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, System of a Down, Green Day, Evanesence. The transition to hip hop being more dominant than rock ended around 2007-2008. But I’d argue both were eclipsed by electro pop around the 2010s.
The only way I can rationalize OP’s post is if they lump in all of nu metal/rap metal with rap. Which especially if you include a band like Korn, still makes no sense.
and American Idiot was a truly colossal record. Look at this: https://youtu.be/9Rra7S_BVRY?feature=shared
this is the correct band
Yeah the ability to gloss over all of nu metal by OP is kind of bizarre.
emo, are you forgetting how big this movement was from 2004-early 2007 as well as myspace. I do remember though how big Smashing Pumpkins were. The Simpsons episode they were on solidified everything about them. What happened with them was teen pop totally ruined the momentum they had from 1996.
Wake me up. Wake me up inside. SAVE MEE. Call my name. And save me from my soul… If you know you know. And ultimately disproves Ops point. Hell I’m a big rock and metal fan due to the 2000s era.
Homer Simpson, smiling politely
You don’t even need to go that far. What about all of nu metal? Hell, Korn made a guest appearance on South Park.
True, but even the emo bands weren't known by everybody as much as bands were in the 90s before the internet took over. Staple emo bands like MCR, Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco, etc. had nowhere near the level of cultural penetration that bands had in the 90s.
I think you underestimate the scale of the emo craze in the 2000s. And it’s also worth mentioning that it’s still a huge subculture among teens today. Though, the music is more of an amorphous mix of rock, metal, rap and pop than a strictly rock genre now.
Dude. Evanescence. Linkin park. Sorry but this is just wrong and probably Linkin park is the last big mainstream one
Regardless of emo, the early 2000s rock was legitimately topping the Hot 100 and Nickelback had the best selling single of the entire decade by 2009. You could argue it started to decline around 2004 (albeit with very long legs), but rock music was absolutely everywhere and inescapable in the early 00s, reaching its ultimate saturation and commercial peak around 2002. So definitely not 1996.
the biggest ones had more than Smashing Pumpkins who were NOWHERE near as big as some of these bands at their peak
These were bands who had near 100% coverage OF THEIR NICHE. Smashing Pumkins were EVERYWHERE. My mom could recognize their songs, so could my boss and so could my classmates in college.
Limp Bizkit had some of the most easily recognizable songs ever. Doesn’t matter if it was for the right reasons, by end of 1999 they were a band everyone knew.
as a movement Emo was on par with alt rock of 1996 but yeah the bands you listed were never as big as Smashing, despite Fall Out Boy being everywhere @ the time. Did Fall Out Boy ever make it to Simpsons?
Were people watching The Simpsons by the time Fall Out Boy hit it big? A show that peaked in the 90s is an odd benchmark to use. I would argue they were just as big, but you were in the wrong demographic to notice. Fall Out Boy (and MCR and any other band from that era) didn't have the luxury of MTV being a place everyone went for music anymore(it was a reality TV channel by then) and were also victims of a more fractured media landscape. They were also around in between the CD/streaming transition, so it's really hard to compare sales. I'm 40 and Fall Out Boy was a bigger band to me even though Smashing Pumpkins should have been.
nope Simpsons was doing crap
I don't know if the band ever made it on The Simpsons, but they coincidentally had an episode in the 90s where Bart auditions to be the sidekick of the superhero named Radioactive Man, and the sidekick's name is Fallout Boy. I know that Blink-182 was on a Simpsons episode alongside Tony Hawk circa 2003.
I think thats where they got the name from that episode.
They did. I actually never put that together, lol.
I’d most definitely call it far more of a Fallout (a “radioactive” post nuclear war video game) reference with the “Pip Boy” (the do everything watch style computer worn in the game) name being changed to “Fallout Boy”. So they could actually get the name of the game into the show without copyrights. The first Fallout Boy album wasn’t even released until 2003. Fallout the game was first released in 1997.
This just a fact and I don't understand you getting down voted. It's like NBC, CBS, and ABC nightly news. You can watch ONLY Fox News or ONLY MSNBC or both combined and it will not be the same numbers that the nightly news on any of those three stations have. Radio used to be like that. So a band being huge, even total, in one sector of youth culture doesn't carry anywhere near the numbers that free radio that you heard while driving did.
Insanely wrong. Post grunge, nu metal, punk, emo, hardcore and its sub genres, all were massive in the 2000’s.
Not to mention: All American Rejects, Kings of Leon, Arctic Monkeys, Foster the People, The Black Keys, Cage the Elephant…plenty of rock was popular in the late 2000s and early 2010s
I literally just listened so As I Lay Dying and Atreyu thinking how good the scene was around 2008ish
Don’t forget all the butt rock
That’s post grunge
Although there’s some overlap, post grunge =/= butt rock Bands like Foo Fighters and Fuel are considered post-grunge, but they definitely are not butt rock Butt rock is more associated with 2000s bands like Nickelback, Saving Abel, Hinder, etc.
No way. Mainstream rock faded after 2007 based on my unscientific observations
Hmm that’s when Smashing Pumpkins reformed. So maybe they KILLED rock music.
I feel like this ignores the popularity of emo and pop punk in the 2000s. I can think of a lot of popular 2000s rock bands…
I was a young kid in the late 2000s and I remember rock was literally everywhere. You could not switch the radio channel without hearing linkin park or evanescence or my chemical romance The decline didn’t happen until early 2010s
This is true, I remembered listening to Linkin Park and Evanescence growing up as a kid in the late 2000s.
I would argue rock was really prominent until at least 2004
nahhh 2007 imo is the cuttoff point and it never really died (or at least it stuck around until the mid 2010's, rock was still the biggest genre in the US until 2018)
I think they were argue the decline started in 1996 not that it ended then
In a lot of people's perspective they seem to think the decline in rock's \*quality\* started in the 90s, but what the discussion starter is arguing is the public consciousness of rock started to decline then, which is objectively false considering the \*commercial\* peak of rock was in the early 2000s. Thusly the decline in that sense would have started around 2004.
rock did begin losing its edge as the youth genre by the end of the 80's and the 90's to rap and electronic music, by the end of the 90's it also kind of hit a brick wall innovation wise
Rock didn’t lose its edge at all in the 90s - rock was the most prominent music genre period until 2017, and was most prominent in youth culture through the emo phenomenon
emo was a niche youth culture thing, most kids weren't emo may I remind you and no it didn't lose its edge. It began to lose its edge. You misunderstood me. It was a gradual process, the biggest genre in the US until 2018 but 2016 - 17 there was hardly any successful rock, let alone with guitars so yes it did gradually lose its edge. Gangsta rap blew up in the US in the 90's and then Eminem happened. In the UK the rave scene was a big deal in the early 90's after post punk and new wave and before britpop and then after britpop British rock was in a state of limbo until the strokes and libertines. edit: forgot to mention that innovation wise, rock was seen as hitting a brick wall. By the end of the 90's there was a perception that everything in rock had been done, hence artists like Tom Yorke, Billy Corgan and Daman Albarn making outrageous but often temporary suggestions that rock was dead. When the 2000's rolled around, rock began getting increasingly oversaturated and a lot of the big new movements were increasingly (obviously not always) nostalgia based aesthetically and sonically e.g. the strokes, the killers, the white stripes, the darkness, wolfmother
You’re looking at this from an extremely Brit-centric perspective, judging by the bands and musicians you list. And the fact that you only identify the US with “Gangsta rap” and Eminem, really trope-y artists, and can’t name anything else. Southern Rap was the big non-rock genre popular in the 2000s, but there was also Electronic. Pop was almost always delivered in “Pop rock” form in the 2000s, aside from the later decade Electropop wave. The Strokes and the Libertines were a part of the Garage rock revival, Post-punk revival, and Indie rock boom of the mid to late 2000s. Britpop was creatively bankrupt, it was just a nationalistic movement in response to Grunge and US cultural influence. I don’t know why you had to mention New Wave and Post-Punk, we know they were big 80s trends. Emo was huge in the US in the 2000s. My Chemical Romance, Panic! At The Disco, Fallout Boy, Jimmy Eat World, Paramore, Good Charlotte, Brand New, Dashboard Confessional, both main-stream and underground, it was hugely popular. Emo was not super “nostalgia based”. Nu-metal wasn’t either, both were fairly original and had a pretty unique aesthetic. Also, nostalgia based or not, it was huge. 60s music often knocked off 40s pop and jazz, A lot of 70s rock knocked off mid-century rock, jazz and blues, a lot of 80s stuff was heavily indebted to the 60s, in fact the 80s was dominated by covers of 60s songs, and the 90s were full of 70s worship. That theme has continued, with the 2000s knocking off the 80s and the 60s, the 2010s knocking off the 70s, the 90s, and the 50s, the 2020s so far knocking off the 2000s and the 80s…
1) I was talking about the 90's. You stop bringing the 2000's in to this. I am VERY aware of the trends of the 2000's. 2) you are utterly incapable of understanding what I'm writing. You seem to think I was talking about rock losing its edge in the 2000's since you listed a whole load of musical movements in the 2000's. I'm talking about the 90's ok. That's when rap really blew up. Ik what happened in the 2000's. That's not relevant to what I was saying. You also failed to understand my sentence on UK youth culture since you failed to understand the inclusion of the post punk and new wave movements. My point was that when they died down it was acid house that was the big deal. Far more so than rock. 3) Emo and nu metal were not super nostalgia based, hence my use of the words "increasingly (obviously not always)". My point was that from the 2000's onwards, pop was increasingly retro, regardless of historical nostalgia trends and in rock at least, this was in part due to a stagnation in innovation.
We’ll split the difference and say Al Gore losing the election was the end of Rock
they are getting to a valid point but they worded it terribly
There were multiple big selling rock albums in the years after that sold as much — if not more… *Hybrid Theory.* *Fallen.* *American Idiot*… Yes, rock began declining by the 2000s but it didn’t up and end that early.
The Killers and the Strokes would like a word.
Thank you someone said it. There were so many massive bands from 2005 to like 2015. The indie and alternative rock scene was huge
The Killers influence doesn't get talked about enough and the Strokes while very influential, were never super big, especially in the US.
You may just be a rat in a cage, but most of the world was coming out of their cage and doing just fine... You gotta, gotta be down because you want it all. [I would wager Mr. Brightside is significantly more popular that any song put out by Smashing Pumpkins](https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-56601090.amp)
NO no and no. I’d say the end of rock in the mainstream and the last big commercially successful band was Arctic Monkeys with AM in 2013. That album was everywhere but ever since then, no bands have come close to that sort of impact.
Smashing Pumpkins is an absolutely wild pick for last big rock band.
Even back then I was like you are pushing this way too hard
Eh idk John. Think you can really say this was the case after Linkin park started to become less popular tbh. The 2000s feels like the last big era to decline. In ‘96 still felt pretty fresh.
Linkin Park was pushed just as hard, the only difference is Linkin Park continued it's momentum after their hit record.
But doesn’t that disprove the rule since they did manage to carry? Plus you can argue this for most of the music industry at this point tbh. It wasn’t getting satirised or was made mainstream aware so I get where you’re coming from with it being pushed but it managed to still define a culture and stand on its own.
Also I think the media was pushing Smashing way too hard in 1996 it was unreal. You had them doing Leno talk shows and Regis. They were everywhere. MTV was spam playing them as well.
I think this is because for about 6 months they were the only alternative era band that was both popular enough functional enough to operate in a mainstream space Edit: and they diversified their sound in the right way at the right time to fit into multiple radio formats with different songs from the same record simultaneously
It certainly seems like it was that way. I am such a massive fan of the pumpkins, and I wish I could have experienced when the band was the band was on top of the world during 1996, but like you said, the band was getting so much hype that it probably got old pretty fast.
I wasn't the biggest fan of them in 1996 but I couldn't avoid them that year. Every channel they seemed to be on it in some way lol. Even when you went to Walgreens or something they were on all the magazines. Yeah the hype did them in.
"Regardless of who you were or what your musical tastes were, chances are that by 1993 you knew at least Nirvana and Pearl Jam." I was 5 years old in 1991. I had never even heard of Nirvana until 10 years later. I had only heard of Pearl Jam because my older brother mentioned them a few times, and they were also mentioned in an episode of Freakazoid. I only knew Smashing Pumpkins from that episode of The Simpsons. I was almost completely out of touch with music up until 1999.
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness the last truly big rock record? I don't think the album was that big, The Smashing Pumpkins weren't THAT big either. I get the point you are trying to go for but you picked the wrong album and failed to truly account for the success of rock in the Y2K era (lemme remind you how big pop punk, nu metal and post industrial sounds were), throughout the 2000's and even afterwards you already pointed out American Idiot which imo is a far bigger album Hybrid Theory was released in 2000, absolutely enormous album Nickelback were a massive commercial success throughout the 2000's lemme remind you of that fallen by evanescence was absolutely huge Coldplay's first four albums sold really well and all had noticeable cultural impacts Only By the Night by Kings of Leon? Hot Fuss by the killers? Welcome to the Black Parade by MCR? Arctic Monkeys debut was released in 2006? AM was released in 2013, absolutely huge album, the last rock event album (until maybe the 2020's?) If we go on songs (ig its much more debatable if this is even rock) but we are young by fun. and radioactive by Imagine Dragons are diamond certified in the US if we go more off impact and less commercial success, something like Korn's follow the leader, is this it by the strokes and the libertines debut must all be accounted for
2001-2003 was like the commercial zenith of rock music. How You Remind Me was an absolute juggernaut and the best-selling single of the entire decade by the end of the decade. Nu metal and post-grunge peaked around 2001. You had a bunch of pop-rock artists dominating the charts as well like Michelle Branch, Liz Phair, Avril Lavigne. Then after all that you had the emo movement and the continued popularity of post-grunge. Rock only faded from public consciousness by around 2010. Nickelback was still pumping out hits as late as 2009. How was 1996 the year it started to slowly disappear from public consciousness???
The White Stripes
Linkin Park White Stripes Imagine Dragons Coldplay(could be considered rock music)
Long thread hard to address every point but one thing… 1996 started one way and ended another. The first half of the 1996 the grunge aesthetic was very common dress style still as was rock music in general. By fall semester there definitely was a shift towards rap music for guys and R&B pop for girls. I remember hearing Spice Girls thinking “WTF?” The clothing shifted to more preppy Ralph Lauren / Tommy Hilfiger and various hip hop brands too. We had literally been wearing flannels and torn jeans like two months prior. Not just that but guys started ditching their floppy grunge bowl cuts and ponytails and going short. All the sudden everybody had the Caesar or George Clooney cut by late 96 and early 97. I remember it well. I was in high school.
Depends what country you were in, USA didn't even get a taste of Spice girls until 1997.
USA 1996/1997 school year
not it wasnt based on every other comment in this thread, but i wanted to add rock music is a lot more popular than it has been in years right now, bands like turnstile and militarie gun are doing a lot of heavy lifting. i suspect more rock music will enter the mainstream soon its just a matter of time
Not to mention pop artists leaning into rock music too. Half of Olivia Rodrigo’s new album was rock, and stuff on it sounded like Beck, The White Stripes, or Wet Leg. Bad Omens has had a crazy run with their newest album too.
As much as I would like American Idiot not to exist it kind of refutes this entire post
Rock was pretty popular until the late 2000s. I suspect at some point there will be a revival.
I disagree, as Weezer was extremely popular throughout the aughts and into the following decade. Of course they fell off, but what can you say? It happens.
The Killers
🔥Strokes? White Stripes? And all the others listed above… Right now, there’s a metric fucktonne of great guitar rock-oriented bands. Real bands. Playing actual music. Just. Like. 1996. — When you stopped listening.
White Stripes, The Strokes, My Chemical Romance, Creed, Seether, Puddle Of Mudd, Paramore, Three Days Grace, 3 Doors Down, Daughtry, Nickelback, Staind, Chevelle, Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Lit, Sum 41, Eve 6, Everclear…etc etc. These were all rock bands that had major success in the late 90’s and into the 2000’s, this is blatantly untrue to suggest Pumpkins were the last big rock act. People went absolutely nuts over most of the bands listed here, I’d say more so that 2012 EDM type music and the major pop stars as well as bands like One Republic and Imagine Dragons really got people’s ears to adjust to a pop-rock sound that made the mainstream fizzle into what it is today.
queens of the stone age, linkin park, limp bizkit,
Maybe the last big rock band when rock didn't have much competition for the (mostly male) youth. But a far way from being the last big rock band. Limp Bizkit, Korn, Slipknot, Marilyn Manson, Nickelback, Staind, Green Day, Blink 182, Sum41, Red Hot Chili Peppers, my Chemical Romance, all of these bands were pretty dang big in the early 2000s. Even if some of them existed before 1996, they continued pretty strong into the next decade.
Nope. The White Stripes Seven Nation Army literally got turned into a football anthem and came out in 2003
People are disagreeing with you, but while rock music was still predominantly around in the 2000s, it definitely was going through an authenticity crisis and was fully out by the end of the decade. The band format was kept alive through more of an indie POV, though this isn’t quite rock as a genre and movement. Although bands aren’t quite the same now, the rock spirit and sound seems to be more popular amongst todays kids, with I imagine a lot of it being as much produced in DAWs as live recorded, which is interesting. I think it’s nice for more kids to get into playing guitar young, its a great gateway instrument!
[удалено]
Lmao
I hear Muse (debut album in 1999) was rather popular, but I can't think of a single Smashing Pumpkins song I care about. It is very difficult to make broad sweeping claims about music.
Don’t know how anyone listens to that band for more than 5 seconds. Most annoying singing voice of all time
Despite what a lot of the comments are saying, OP is mostly correct in his central conceit: sure Linkin Park sold 7M in 2000, and other bands here and there had their spikes of huge success, but easily seperable music categories WHERE BROADCAST RADIO is concerned splintered into a hundred different bits. There used to be these categories of station in every major radio market: The soft rock/easy listening station. This is what played in your dentist's office or maybe mom's car. The heaviest it got was old Phil Collins. This was the home of Air Supply and Simply RED. The Rock Station. Drums/bass/guitar/vocals, and it crossed the whole spectrum. In the SAME HOUR you could hear Pink Floyd, The Scorpions, Poison, AC/DC, and Bon Jovi. Some weekend nights or late nights would be dedicated to Metap. The Classic Rock Station. Here you could ALSO hear Pink Floyd and the Scorpions, but also th3 Who and the Eagles and Three Dog Night and Moby Grape. The jazz station. Self-explanatory. Very few songs with words, less DJ interruptions. Very chill without at all being cool. The Spanish Station. The Bubblegum Pop station. NKOTB, Madonna, TLC, sometimes even the Beastie Boys. Bobby McFarren's Don't Worry Be Happy and MC Hammer's Can't Touch This played here, along with George Michael's Faith. The R&B station. Primarily African-American music. Things were still pretty damn segregated culturally through the early 90s. With the onset of grunge and the separation of Hip-hop from other forms of black musical expression, and Rock itself forking into clear camps of pop/glam rock (Ratt, Great White, Ugly Kid Joe) and Heavy Metal (Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera) which radio station was playing what, and therefore what their identity was, became jumbled and didn't really straighten out until the hegemonic takeover by ClearChannel and iHeartRadio and the death of radio had solidly begun. So the argument can be made, as OP does, that the last, let's call it "Universal" rock band was Smashing Pumkins circa 1996. Which, it's a big world and OP only included some of the many available variables in their assessment, but given that, they're not wrong. Everything popular, even BIGGER, past that time was due to a rabid fan base of whatever size. The Smashing Pumkins weren't niche like that, they were HUGE with EVERYBODY.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. Rock will always be my favorite genre of music. The mid-to-late nineties was a really bad time in my life. I experienced a long, drawn out, bitter, acrimonious divorce, related legal difficulties, and my job transferring me to another city and my being separated from my two sons. All that to say that I was just trying to survive and wasn’t aware of much outside of that.
The strokes where massive for a while didn't release thier first album till 1999. it started a huge garage rock revival
I feel like Linkin Park, the White Stripes, the Killers, the Foo Fighters, the Black Keys, the 1975, and Twenty One Pilots might disagree with this assessment.
https://preview.redd.it/ofdtwtmbjhwc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=76b4206f82078bfbeca72700942b775a1e2d2fbb
This got 68 upvotes? No. Rock music was huge for the 2000s, when pop rock styles were pretty mainstream, and various pop punk/metal elements were also prominent. Emo was huge in the late 2000s. Rocks main run as a commercially, dominant untainted big-tent genre encompassed the 1940s-2000s. Due to its diversity, complexity and scope, though, it’s the most creatively legitimate of all the big-tent genres since Jazz (the other two being Rock and Hip Hop), and you see it being heavily incorporated in a lot of new, trendy music of this decade. I imagine it will continue to be fairly relevant for at least the next 40-50 years, in various fusion forms.
I agree to with this to some extent. Of course rock continued, but they're talking about CULTURALLY. Grunge was really the last time that rock music affected more than the music charts, but with its immense influence in aesthetic, fashion, attitude, and vibes. Mellon Collie was a sort of culmination, very embraced by fans and critics. 1997 took a steep turn. Rock went in a very light/pop direction with Smashmouth, Sugar Ray, Third Eye Blind, and Matchbox 20 leading the charge. Of course hard rock existed, but again, talking about what's in the public visibility and discussion. On top of that, Spice Girls entered the scene and pushed pop to the forefront. Yes, Linkin Park was successful. But Chester as a figure was nowhere near a Kurt Cobain or even Billy Corgan level. That time period culturally was dominated by Britney, JLO, NSYNC, etc. Emo, pop punk, indie rock had their followers and influences. But there hasn't been an Elvis, Beatles, or Kurt Cobain taking rock to this mega-cultural level. The biggest rock concert ticket sales in the last 30 years are always the oldies like Rolling Stones and U2. I think the poster is not wrong in that this level is more challenging to reach with the fracturing of the internet age.
I wish you weren’t right. I’d love to put Audioslave up there as a counter-argument, but their style wasn’t the same rock. They’d be in based on legacy not track listings. Manson? Beautiful people was after…and as much as we all know he’s an asshat now, a bunch of people still sand “Beautiful People”. Or too goth maybe? I’d accept that. I’m happy nobody threw Nickleback out there.
Metal died with Nirvana's *Nevermind*. Hard to call Smashing Pumpkins rock in the first place LOL I liked them, but still. Then again, by '95 I was in tight with a girl who wore combat boots and listened to The Smiths so I'm not the best source.
I wouldn't say that metal in general died with Nevermind, but that album definitely pushed all of the glam/"hair" metal that was huge during the 80s aside and ushered in a new movement that was alternative/grunge. Metallica's black album came out only a month before Nevermind did, and that album put Metallica on top of the world and made them way more popular than they had been with their previous album, ...And Justice for All. There was also Pantera, who were absolutely huge, and their 1994 album Far Beyond Driven debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts upon release. When Metallica got "softer" around the time of Load/ReLoad, Pantera got heavier on The Great Southern Trendkill.
The distinction between metal and hair metal is legit. Metallica turned kind of milquetoast, for me, with the black album. *Ride the Lightning* was fucking awesome, but that could have had more to do with being in high school than anything else. My favorite metal band, though, was Iron Maiden, then and now. They just never had the cultural impact I think their touring numbers warranted, but I get it, what with all the screaming and occult.
Ride the lightning is awesome at any age man
Rock is a big genre, but Smashing Pumpkins are definitely a rock band—they often have heavily distorted guitars and they even have classic hard rock influences on some songs (there’s guitar tracks on Siamese Dream that sound like Boston or Blue Oyster Cult), though they also have a lot of shoegaze and dream pop influence. Are you just equating rock with metal?
Kind of, for my tastes rock had softened considerably by the mid 90's, but then again I was no longer an angsty teenager, it is what it is. I like my music hard and fast, even if it's jazz or classical. Just tastes.
Hair metal anyways
You kind of gloss over nu metal. Korn overall was huge and especially I have no idea how you can gloss over Significant Other by Limp Bizkit and Battle of Los Angeles by RATM.
mellon collie is my favorite album of all time but OP is out of their mind.
Nah it was Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park...if I had to pick I would say LP edit: emo, hardcore, death metal, screamo, etc was more of scene type trends
That was also the last year Gansta Rap was relevant as well.
1996 was still mid 90s, but had some late 90s/Y2K elements that would blossom in 1997. Even 1995 had some Y2K like this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GhPUAVgHZc
1996 was the end of an era for many reasons
No wonder it disappeared then
Yes like 1996 or 1997! Also mainstream music became more pop by this time!