Members of older generations have taken to lamenting the musical taste – or lack thereof – displayed by Generation Z. It’s easy to understand why. Every generation from the Boomers to the Millennials was raised on rock & roll. That definitive American music genre not only served as a cross-generational pop culture touchstone, it was foundational to the American identity for more than half a century.
But the Zoomers seem to have moved on. Take a look at the most listened to tracks on the streaming sites popular with young people, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a song by a contemporary rock band. Instead it’s autotuned, quantized, vacuous Hip-Pop all the way down.
What happened?
I and others have written volumes on how the Low 90s and their consequences have been a disaster for the arts. A recent discussion on Gab brought up a case study mentioned by my fellow authors and pop culture coroners David V. Stewart and JD Cowan. That being, the death of heavy metal.
For the Zoomers reading this post, it may be hard to imagine now, but metal used to be a titanic cultural force. Bands like AC/DC, Metallica, and Van Halen sold multiple diamond records. Even Millennials will fondly recall nu/rap-metal band Linkin Park, whose Hybrid Theory went multi-diamond.
But now, metal doesn’t even make it into the top 20 most popular genres.
And as documented by heavy metal historians, the genre’s downfall happened in the 1990s.
The remaining audience not alienated by metal’s extreme diversion followed the exodus created by the Grunge movement in the early to mid-1990s. The emergence of Grunge truly signaled the death knell for hair metal. Led by Seattle’s Nirvana (Smells Like Teen Spirit), Soundgarden (Outshined), and Alice in Chains (Them Bones), Grunge picked up where hair metal left off: a simplified musical approach. However, the comparison ended there. Gone were the theatrics and upbeat lyrical subjects, replaced with a stripped-down, progression-driven approach coupled with lyrics obsessed with disenfranchisement and angst. Coinciding with the global recession of 1990-1993, Grunge resonated with the masses preaching a message of resigned despair. Speaking of resignation, the early to mid-1990s saw much turmoil for some of metal’s most successful acts. In 1992, Rob Halford abruptly left Judas Priest, which entered an extended period of dormancy. Likewise, 1993 saw Bruce Dickinson quit Iron Maiden, which carried on with increased irrelevancy (Man on the Edge). The aforementioned mainstream turns by Metallica (Until It Sleeps) and Megadeth (A Secret Place) continued into the mid-1990s with similarly-veined follow-up releases to their commercial breakthroughs. With the original metal bands long since defunct (or enduring a non-stop carousel of lineup changes), heavy metal’s future was not bright. For all intents and purposes, as a mainstream commodity, heavy metal was dead. Thankfully, there’s always the underground…
They’re not wrong about the underground metal scene. It’s the reason for the discrepancy we see below:
As evidenced by metal’s slumping mainstream popularity and the steep decline of the genre’s flagship band coinciding with more album releases than ever, the underground metal scene is just that. Underground.
And under most people’s radar.
That’s not to rag on the current metal scene. Many of us here could claim to be part of an underground fiction writing counterculture.
But it is to illustrate that metal lost its place on top of the pop culture pyramid.
And that fall happened in the 90s.
Which brings up the elephant in the room.
During most of the 1990s, heavy metal languished in obscurity while Grunge and Alternative Rock dominated the modern rock charts. Ironically, heavy metal’s waning mainstream popularity was actually a blessing in disguise. Although the masses abandoned heavy metal in droves, the die-hard fans remained as loyal as ever, eagerly anticipating the next evolution of the genre. Luckily, metal bands enjoyed increased freedom to pursue new and unconventional directions, owing to their absolution from the expectations and obligations inherent in big-time record contracts. Left to its own devices, many original and avant-garde interpretations (often the synthesis of multiple subgenres) exploded on to the scene: Symphonic (Kamelot – March of Mephisto), Folk (Amorphis – Sampo), Melodic Death (aka Gothenberg-style) (At the Gates – Slaughter of the Soul), Progressive Death (Opeth – Blackwater Park), Technical Death (Meshuggah – Bleed)…well, you get the idea.
No offense, but that paragraph reads like a lot of cope.
If a genre falls out of favor, leading artists take the chance to indulge in esoteric audio experimentation, and the genre stays unpopular, that says something about the fruitfulness or otherwise of the experiments.
As an example, here’s the lead track from Destroy Erase Improve, the breakout album by Swedish group Meshuggah, who are mentioned in the above excerpt.
Here’s how the band’s bio describes the album:
It’s an old story.
- New genre emerges.
- Genre gets popular.
- Genre stagnates.
- Genre’s popularity slips.
- Someone decides to deconstruct the genre to learn what makes it tick.
- No one bothers to learn why the genre worked in the first place; instead everyone just keeps deconstructing it.
- Genre self-ghettoizes.
Where have we seen this pattern before?
Anyway, it’s no wonder why Gen Zed thinks of rock in all its forms as Boomer music. Or at best, a source of nostalgia for a place and time they’ve never been.
Primitive synth-driven 80s tracks may sound corny now, but at least they had some human craftsmanship and heart.
For a military thriller that hearkens back to the golden age of Zeta Gundam and VOTOMS-era anime, read my hit mech adventure novel:
