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Ragging on Zoomers’ taste in music has become common among older generations. Spend a few minutes sampling tunes that are popular with Gen Z, and you’ll soon know why. Every generation from the Boomers to the Millennials was raised on rock & roll. The quintessential American music genre wasn’t just an intergenerational pop culture mainstay, it defined the American identity for more than half a century.
These days, browse the most listened to tracks on streaming sites popular with the youth, and you’ll have trouble finding a track by a contemporary rock band. Instead it’s autotuned, quantized dance, pop, and rap all the way down. What happened?
Related: Ground Zero
I and others have written volumes on how the Low 90s were a disaster for the arts. Among the casualties of Cultural Ground Zero was heavy metal.
The Zoomers out there may find it hard to imagine, but metal used to be a cultural phenomenon. Bands like Metallica, Van Halen, and AC/DC each sold multiple diamond records. Even Millennials remember nuMetal act Linkin Park, whose Hybrid Theory went multi-diamond. But now, metal doesn’t even make it into the top 20 most popular genres.
Related: More Music Ground Zero
Heavy metal historians have chronicled how 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…
Related: The Music Men
They’re not wrong about the underground metal scene. It’s the reason for the drastic divergence we see below:
Related: Y2K Music Curse
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 diss the current metal scene. Many of my readers belong to the underground fiction counterculture. But it is to illustrate that metal lost its place atop the pop culture mountain.
And that fall happened in the 90s.
Related: The 1990s: Decade of Despair
Which brings us to the 500-pound gorilla 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.
Related: Who Killed Rock and Roll?
No offense, but that paragraph reads like a load 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 those experiments’ success.
As an example, here’s “March of Mephisto” from The Black Halo by American power metal band Kamelot, mentioned in the quote above.
It’s a familiar 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.
Related: The Corporate IP Death Cycle
No wonder Gen Z thinks of all rock as Boomer music.
Or as an object of nostalgia for a place and time they’ve never been.
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