Music genre may not be a huge deal to listeners these days, most will be eclectic in their tastes without much care as to what genre their favorites fall into. There was, however, a time when it wasn’t all so simple. Many times, a listener’s very identity was connected to their music tastes, even leading to disputes with those of a different musical persuasion.
Many a genre has also inspired a counter-genre that provided the total opposite to its predecessor. While some genres seem immortal, remaining relevant and timely through every decade since their inception, others come and go in the blink of an eye.
History indicates music has been around almost as long as we have and is considered an essential art form to the human experience. For many, music tastes are influenced by those close to them, leading to enjoying music from various generations other than their own. Even with this, many of us will remain completely oblivious to lesser known or less relevant genres. Even so, some of these forgotten favorites enjoyed a time of great significance in the music world.
Whether they simply faded away or stumbled under their own weight of success, here are 10 music genres that have ceased to be.
Grunge itself had two moments in 1994 that can be pointed to as Genre-Killers, the trend in both of them being the genre's anti-commercial attitude running head-first into its sudden mainstream popularity. First, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was Driven to Suicide over his heroin addiction and inability to reconcile his values with his success, which not only took out the biggest band in the scene but made many rock fans leery of the Darker and Edgier attitudes that were synonymous with grungenote . It's probably not a coincidence that Hootie & the Blowfish, a band whose twangy, wholesome, down-home folk rock was the Spiritual Antithesis of everything that grunge stood for, took off just a few months later, as did Blues Traveler, a jam band whose hit single "Hook" was a Take That! at the "hip three-minute ditties" that dominated pop and rock radio (the "jangly folk-pop-rock" craze soon became overshadowed by Britpop). Second, Pearl Jam got into a nasty fight with Ticketmaster over their anti-consumer business practices, resulting in them canceling their tour that summer and finding it nearly impossible to tour nationally afterwards, which dealt a crippling blow to the fortunes of the second-biggest band in the scene. The drug-related deaths of Blind Melon frontman Shannon Hoon in 1995 and Brad Nowell of Sublime in 1996 also dealt a blow to the alt-rock boom of the '90s. Grunge continued to limp along in the absence of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but as a whole, it faded from the limelight over the next few years. Sean O'Neal of the AV Club points to 1996 as the year when grunge and Alternative Rock in general "died a messy, forgettable death", as it was the year the remaining "Big Four" Seattle grunge bands (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains) reached their nadirs of popularity and, in the case of the latter two, ultimately saw the seeds planted for their breakups, while the assorted copycats started falling away. Of those four bands, only Pearl Jam would survive the decade, but they had mostly turned away from the grunge sound by their third album. Most importantly, however, by that point what had started out as a backlash against corporate hair metal had essentially been taken over by the record industry, turning into Post-Grunge. A more polished, radio-friendly version of grunge that sanded off many of its more abrasive edges, post-grunge dominated mainstream American rock music for the rest of the decade, eventually converging with hard rock and the remnants of nu metal and dominating the next decade as well.
In the UK, meanwhile, grunge only lasted for a couple of years before getting hit with backlash. Britpop emerged in the early-mid '90s as a Lighter and Softer reaction to the dourness of grunge (Noel Gallagher famously claimed that he wrote "Live Forever" out of disgust over the Nirvana song "I Hate Myself and Want to Die"), and quickly supplanted it in mainstream popularity there. By 1994, Bush was the only grunge or post-grunge band seeing any success in the UK, and even then, they were far more popular in the US than they were in their native Britain.
The most commonly-cited turning point in disco becoming a pop culture punchline was the notorious Disco Demolition Night, a promotion held on July 12, 1979, in which thousands of people brought disco records to a Chicago White Sox double-header in exchange for heavily discounted tickets; the records would be put into a crate and blown up in the middle of the field between games. Most of the people there hadn't come for baseball so much as to watch disco records getting destroyed, and the ensuing riot forced the White Sox to cancel the second game of the night. The affair played a major role in fueling an anti-disco sentiment that had been building for several months by that point (especially among rock fans and people who hated the seemingly effeminate and/or the over-sexualized aspects that the disco lifestyle represented), and disco was virtually gone from the airwaves by the end of 1980. Steve Dahl, the Chicago rock DJ who helped organize the event, has said, that while Disco Demolition Night didn't destroy disco by itself, it did play a large role in hastening its demise.note
In the UK, disco music began to lose popularity as soon as Margaret Thatcher came into 10 Downing that same year, as her squad of Moral Guardians, which included Ian Paisley and Mary Whitehouse, saw the genre as a symbol of debauchery. Disco instead went underground and split into several different genres (Italo Disco, post-disco (like Madonna), freestyle, and dance-punk being the most obvious, but House Music, Post-Punk, New Wave Music, early Hip-Hop, Alternative Dance, and Synth-Pop are all also strongly influenced by it).
The record industry also was sort of working to reconfine disco to "the dance market" (i.e. blacks and gays) by 1979.
But there wasn't much room for the genre to evolve, either. Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive", largely regarded as the best disco song ever, came out in 1979, and fittingly won the only Best Disco Grammy ever given. It didn't really look like someone could write and perform a better disco song than that. And then that autumn M's "Pop Muzik", became a worldwide hit, ushering in the age of electropop and showing where what disco started could go.
One of the most famous stories in rock music is that the rise of grunge, particularly the sudden success of Nirvana's album Nevermind in 1991, destroyed hair metal in the early '90s. In truth, hair metal had been on life support for a couple of years by that point, and grunge was only the last of three connected moments that could be called genre-killers:
The backlash started with the 1988 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years, which showed the hedonistic excesses of many hair metal bands and musicians uncensored. It's been joked that Warrant and WASP did more to kill hair metal than Nirvana and Pearl Jam ever did�and that has a lot of basis in truth. In the subsequent years, all sorts of Darker and Edgier bands like The Black Crowes, Guns N' Roses and Queensrÿche pushed hair metal off the rock charts. Some of them, like Alice in Chains and Pantera, started as hair bands but abandoned the genre before they got big.
To add insult to injury, as soon as hair metal began losing its commercial power, many big bands of the genre (like Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard) tried to chase the alternative or heavy rock bandwagons. Nobody was pleased: existing fans were turned off by their chasing the new trends, and any potential new fans didn't care for old guys trying to imitate their favorites. FireHouse lead singer C.J. Snare summed it all up in a 2005 interview: while everyone else failed trying to "get with the times", his band scored a Top 20 power ballad without changing their style in 1995, at the peak of the grunge years.
What few will argue is that grunge gave a single unified image to the growing backlash, and while it didn't kill hair metal, it wrote its obituary. As a result, since hair metal was the dominant genre of metal music in the mainstream rock scene, metal as a whole faded from the limelight for much of The '90s. While some genres avoided this, the general rule was that as long as you paid due reverence to '80s Alternative Rock (The Smiths, R.E.M.) and Hardcore Punk (Minor Threat, Black Flag) or played something abrasive and unquestionably anti-mainstream, it was okay to play metal in The '90s.
Classic heavy metal (Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, et cetera) and its spiritual successors, doom metal and sludge metal, survived mainly because of the heavy influence those genres had on the development of grunge. Black Sabbath, for example, are cited as influences by Soundgarden, Green River, Mudhoney, The Smashing Pumpkins, Tad, and many others, while the sludge metal band the Melvins also had a major influence on grunge, taking influence from '80s hardcore punk bands (particularly Black Flag's My War).
Thrash metal didn't even skip a beat, with three of the "big four" bands (Metallica, Megadeth, and Anthrax) enjoying their best album sales shortly after the death of hair metal. Members of Metallica have even mentioned that they saw the rise of grunge as a good thing, meaning that radio stations and MTV were willing to take a chance on heavier music and darker themes. Bands like Van Halen and Guns N' Roses stayed popular during grunge's early phase, and fell off more due to interpersonal conflict rather than chart failure.
Alternative metal and groove metal, like grunge, emerged as a backlash against hair metal, becoming the defining metal sounds of the '90s for many American listeners. Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Faith No More were among the defining alt-metal bands of the era and were often associated with the grunge aesthetic by mainstream listeners. Meanwhile, Pantera, the biggest groove metal band of the '90s, consistently managed to fill large arenas, and their album Far Beyond Driven even managed to debut at #1 on the Billboard 100 (making it probably the heaviest and least-mainstream album to ever accomplish that feat). Billy Corgan even praised Dimebag as his favorite contemporary guitarist. By the late '90s, the two genres, along with other, smaller sub-genres (particularly rap metal), fused together in the mainstream consciousness and morphed into Nu Metal, which has its own section below.
Death Metal and Black Metal both took off and hit their peaks in The '90s. While they rarely, if ever, received radio airplay, they made for a particularly popular target for the era's Moral Guardians in both the US and Europe due to the brutality of the music itself, the lyrical subject matter, and (in the case of black metal) the musicians' militant anti-Christian messages that often went well beyond the music.
MTV also played a part in killing hair metal around 1990. Many of the executives had gotten tired of people accosting them at parties and asking them why they played some of those videos, which they regarded as juvenile and sexist. So, late that year, a lot of bands that had been gearing up for another successful album and tour suddenly had those plans trashed when MTV told them not to bother sending in their next video.
The murders of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. in 1996 and 1997 respectively, within six months of one another, put an end to the Golden Age of Gangsta Rap. The Lighter and Softer genre of Glam Rap replaced it in the mainstream for much the same reason why post-grunge replaced grunge after Kurt Cobain's suicide. As The Rap Critic and The Nostalgia Chick put it:
Quote:
Rap Critic: "[The murder of Biggie and Tupac] was a big wake-up call for hip-hop fans, because two artists that everyone knew were dead, victims of the lifestyle that was promoted in their music. Hip-hop had gone as dark as people wanted it to go, and they wanted something else. Nostalgia Chick: Suddenly, the dangerous lives and poverty that some of these guys grew up in and rapped about... it was just a little too real. Joe Public wanted something a little nicer, cleaner, you know, still culturally relevant but reminded us of the good old days when rap was fun, and- oh, hey, Will Smith, what's going on? Heard your movie career's doing pretty good! Oh, and what's that you've got there? A new rap song? And it goes with that new summer movie you're in? Oh, and you have a whole album without curse words or references to hard living? Come right on back, Will! We missed you!
Tupac's death also crippled the West Coast hip-hop scene, which took over a decade to recover. While the New York-based Bad Boy Records was able to survive Biggie's death (though not without difficulty), the same could not be said of Death Row Records, then the most powerful rap label on the West Coast and running a heated rivalry with Bad Boy. Tupac's death, combined with the myriad legal problems of the label's owner Suge Knight, did irreparable damage to Death Row, causing an exodus of talent in the '00s that culminated in the label going bankrupt in 2006, leaving little more than a shell that survives mainly through Greatest Hits albums and re-releases of its catalog. West Coast hip-hop spent the years from 1998 to 2011 in underground purgatory, with rappers from the East Coast (50 Cent, DMX, Jay-Z, Nas, P. Diddy), the South (Lil Jon, Master P, Lil Wayne, OutKast, Pitbull), and the Midwest (Kanye West, Eminem, Nelly) dominating the rap game from the late '90s onward. Only a few isolated artists, such as The Game and E-40, managed to break through, and beyond that, the only West Coast rappers who were still successful were stars from the '90s. It was only in the '10s when West Coast hip-hop managed to make its presence felt in the mainstream and with critics again, thanks to the likes of OFWGKTA, Hopsin, DJ Mustard, ScHoolboy Q, Kid Ink, Sage the Gemini, YG, Tyga, G-Eazy, and most notably Kendrick Lamar.
The style of Emo commonly called "Midwestern Emo" or "real emo" by its fans had a relatively small but very dedicated underground fanbase in The '90s. Some of the bigger bands like Sunny Day Real Estate and The Get Up Kids achieved some semblance of mainstream success and more obscure ones like Cap'n Jazz picked up after file swapping introduced them to a new generation and a very dedicated underground cult following grew more dedicated. However it didn't last long, after the breakup for the second time of Sunny Day Real Estate (after they had largely changed their sound anyway), left most of the iconic bands broken up and the scene didn't have much room to grow and one album can now be identified of signalling the decline, Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American. While the album was well-received even amongst their underground fanbase, it had a more commercial sound and the commercial success of "The Middle" resulted in a much more polished sound that wouldn't fly in the underground. The other punch was the redefinition of the word to apply to the new "Emo look" and bands like My Chemical Romance instead, thus rendering it a dirty word to the more indie crowd. The style went dormant for around a decade until the unexpected "emo revival" of the late 2010s.
Also happened around the same time period for Emo's Darker and Edgier cousin, Screamo, and the subsubgenre commonly referred to as "emoviolence" (later jokingly referred to as "skramz".) For a while, it had an arguably even more dedicated fanbase and one of the most of any subgenre within Hardcore Punk, despite the worldwide population who even knew what it was being at most in the low five digits its most popular and sought after records would go for insane prices on internet auction sites, people would travel multiple hours to see bands play in basements or rented VFW halls to shows that only a couple dozen people would go to. The decline became around the Turn of the Millennium once some of the bigger bands of the style broke up, the breakup of Orchid in 2003 was the demise of the biggest band of the style, (although some members played in their Spiritual Successor Ampere they didn't achieve the same level of universal acclaim), and the style was actually bogged down by a bizarre rare musical example of Continuity Lockout: it was so based around various tropes and aesthetics that it was pretty inaccessible to anyone not already very familiar with it, making it difficult for the scene to recruit fresh blood. The rise of digital distribution of music also gave a blow, as its music being released mostly or even exclusively on vinyl was a big part of the culture and aesthetic that gave it its unique appeal. However, perhaps the ultimate blow was when bands like The Used and Thursdaynote blowing up and giving a completely different perception in the mainstream of what "screamo" was, as well as Metalcore going mainstream as well and making it so that most new bands were imitative of those styles instead. The scene was a shell of its former self in the US by around 2005, and although it managed to survive pretty well in Europe for several years after that, that too eventually declined, (another big blow that came later was the Great Recession, a time of economic uncertainty and stress isn't the best time for a Crack Is Cheaper hobby to proliferate, which was arguably the case with the style's vinyl collecting.) Outside of a few legacy bands like the aforementioned Ampere the style was mostly seen as a relic until it too had its own revival around the mid The New '10s. While it's a fairly healthy style of underground music today, it doesn't have anywhere near the dedication or cult following it had around 20 years ago.
The 2003 albums Results May Vary by Limp Bizkit and Take a Look in the Mirror by Korn played a huge role in killing Nu Metal. A fusion of Alternative Metal, Industrial Metal, and Rap Metal influences, nu metal emerged in the mid-1990s and was seen as an antidote to the bubblegum boy bands, girl groups, "rap rock" acts, and easy listening idol singers that ruled the world of pop music after the fall of grunge, bringing metal back to the forefront of youth culture for the first time since the '80s. Nu metal reached the peak of its popularity from 1998�2001, but before long, came to be stereotyped as a genre of wangsty lyrics, phony machismo, and grating instrumentation that substituted technical skill with sheer noise. Meanwhile, Columbine and the violence at Woodstock '99 during Limp Bizkit's set made people wary of the anger and macho attitudes in nu metal pretty much the same way Kurt Cobain's suicide made people wary of the depressive attitudes in Grunge. By 2002, nu metal was earning the mockery of metalheads as a pale shadow of "real" metal, and albums by major bands like Korn and Papa Roach were producing diminishing returns on the charts. The tipping point came in 2003 when Limp Bizkit and Korn released the aforementioned albums to a reception that ranged from mixed to scathing, with Bizkit's cover of The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" coming in for especially heated criticism as borderline rock sacrilege. By 2004, nu metal's reign on the rock charts was over, with emo and metalcore emerging in its place, and most of the bands involved with the genre quickly changing their sound to get away from it (a notable example being Linkin Park). Papa Roach quickly recovered with their sole Top 40 hit "Scars", and they remain popular on mainstream rock radio to this day. Deftones and Incubus, the two most critically acclaimed bands associated with the genre, both changed their sound to remove any remaining nu metal elements. Korn took a beating, only to recover in the 2010s, by adapting dubstep into their style and scoring their first-ever #1 rock hit in 2013. But Limp Bizkit fared the worst of all; they became so hated in America that they were forced to tour overseas for the rest of their days. Nearly a decade passed before nu metal regained some cultural acceptance, and even then it's not even half as popular as it used to be.
Be Here Now, the notorious 1997 flop by Oasis, is generally regarded as having killed Britpop. It was actually a major success initially, earning gushing praise from critics and selling eight million copies. However, once people had the chance to actually listen to it, they found that it was nowhere near as good as their first two albums, let alone the masterpiece that had been hyped up for months and which critics had been gushing about. The result took the shine off of the biggest band in Britpop. Only a handful of bands survived the collapse of Britpop for more than a few years.
A major factor in Britpop's demise? Probably. However, on top of the above, Blur — the other band most associated with the scene (and Oasis' arch-rivals in 1995's "Battle of Britpop") — had already broken away from it a few months prior with their eponymous album (primarily lo-fi and US alt-rock-influenced). Another arguable factor may be that by 1997, "Cool Britannia" had jumped on Britpop's bandwagon, with (e.g.) Geri Halliwell in a Union Jack dress and honeymoon-era Tony Blair schmoozing Britpop stars. This got old fast, and probably helped kill off the remainder of Britpop when it derailed.
Blur's "Song 2" is often considered to be the last real "Britpop" hit, and even then, it sounds nothing like anything else in the genre, having specifically been written to parody Nirvana-style grunge.
The other major factor in Britpop's death was the release of OK Computer by Radiohead, whose huge critical and commercial success made the whole scene yesterday's news. OK Computer was not a Britpop album, instead popularizing a gloomier, more atmospheric style of rock music that would later become more common in rock in place of Britpop. The bands that survived Britpop's fall and Radiohead's rise were the ones that either moved away from the genre (such as Blur and Manic Street Preachers), were too big to fail (Oasis kept having hits afterward, but were never as earth-conqueringly huge again) or were unique enough that they were barely Britpop to begin with and could simply detach themselves from whatever Britpop trappings they had picked up (namely Stereolab and The Divine Comedy).
01-19-2022, 05:49 AM
10 Music Genres That Died
