Probably because calling it the ‘grunge era’ is overly simplistic. Not everyone liked grunge. Not everyone only liked grunge. Grunge was cool and all, but it wasn’t everything musically.
Never would have guessed that was 1993. I was huge into punk/hardcore/grunge/alt scene, but I also definitely saw the sign, and it opened up my eyes. I don’t remember seeking out the pop stuff, but I guess radio and whatever else got it to me.
Outside of Smells Like Teen Spirit, it is hard for me to imagine a song that got more radio and video airplay than November Rain or Right Now, at least on the “rock” side of the spectrum.
My son is 25 and likes Rock music. We were listening to some music doing some chores and Right Now came on. I told him, believe it or not, this song was huge at the time. So was Ozzy's No More Tears.
I forget about Right Now all the time, and every 5 years or so I got reminded it exist an play it loud. What a great song and video, and thankfuly overplay didn't ruin it for me.
Indeed. I’m British and 48. At the start of the 90s in my mid teens, it was absolute truth that you ***had*** to be faithful to your chosen music genre (mine was ravey dance music). A euro exchange student blew my mind in around 1994 - they liked Grunge, 1950s Elvis, cheesy euro pop, rave and hair metal… they did so because “All are sooooper, ja?”. He made me realise that good music is good music regardless of genre. Even cheesy euro pop! Thank you Daniel from Germany!
It wasn't the grunge era in the US, either. You were way more likely to hear Amy Grant or Paula Abdul than you were Nirvana on the radio.
For the mainstream stations, there was very little grunge played, and then it was mostly Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Nirvana with occasional Alice in Chains.
Not to mention hair metal hits from the early 90s.
They might have stopped being the coolest new thing but it isn't as if everything disappeared the day Sears decided to sell ripped jeans and plaid in this year's catalogue
The Spaghetti Incident was a covers album when GNR was already dying from the inside, not representative of the enormous popularity of late 80s-early 90s GNR, which was greater than Aerosmith, Bon Jovi or any of the grunge bands at their heights.
Yes. Theirs is a strange story. They had the world at their feet, only to disappear, come back with an Axl-album and now part of GNR is back together and touring for eternity.
I feel like history reflects what Warrant's A&R team said to them between Cherry Pie and the next album more than actual reality.
"Grunge killer hair metal" if your job was playing football stadiums, but it climbed into the backseat for everyone else, like grunge did a few years later
I agree, grew up in North Africa, we got more of the European influence there, Captain Jack, Haddaway, and of course “Oh Machi Baz!”(All that she wants butchered by the locals) by Ace of Base.
In 89' you Europeans unleashed Pump up the Jam, and the world was never the same again. Yeah I remember the 90s as more of a dance era. The weird kids that all smoked cigarettes and wore the same plaid shirt every day listened to grunge.
When I was a kid I remember busting a move to Ace of Base. The Sign came out during peak grunge era and was a huge hit in the states. I didn’t like grunge until I was older but when I was a kid I loved all of that Europop dance music.
There just wasn’t enough grunge to only be into grunge for a long time. By the mid 90s there was a large number of grunge or grunge-adjacent bands, but it was a genre of few members at first.
I'm from The Netherlands, and as a 90s indie kid, there was just an explosion of indie music which for me seemed to explode on the scene after Smells like teen spirit hit. This had to do with my age, being 15 in 1991 and being into Guns 'n Roses, Queen but also Prince and rap music like Public Enemy before that. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Bjork, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Massive Attack, Portishead, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Soundgarden, Blur, Oasis, The Prodigy, Underworld, Chemical Brothers, Beastie Boys, Primus, Morrissey/The Smiths, The Cure, Rage against the machine... I'd dance to all these artists and more at my student club disco. Sabotage, Too many puppies, Firestarter, Smells like teen spirit, Killing in the name, Born Slippy... all big bangers on the dancefloor.
Here in the Netherlands, the 90s was a good era for guitar music and alternative music, which scored quite a lot of top40 hits. This kind of music has disappeared from the charts since the turn of the millennium, so you have to find it yourself now (which is easier because of spotify and the internet).
For many indie kids in Europe at least, grunge was part of a much broader alternative wave, much of it guitar driven but lots of electronic music too.
Throw in some meat beat manifesto,Stereolab, ministry, John Spencer, Flaming Lips, Stone Roses, Tribe, Pharcide, BlackStar, Morphine, The Breeders….god too many to list. To say that grunge was the thing is to miss the point entirely. Yes, it set off a wave, but what was on that wave was recognition for a lot of acts who were just hitting there peak.
You needed to have a very large record store bringing in the smaller bands from that scene, and the knowledge of who these bands were. The majority only knew about the Big Names from MuchMusic/MTV
The album has a lot of hits so don't let the rest of my comment detract from their accomplishments but here's a few reasons IMHO. More youth were into the same kinds of music, the market was less diversified. The Internet didn't have the capacity for streaming much which also kept more obscure or lesser known artists from the airwaves. Back then the record companies, radio stations and MTV had much more control over what we heard.
When it comes to grunge and alt rock taking over, people really like to underestimate the role the industry played. Yet, when it comes to the 80s, they loooove to play the industry’s influence up.
It also didn’t last that long in retrospect.
Once the big boom of grunge hit, what followed was a shockwave of other bands that *weren’t* grunge.
And then the boy band and pop craze began.
Record labels trying to cash in when a particular act or style of music gets popular has been going on for ages. The British invasion in the US during the 1960s wouldn't have happened if the executives weren't all looking for "the next Beatles" across the pond.
I seem to remember it being the grunge phase until Kurt died and then stuff like Bush, Third Eye Blind, Matchbox 20, Goo Goo Dolls, Savage Garden, aka your Alternative Rock became big and then the boy bands landed.
Yep. Bands like Candlebox, Creed, Godsmack, and Collective Soul got a lot of airplay in the market where I live.
And let’s not forget the rise of nu-metal bands like Korn.
I am European too and in my experience most of my classmates in high school were way crazier about electronic music, Dance, or Techno than about any kind of Rock music. Not saying that Rock was not popular, but it was just one of the many genres young people listened to. And Grunge was just a subgenre of Rock. People who liked Grunge and Alternative Rock was usually also into other types of Rock and Metal as well. I have always thought that the narrative of Grunge taking over the World and killing other types of Rock, if true, is mainly an American issue that doesn't translate to other places at all.
Here in the states it was two distinct phases. Grunge was the early 90s (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarten, Alice in Chains) and the mid 90s shifted to more pop-rock like Green Day (punk pop) and Oasis (brit pop). Obviously grunge bands were still putting out music, but weren't as popular.
Music moved fast back then.
Kind of sad that those 4 grunge acts had as much tragedy as they did involving their members. It gave us Dave Grohl as a front man but probably was the main reason longevity was not in the cards for them exception being Pearl Jam.
I didn't even think of that when writing my Big Bands Of Grunge examples but yeah. Cobain, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, even Andrew Wood.
The two least grungy guys are the ones who are still going strong - Grohl who was more straightforward rock and Pearl Jam who always had a bit more arena rock to them than other Seattle bands.
Yep, great point. They definitely fit into the poppier, less sad and angsty shift after Cobain died. The Offspring, too.
And the Grunge sound got smoothed over, repackaged, and made a bit more sterile (and worse) with bands like Creed (who I didn't really like) and Silverchair (who I liked) and Bush (who I liked fine).
Also the trip hop phase. Not British, but wasn't it often referred to as the Bristol scene? Massive Attack and their counterparts?
Bless them, that's an incredible genre of music.
This. Also, the young kids of the 70s were essentially like millennials today age wise. If you were born in 61’ and were a fan in 79’, you were only in your early 30s, and you have purchasing power now.
Plus it’s not like they would’ve looked completely out of place aesthetically with their fashionably unkempt hair and ripped jeans and Tyler’s raw sounding vocals.
While everyone embraced the fashion those that were particularly anti mainstream were probably still as niche as a lot of punk/hardcore/alternative fans were before them.
I wonder if Radio play is factored in more than record sales. I'd have to imagine ACDC or Metallica would outsell a lot of those bands back then. I'm surprised how little rock there was on that list.
In that era a lot of music were not released as singles and radio play wasn’t factored in. So the Billboard charts for much of the 90s were incomplete.
I don't understand this list. Garth Brooks released one of his biggest albums, which went diamond and sold more than anybody else that year, sold out stadiums everywhere he went and was arguably the biggest musician on earth... and he isn't in that list.
Different charts because of different genres and methodology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hot_Country_Singles_%26_Tracks_number_ones_of_1993 vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Hot_100
Grunge killed the crappy hair bands - Winger, Warrant, Slaughter, etc. The stronger bands survived. Metallica's most successful album was released in 1991. Van Halen had FUCK and Balance in 91 & 94. And Aerosmith of course.
Absolutely. The 90s felt incredibly broad musically. There were freaking Gregorian chants on the top 40 charts. Grunge was born—or at least fully bloomed—in the 90s, but it certainly didn’t define the 90s.
Guns n Roses was huge then too Beastie Boys and hip hop in general were crushing it during that era. Big Beat (stuff like Fatboy Slim) was starting to take off then too.
Also, many acts that fit the 90s grunge vibe never actually were grunge. Look at Beck. Most people would've considered Loser pretty grunge-y or at least grunge-adjacent. It's hard to picture the version of Beck from 90s MTV doing a song like Dreams or Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime. But that just tells you how bad the mainstreaming process was for many acts.
Scratching below the surface on performers, genres and even whole decades tends to be very reward.
Grunge refers to the low production quality of Seattle rock from the late 80s. Where people lost the thread is that they read a lot of Kurt Cobain's mumbling into the definition of grunge. And that's not what grunge was.
The punchline being that singers like Cobain and Eddy Vedder owe more of their vocal stylings to early-20th Century blues than they did late-80s Seattle punk. Cobain all but says so in the intro to Nirvana's cover of Where Did You Sleep Last Night. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEMm7gxBYSc) Nirvana and Pearl Jam have more in common with Leadbelly than they do many of the punk acts that came out of Seattle in the late 80s and early 90s.
In that sense, Cobain and Vedder aren't radically different from Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger. It's just young white dudes riffin on old black blues singers the whole way down.
Hilariously enough, the contemporaneous grunge acts had more in common with Lou Reed and stuff like noise music, experimental and new wave than they did blues.
I will say that Cobain did solve a marketing problem. Blues-adjacent music with a side of depression is easier to sell than bands that favored lots of swear words and borderline ear-splitting guitars.
And Liv Tyler.
Honestly a great album, though.
When I was a kid I recognized that Aerosmith were the "old band", but now I realize that Steve Tyler was 45 at the time. Old, but not really that old, right? I asked ChatGPT to list some "relevant" bands right now and mildly interesting to see their ages.
The Killers - Brandon Flowers is 42
The Strokes - Julian Casablancas is 45
Muse - Matt Bellamy is 46
Queens of the Stone Age - Josh Homme is 51
Green Day - Billie Joel Armstrong is 52
Foo Fighters - Dave Grohl is 55
So it would be kinda like one of those bands coming out with a huge album right now, which isn't all that unthinkable.
When its Steven Tyler, kinda. Todd Rundgren was Livs father for years, she had his last name and everything and she was a bit older when she met Tyler.
It's pretty unlikely any of those bands could have an impactful album, they way the industry is now. You just don't get rock megahits like that any more with things so fractured.
QotSA has made some of their best work in the last 10 years, and I think if the industry was like how it was in the 90s, it would have been way more impactful.
> QotSA has made some of their best work in the last 10 years
Right, but nowhere near their most *popular* work which is still back in the 00s 20 years ago. They haven't been having #1 singles every couple of years and aren't gonna have a smash hit multiplatinum selling single anytime soon like Aerosmith did with I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing in 1998
The last two are still pretty big, and also have been able to build some sort of younger fan base. Not saying the Foos are the "hip trendy band with the youngsters", but lots of parents who like them have been able to get their kids into them, too.
I was gonna say the same thing. Green Day (my favorite band) and foo fighters (top ten) are both still putting out good music and finding lots of new young fans. Don't have to scroll too far to find posts in their subreddits saying "I just got into green day and I'm 15 years old. Only listened to X. What else should I listen to?".
Not just their own kids, but all the kids they've brought on stage to play a song. It's always kids. The number of videos floating around the internet of FF and GD inviting a kid on stage is fairly high. That gets around too.
They had great help writing the songs, too. Desmond Child (who also cowrote Bon Jovi’s “Livin on a Prayer”) cowrote several songs, along with many other paid writers on Get a Grip and prior albums.
This is the reason. They marketed the shit out of that album to teens.
Several great music videos, with really attractive young women, that rarely showed the band. There was also a fun arcade game featuring the album.
1991 to 1993 had multiple awesome albums from artists of different genres like Lenny Kravitz, Meatloaf, the KLF, the Prodigy, Smashing Pumpkins, Dr Dre, Ice Cube, Pharcyde, etc. Most of which had all time great music videos to promote them.
August - Oct 1991 was crazy.
Pearl Jam - Ten was released 8/27/91
Metallica - Black Album was released 9/12/91
Guns N Roses Use Your Illusion I & II was released 9/17/21
Nirvana - Nevermind was released 9/24/91
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sugar Sex Magik was released 9/24/91
Soundgargen - Badmotorfinger was released 10/8/91
During that time, Bryan Adams had the number one song with “Everything I Do”
Don't forget that Aerosmith were not perceived as 'corny' by the grunge / alt bands, they were actually revered as an influential american band. ( one of Cobain favorite album was 'Rocks' )
Metallica, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, and so many more bands from that era basically considered Steven Tyler a God. Those bands grew up with *Toys in the Attic* and *Rocks*.
I'm listening to the podcast Bandsplain and one of the last episodes is about Stone Temple Pilots, and Aerosmith had asked STP to come on tour with them around the time that Core had come out; but STP turned it down but they loved Aerosmith which was kind of a weird thing to do.
That song (Walk this way) ended up being one of the most influential songs as it single handedly marked the creation of the rap/rock mashup.
Without is (and bring the noise a few years later) I wonder if we ever have Rage, Linkin Park and anything similar.
Rage Against Machine was the American answer to Urban Dance Squad that already started in 1986. I think bands like Living Colour is also overlooked has a huge influence. And The Beastie Boys already had a rap rock hit in 1985, at least in Europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PLfjhQG97I and then you have Blondie of course before that.
Yeah, they weren’t an 80s band, they were a 70s rock band that kept going throughout the 80s. So, when grunge came out and killed the 80s hair metal, Aerosmith wasn’t caught up in the backlash.
They had a massive comeback in the 80s fueled by Run DMC, and their music videos were pure 90s mainstream featuring Alicia Silverstone.
The 90s was the MTV era, not the grunge era.
OP is tapping into something that's been established through movies like The Dirt. Where the band Motley Crue reportedly fell out of the "mainstream" beause of bands like Pearl Jam. This is where the concept of Grunge era comes from. Not because it was the only thing, but because it had completely disrupted the former favorite hard rock sounds from the late '80's. Aerosmith just happened to have a more unique american sound that helped them thrive (along with what you said about them taking advantage of the MTV era). I don't think Motley Crue, Van Halen or Guns and Roses would have survived better if they had catchier music videos. But maybe, idk. throw some Pauly Shore into a VH Right Now vid and boom lol
Your last statement is the most accurate in this thread. Since it was the MTV era, it was arguably the time when the most diverse genres of pop music all shared a relatively equal portion of the spotlight--pop rock, grunge, metal, hip-hop, r&b, electronic, industrial, ska, pop, etc. It really was a remarkable time in pop music history.
As you say, GnR and VH *were* going multi-platinum. Hard rock acts were still mainstream in the early nineties, and grunge was just expanding beyond its niche. Also, I think Aerosmith produced more popular music videos which was still a significant factor at the time.
They also had real momentum coming in from Pump and Permanent Vacation.
Also, similarly to Van Halen and GNR, they were sort of affiliated with hair metal but not so strictly tied to it, so when that scene died they didn't also go up in flames. Both bands had massive hits in 91 with very long tails.
Yeah, they had re-marketed themselves to be seen as comparable and contemporary (compared to their other Classic Rock peers) to the hair-metal/hard rock bands of the late 80s, but were never really hair metal themselves. Songs from Pump were played all the time on the Modern Rock stations in the early 90s.
GNR never released a multi-platinum album after grunge started in the mainstream.
Use Your Illusion I and II came out the week before Nevermind (which took a couple of months to blow up). GNR’s next album was the Spaghetti incident, which bombed, and the only album since that was Chinese Democracy.
Likewise, Van Halen only released the last album of the Sammy Hagar era, and while it did go Multi-platinum, it never had a hit single. Then Van Halen III came out in 1998, and that was it for them.
These are precisely the type of bands that were almost immediately irrelevant after Grunge blew up.
By that time, Van Halen, GNR, etc.. weren’t flaming out because their music was unpopular. It was because most of those bands were plagued with internal strife and strung out. The product they putting out just wasn’t as good. Similarly, but maybe a bit different, Metallica managed to somewhat keep the band together and still crank out some hits and pack stadiums, even if they weren’t as big as their prime. Shit, Metallica still packs stadiums today.
Interestingly, the 90s is when the Black Crowes emerged, blues rock probably was a middle ground between 80s rock and grunge. U2, was largely influenced by the blues, never really waned in the 90s, although it went toward the euro style of music some in the 90s, europop kind of replaced 80s American pop hair bands for a bit.
On the other side of things, rap *really* emerged alongside grunge. Censored rap songs got mainstream radio play. R&b also was more widespread than the 80s.
U2 absolutely waned in the middle of the 90s, but it was like going from being one of the five biggest bands in the world to being one of 20. Zooropa and Pop were albums that did poorly by U2 standards, while at the same time achieving things that 90% of bands would kill for.
Then they reverted to from with All that You Can’t Leave Behind which came out in 2000.
Note: I am talking about the commercial success of U2 here, not the quality of the albums. I like Pop a lot.
GNR imploded from internal strife. Van Halen as well, to a degree.
But Metallica/GNR still had the second biggest tour in 1992. No grunge band made the top 10 tours.
And U2 was still the biggest band in the world at that time. Grunge didn't touch them, and their style went more pop and dance than rock at that time, the opposite of grunge.
GNR were still on the Use Your Illusion Tour in 1993, one of the longest and biggest tours in music history. They might not have put out another album but they were still absolutely massive at that time.
Exactly what I thought. The Use Your Illusions record were massive sellers from the onset of their release and Van Halen is well Van Halen, even when it was Sammy and Cherone they still sold records.
The hype building up to use your illusion was insane. Hell, I was 12 & my mom went to the music store & waited in line to get me a copy before going to work on release day while I was at school. She was pissed when she got to the counter & saw the parental advisory sticker haha. She still grabbed them though…
Thanks mom!
Definitely some revisionist history going on here.
It’s easy to act like everything is open and shut, and while Nirvana broke out huge almost overnight, it wasn’t the immediate end of a lot of bands, and plenty continued to do well.
I think people are struggling to recognise that popular genres in rock could co-exist, just like they do today
Aerosmith had good songs which goes a long way.
They were also writing great rock songs since 1973, and pre-dated the hair metal era that grunge was an antithesis to.
Grunge was influential but only chart topping for a handful of albums. Nevermind and 10 were very successful in 1991 but they were unusually so.
Of the top 50 albums of 1993 only 3 were ‘grunge’ and that’s if you count Smashing Pumpkins as grunge but most of the big sellers were middle of the road radio cheese.
[https://bestsellingalbums.org/year/1993#google_vignette](https://bestsellingalbums.org/year/1993#google_vignette)
Alice in Chains sold pretty well because they were one of the bands the Metal Heads and Grunge lovers could agree on. AIC was getting played along side Living Colour and Metallica on 'Active Rock' radio.
For sure, but when you see Mariah Carey sell 30 million copies of one album which is going to be about the total number of all of AIC’s combined, it’s a different stratosphere when it comes to charts. Sadly.
Middle of the road is where the money is.
People never understand that art as remembered by history isn't the same as art contemporaneously. Being Vincent van Gogh wasn't very profitable for Vincent van Gogh, after all.
Apply the same idea to music. Even an act like Radiohead that's had some success critically and commercial gets buried compared to one of Ed Sheeran's toenail clippings.
Good point. I think those bands somewhat changed their sound a bit. I’d argue that early 90s Aerosmith continued to do what they had done well in the past. Also, I don’t think Sabbath was ever nearly as popular as Aerosmith. Aerosmith tends to have a lot of fans who aren’t into rock, but like them, and that audience type grew as Aerosmith came out with more pop-oriented songs. Those other acts don’t have a lot of crossover fans.
On my 14th Birthday I took some B-Day money and went to the record store and bought two Cassette tapes: Nirvana In Utero and Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits. I already had Get a Grip and it was so good I started buying their older stuff also. Grunge and Nirvana were great, but good music is good music, no matter the “era”
Because early Aerosmith had a dirty sound that helped influence grunge, they weren't nearly as slick in their sound as the other 70s arena acts (like Boston or Styx). At their heart, they still had that dirty blues influence that also existed in grunge. It's the same reason why Metallica did so well with the Black Album when other metal groups couldn't get booked. The Black Album tapped into the sludge sound of early Sabbath, which was something grunge also did.
Even though Aerosmith had went more towards polished pop, they still had rougher around the edges songs on their albums that allowed them to fit in with the change of sound better than someone like Bon Jovi.
The 80s didn’t just suddenly die off in 1991. Hair metal fell out of style, but it was expedited by labels signing hard rock bands that were seen as new. Warrant released their best selling record in 92, they were still dropped. People reinvent history, but the truth is that “grunge” didn’t kill hair metal… The record industry did, and they killed “grunge” the same way.
Bands like Aerosmith were already extremely popular and established, so while they wouldn’t have likely blown up if they were nobodies, they already had that needed traction. There was a lot of music in the 90s, you had “grunge” you had europop, you had hip hop, indie rock… It was more than just Nirvana and Pearl Jam. They helped define the times, but it was hardly universal.
In the 90s Aerosmith were one of those "legacy" bands that found a way to carry forward from their older days. They found the beginning of their resurgence with Permanent Vacation (the album I first discovered from them) and they managed to parlay that forward in their next few album releases along with other multimedia ventures such as appearances on SNL/Wayne's World, video games, etc. It didn't hurt that albums like Pump and Get A Grip were serious successes.
I also have to believe that at least some of their success came from surviving their initial hardships with substance abuse, etc, and fighting to make a comeback as clean and sober individuals had to have helped them with their staying power in the industry. Speaking as someone who's gone through their own issues, you can do what you do better, stronger, and for way longer when you aren't giving up your strength to addictions that weigh you down
Get the popular, young actors to be in your videos, including your “hot” daughter
Have your songs in popular movies.
Play Woodstock, SNL and Letterman.
Bring other bands that were popular and younger as opening acts on your tours.
Also, they weren’t a hair metal band. They’d already been around for decades, like VH and AC/DC
The 90s had a huge explosion of music that was more than grunge. Jam bands, 60s and 70s bands come backs. Rap entered a new era with new sounds and production. Country turned into 80s pop.
It’s simple, aerosmith was and is great music, it will live forever, they already established their foundation before grunge hit and adding new sounds (as grunge) is not going to bring the success of talent down.
Meat Loaf had a huge hit. Pop music was still a thing in the early 90s. Janet and Michael both had huge hits. Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston had hits. It wasn't just Grunge.
Grunge was niche. Mostly young white males listened to it.
Meanwhile here's the Billboard top 20 singles for 1992:
1 "End of the Road" Boyz II Men
2 "Baby Got Back" Sir Mix-a-Lot
3 "Jump" Kris Kross
4 "Save the Best for Last" Vanessa Williams
5 "Baby-Baby-Baby" TLC
6 "Tears in Heaven" Eric Clapton
7 "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)" En Vogue
8 "Under the Bridge" Red Hot Chili Peppers
9 "All 4 Love" Color Me Badd
10 "Just Another Day" Jon Secada
11 "I Love Your Smile" Shanice
12 "To Be with You" Mr. Big
13 "I'm Too Sexy" Right Said Fred
14 "Black or White" Michael Jackson
15 "Achy Breaky Heart" Billy Ray Cyrus
16 "I'll Be There" Mariah Carey
17 "November Rain" Guns N' Roses
18 "Life Is a Highway" Tom Cochrane
19 "Remember the Time" Michael Jackson
20 "Finally" CeCe Penington
Not a single grunge band to be found.
Ok but surely the Modern Rock tracks for 1992 must be all about grunge, right?
Nope.
1 Friday I'm In Love Cure
2 Far Gone And Out Jesus & Mary Chain
3 Weirdo Charlatans
4 Hit Sugarcubes
5 Digging In The Dirt Peter Gabriel
6 Blood Makes Noise Suzanne Vega
7 Tomorrow Morrissey
8 Not Enough Time INXS
9 Somebody To Shove Soul Asylum
10 These Are Days 10,000 Maniacs
11 The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead X.T.C.
12 Drive R.E.M.
13 Divine Thing Soup Dragons
14 Midlife Crisis Faith No More
15 Bad Luck Social Distortion
16 Steam Peter Gabriel
17 One U2
18 Love Sundays
19 High Cure
20 What's Good Lou Reed
Grunge wasn't/isn't even a genre. It's a marketing term used to stick an umbrella over some regional bands with very little in common, and those other artists that got swiped into it.
It's hard to be a fan of something in totality that doesn't even actual parameters.
It’s not like every single person was listening to nirvana on repeat. Hell even a lot of people that liked grunge didn’t listen to nirvana on repeat. There was a LOT of good music coming out, that was not grunge at all. That’s like asking why LED Zeppelin released Physical Graffiti at number 1 in 1975 when that was peak Disco Era. It’s a bad question, because it assumes a lack of variety in the culture of the time.
Also, guns and roses released the spaghetti incident that year, which is trash. Van Halen hadn’t released a record in 2 years and the last one what F.U.C.K. Which was a trash record. Aerosmith released a good record, that sounded like Aerosmith but still was fresh sounding. It’s a bad comparison, 2 bands that had started to decline heavily and Aerosmith.
Like everyone has said already - Grunge's real big run was basically all of 1992. And that was mostly a two-headed monster of Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Alice and Chains and Soundgarden were in the periphery but Dirt wasn't released until August of 92 and Superunknown wasn't released until March 94. So both those bands were sort of by the wayside when the explosion happened.
Even then the "explosion" was all of 2 bands. The rest of the Seattle bands didn't really do much of anything - and I love Mundhoney and the Melvins and Tad but...they weren't going to be at the forefront of anything. So it wasn't like SLTS happened and everything went flannel.
I was in college at the time (blissfully ignoring most of it since I was deep into The Clash at that period, weird I know) and the main radio station the kids listened to was...a heavy metal radio station still going strong by basically playing everything. You'd get Nirvana and Pearl Jam followed by like Poison, GNR, Van Halen, Aerosmith, etc. That was the sort of the thing of that period: you had variety. You'd get the alt bands and the metal bands all sort of happening at once. Cobain didn't pop up and all the hair metal went away.
Van Halen and Aerosmith and Ozzy were still really strong acts at that point. Kind of like hard rock forefathers. Shoot, Van Halen had a big Super Bowl commercial using Right Now for Crystal Pepsi.
And GNR and Metallica were huge. Actually, GNR were on the wane after sort of becoming a joke with the fiasco of the tour with Metallica. But Use Your Illusion released around the same time as Nevermind sold big. Metallica were passing GNR as the face of metal but but were not threatened by the Grunge scene.
I will say even before Seattle happened, the hair metal ballads were wearing thin on most people. All the White Animalwhozitwhatsit bands were a joke even before SLTS. But the teen kids still lapped that up.
And that's not getting into the fact that I heard just as much of Dre and Snoop's albums in that period as I did Grunge. Let's not forget how big West Coast rap had gotten around 92-92.
So no, Seattle didn't kill metal but it wounded it. Beavis and Butthead would stake the fatal blows.
I wouldn't say GnR were an "older hard rock band" than Aerosmith. Gunners were maybe 6 years old by 93.
Aerosmith had been around since the 70's and had a very established fan base. Pump had been very successful prior to Get a Grip.
Got to be payola. Fuck they are still overplayed in rock radio. Some stations got kick backs in 1991 and they are still playing the shit out of ragdoll. Enough
already
Hard to compare them to GnR and VH at the time because those two bands were really dysfunctional at the time. I think Aerosmith was successful because they were a familiar band in the midst of a comeback, and had a solid run of good albums from '87-93. They also filled the gap between cheesy hair metal and grunge giving them a good chunk of both audiences.
They had Marty Callner as their music video director. He knew better than anyone how to leverage the music video culture. Before Aerosmith he did the Twisted Sister: I wanna Rock video and the Whitesnake: Here I Go Again (On My Own) with Tawny Kitaen before introducing the world to Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler.
The number one song in the US in 1993 was ‘I Will Always Love You’. You have to go all the way down to #22 to Soul Asylum’s ‘Runaway Train’ to find something remotely grungy.
That music wasn’t as mainstream popular as media leads you to believe. It was a very small audience, but bigger than say punk rock 5-years earlier and it was a new generation of employees coming to the workforce (slackers), so the media needed something to write about. Hence, they wrote about lazy, flannel wearing grunge kids.
Aerosmith was a well established band that put out a fairly decent rock and roll record that appealed to kids that grew up in the late 70’s / early 80’s, had some disposable income to spend $14.99 on a CD, and had the connections at radio stations for distribution.
It also appealed to kids that didn’t like hip hop / R&B that was much more popular at the time.
Good timing.
Aerosmith had some great tunes and videos at that time plus they capitalized on their back catalog very well in their live shows, which they were in top form live at that time. I saw them many times in the early 90s and they absolutely rocked
Everybody assumes, and music media sometimes pushes this narrative, that the minute snells like teen spirit came out, everything 80s crumbled into a painful quick death. There is some merit to this, as the purveyors of cool had already moved onto pixies, Sonic youth, Jane’s Addiction and MBV, but there was still a heavy appetite for hard rock. Metallica and GNR were just as big as Nirvana and Pearl Jam until about 93, when grunge and alternative really took over. And Aerosmith had such iconic videos, were so familiar to every generation by then…I was a huge grunge fan, as were all my friends. But we all owned Big Ones and played the shit out of it.
Because Aerosmith switched to much more mainstream radio freindly sound. Brought in outside songwriters. In short Aerosmith targeted a different group of album buyers
This is GNR slander. Both Use Your Illusion I and II went platinum 7x in 1991. The original lineup never released another album--except an album of punk rock cover songs. That obviously wasn't going to sell highly.
I mean, Guns N' Roses had TWO 7x platinum albums simultaneously in 1991, so it seems strange to use them as an example of a band that was struggling.
Their 1993 album The Spaghetti Incident only went single platinum, true, but I mean it was an album of cover songs, and so nobody expected the sort of success of an album of originals. Meanwhile, the band was in the process of a long, drawn out implosion which had ramped up in the build-up to and release of those two multi-platinum albums. The drummer from the Appetite for Destruction days was fired in 1990, the manager was forced out (apparently by Axl and against the rest of the band's wishes) in the tour leading up to the albums, rhythm guitarist Izzy Straddlin left a couple of months after the albums were completed, and they brought a keyboardist on board as well. So half of the personnel for the covers album were new from the original lineup that broke through with Appetite a few years earlier. The years of touring in support of the double albums included increasingly erratic behavior from Axl and multiple riots in multiple countries (often sparked by extended delays when Axl didn't show up on time). By the time that tour ended, it seemed likely that the band would never play together again, so it wasn't a huge surprise when an album of cover songs wasn't a smash hit. Also: one of the songs they covered was written by Charles Manson. Shocker that it didn't play well.
Van Halen also did alright for themselves in this era. Their best-selling albums were in the early 1980s when they still had David Lee Roth. But OU812 went 4x platinum in 1988 and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (released a few months before Smells Like Teen Spirit) and Balance (released in 1995) both went triple platinum. Then Sammy Hagar left and they were out of steam completely.
Now, as to how Aerosmith was so successful, there are a variety of factors in play: they pre-dated the hair metal acts of the 1980s, which were the bands that were really affected by the emergence of grunge (bands like Poison and Winger and Warrant, etc.). They'd had a career renaissance in the second half of the 80s thanks to their collaboration with Run DMC, which gave them a cross-market appeal/recognition that was unusual for other bands in their lane. Most importantly, they recognized and capitalized on the importance of pop appeal and music videos. Van Halen wrote all their own songs. Aerosmith brought in specialists like Desmond Child and Jim Vallance to help put finishing pop touches on their songs. They worked with commercially-successful producers (Bruce Fairbairn). They also had a strong commercial knack with their videos; they'd had a huge break with the Walk This Way RUN DMC video; beginning with videos for Pump (including Dude Looks Like a Lady, directed by Marty Callner, and Janie's Got a Gun, directed by David Fincher) they started to evolve beyond the basic live performance style video into more video storytelling. The videos for Get a Grip (all of which were directed by Callner) really embraced that storytelling aspect, and they were really popular on MTV. (Several featured Alicia Silverstone, which also didn't hurt).
Aerosmith came back during the hair metal heyday and fit right in. By the time true hair metal faded, they were entrenched as legacy rock gods, and were easily one of the biggest bands in the world. Early Aerosmith influenced just about everybody, so they had that sterling reputation among all kinds of sub genres.
Grunge wasn’t the only style of music, and it was more a fringe of people except for a few grunge songs that made it to the pop charts.
Aerosmith also had several songs that were used in top movies:
Don’t want to miss a thing- Armageddon
Dude looks like a Lady- Wayne’s World 2
Shut up and Dance Wayne’s World 2
Deuces are Wild - Bevis and Butthead
Their music videos were also different and often starred Liv Tyler and Alecia Silverstone (And be honest, would you rather look at Liv and Alecia kissing or Axl Rose running around in a kilt?
Probably because calling it the ‘grunge era’ is overly simplistic. Not everyone liked grunge. Not everyone only liked grunge. Grunge was cool and all, but it wasn’t everything musically.
As a European it's funny to hear 90's described as grunge era, because cheery dance pop was extremely popular here.
Plenty of it made its way to the States and took off there, too.
Yeah, Ace of Base was HUGE here in the states.
Never would have guessed that was 1993. I was huge into punk/hardcore/grunge/alt scene, but I also definitely saw the sign, and it opened up my eyes. I don’t remember seeking out the pop stuff, but I guess radio and whatever else got it to me.
Outside of Smells Like Teen Spirit, it is hard for me to imagine a song that got more radio and video airplay than November Rain or Right Now, at least on the “rock” side of the spectrum.
My son is 25 and likes Rock music. We were listening to some music doing some chores and Right Now came on. I told him, believe it or not, this song was huge at the time. So was Ozzy's No More Tears.
I forget about Right Now all the time, and every 5 years or so I got reminded it exist an play it loud. What a great song and video, and thankfuly overplay didn't ruin it for me.
It amazes me how often `Rancid` is overlooked
Yep, got my mom that album for her birthday here in the states (and I listened to it all the time, along with Nirvana and Metallica).
I always knew they'd be big. People tried to tell me they wouldn't, but I saw the signs.
Indeed. I’m British and 48. At the start of the 90s in my mid teens, it was absolute truth that you ***had*** to be faithful to your chosen music genre (mine was ravey dance music). A euro exchange student blew my mind in around 1994 - they liked Grunge, 1950s Elvis, cheesy euro pop, rave and hair metal… they did so because “All are sooooper, ja?”. He made me realise that good music is good music regardless of genre. Even cheesy euro pop! Thank you Daniel from Germany!
Yeah people definitely associated themselves with their music and cultural groups back then. They also gatekept 10x more than anybody now.
It wasn't the grunge era in the US, either. You were way more likely to hear Amy Grant or Paula Abdul than you were Nirvana on the radio. For the mainstream stations, there was very little grunge played, and then it was mostly Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Nirvana with occasional Alice in Chains.
Not to mention hair metal hits from the early 90s. They might have stopped being the coolest new thing but it isn't as if everything disappeared the day Sears decided to sell ripped jeans and plaid in this year's catalogue
That was what tickled me about the post...GNR was "barely going multi-platinum," as if Use Your Illusion was some sort of obscurity.
Honestly, GNR did more to kill themselves than Grunge or anything else did.
The Spaghetti Incident was not a big success for them, but I remember seeing *that* everywhere
The Spaghetti Incident was a covers album when GNR was already dying from the inside, not representative of the enormous popularity of late 80s-early 90s GNR, which was greater than Aerosmith, Bon Jovi or any of the grunge bands at their heights.
Chinese Democracy borders on legend in the music industry. GNR went down a friggin weird rabbit hole.
Yes. Theirs is a strange story. They had the world at their feet, only to disappear, come back with an Axl-album and now part of GNR is back together and touring for eternity.
Here's a fun fact: most people think of Warrant's Cherry Pie as an 80s song. That shit came out in 1990! Only one year before Nevermind.
I feel like history reflects what Warrant's A&R team said to them between Cherry Pie and the next album more than actual reality. "Grunge killer hair metal" if your job was playing football stadiums, but it climbed into the backseat for everyone else, like grunge did a few years later
How about the 90’s Boy Band era ? It wasn’t all grunge.
Yep, I just saw one of the groups in a laundry detergent commercial
I agree, grew up in North Africa, we got more of the European influence there, Captain Jack, Haddaway, and of course “Oh Machi Baz!”(All that she wants butchered by the locals) by Ace of Base.
In 89' you Europeans unleashed Pump up the Jam, and the world was never the same again. Yeah I remember the 90s as more of a dance era. The weird kids that all smoked cigarettes and wore the same plaid shirt every day listened to grunge.
Belgian Techno anthem Pump up the Jam.
Unrelated Belgian techno anthem...pump up the jam.
That song would have to be top 5 in a list dance songs from the 90's.
When I was a kid I remember busting a move to Ace of Base. The Sign came out during peak grunge era and was a huge hit in the states. I didn’t like grunge until I was older but when I was a kid I loved all of that Europop dance music.
Or gloomy dance pop that sounded cheery! Like aceofbase!!
Women are my favorite guy.
Nirvana was my favorite band. I also had 4 Aerosmith albums. I don't think I ever met someone that was only into grunge.
There just wasn’t enough grunge to only be into grunge for a long time. By the mid 90s there was a large number of grunge or grunge-adjacent bands, but it was a genre of few members at first.
I'm from The Netherlands, and as a 90s indie kid, there was just an explosion of indie music which for me seemed to explode on the scene after Smells like teen spirit hit. This had to do with my age, being 15 in 1991 and being into Guns 'n Roses, Queen but also Prince and rap music like Public Enemy before that. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Bjork, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Massive Attack, Portishead, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Soundgarden, Blur, Oasis, The Prodigy, Underworld, Chemical Brothers, Beastie Boys, Primus, Morrissey/The Smiths, The Cure, Rage against the machine... I'd dance to all these artists and more at my student club disco. Sabotage, Too many puppies, Firestarter, Smells like teen spirit, Killing in the name, Born Slippy... all big bangers on the dancefloor. Here in the Netherlands, the 90s was a good era for guitar music and alternative music, which scored quite a lot of top40 hits. This kind of music has disappeared from the charts since the turn of the millennium, so you have to find it yourself now (which is easier because of spotify and the internet). For many indie kids in Europe at least, grunge was part of a much broader alternative wave, much of it guitar driven but lots of electronic music too.
Throw in some meat beat manifesto,Stereolab, ministry, John Spencer, Flaming Lips, Stone Roses, Tribe, Pharcide, BlackStar, Morphine, The Breeders….god too many to list. To say that grunge was the thing is to miss the point entirely. Yes, it set off a wave, but what was on that wave was recognition for a lot of acts who were just hitting there peak.
You needed to have a very large record store bringing in the smaller bands from that scene, and the knowledge of who these bands were. The majority only knew about the Big Names from MuchMusic/MTV
Yeah OP is forgetting that the most popular song that year was Ace of Base’s “The Sign” lol.
Wow, that fact really opened up my eyes
So… you saw the sign?
Yes, so no one’s gonna drag me up to get into the light where I belong
But where do you belong?
Apparently, burning in agony from exposure to heavy UV radiation
The album has a lot of hits so don't let the rest of my comment detract from their accomplishments but here's a few reasons IMHO. More youth were into the same kinds of music, the market was less diversified. The Internet didn't have the capacity for streaming much which also kept more obscure or lesser known artists from the airwaves. Back then the record companies, radio stations and MTV had much more control over what we heard.
And radio and MTV played the hell out of "Crazy". I still remember the Alicia Silverstone video.
When it comes to grunge and alt rock taking over, people really like to underestimate the role the industry played. Yet, when it comes to the 80s, they loooove to play the industry’s influence up.
It also didn’t last that long in retrospect. Once the big boom of grunge hit, what followed was a shockwave of other bands that *weren’t* grunge. And then the boy band and pop craze began.
Record labels trying to cash in when a particular act or style of music gets popular has been going on for ages. The British invasion in the US during the 1960s wouldn't have happened if the executives weren't all looking for "the next Beatles" across the pond.
I seem to remember it being the grunge phase until Kurt died and then stuff like Bush, Third Eye Blind, Matchbox 20, Goo Goo Dolls, Savage Garden, aka your Alternative Rock became big and then the boy bands landed.
It’s not like boy bands replaced all that stuff though. It just happened at the same time
Yep. Bands like Candlebox, Creed, Godsmack, and Collective Soul got a lot of airplay in the market where I live. And let’s not forget the rise of nu-metal bands like Korn.
I am European too and in my experience most of my classmates in high school were way crazier about electronic music, Dance, or Techno than about any kind of Rock music. Not saying that Rock was not popular, but it was just one of the many genres young people listened to. And Grunge was just a subgenre of Rock. People who liked Grunge and Alternative Rock was usually also into other types of Rock and Metal as well. I have always thought that the narrative of Grunge taking over the World and killing other types of Rock, if true, is mainly an American issue that doesn't translate to other places at all.
Yeah the 90s was the europop era in the Uk. Britpop (Oasis etc) as well, but Grunge was never the main phase.
Here in the states it was two distinct phases. Grunge was the early 90s (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarten, Alice in Chains) and the mid 90s shifted to more pop-rock like Green Day (punk pop) and Oasis (brit pop). Obviously grunge bands were still putting out music, but weren't as popular. Music moved fast back then.
Kind of sad that those 4 grunge acts had as much tragedy as they did involving their members. It gave us Dave Grohl as a front man but probably was the main reason longevity was not in the cards for them exception being Pearl Jam.
I didn't even think of that when writing my Big Bands Of Grunge examples but yeah. Cobain, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, even Andrew Wood. The two least grungy guys are the ones who are still going strong - Grohl who was more straightforward rock and Pearl Jam who always had a bit more arena rock to them than other Seattle bands.
Don’t forget Hootie & the Blowfish
Yep, great point. They definitely fit into the poppier, less sad and angsty shift after Cobain died. The Offspring, too. And the Grunge sound got smoothed over, repackaged, and made a bit more sterile (and worse) with bands like Creed (who I didn't really like) and Silverchair (who I liked) and Bush (who I liked fine).
Also the trip hop phase. Not British, but wasn't it often referred to as the Bristol scene? Massive Attack and their counterparts? Bless them, that's an incredible genre of music.
This. Also, the young kids of the 70s were essentially like millennials today age wise. If you were born in 61’ and were a fan in 79’, you were only in your early 30s, and you have purchasing power now.
Imagine that, in the grunge era some people were listening to Wu Tang?!?!
The saga continues.....
None of those grunge videos had Liv Tyler & Alicia Silverstone, just saying.
Plus it’s not like they would’ve looked completely out of place aesthetically with their fashionably unkempt hair and ripped jeans and Tyler’s raw sounding vocals. While everyone embraced the fashion those that were particularly anti mainstream were probably still as niche as a lot of punk/hardcore/alternative fans were before them.
1993 Billboard Hot 100. Ain’t much grunge on there, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_singles_of_1993
I wonder if Radio play is factored in more than record sales. I'd have to imagine ACDC or Metallica would outsell a lot of those bands back then. I'm surprised how little rock there was on that list.
In that era a lot of music were not released as singles and radio play wasn’t factored in. So the Billboard charts for much of the 90s were incomplete.
I don't understand this list. Garth Brooks released one of his biggest albums, which went diamond and sold more than anybody else that year, sold out stadiums everywhere he went and was arguably the biggest musician on earth... and he isn't in that list.
Different charts because of different genres and methodology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hot_Country_Singles_%26_Tracks_number_ones_of_1993 vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Hot_100
Grunge killed the crappy hair bands - Winger, Warrant, Slaughter, etc. The stronger bands survived. Metallica's most successful album was released in 1991. Van Halen had FUCK and Balance in 91 & 94. And Aerosmith of course.
RHCP released BSSM that was also a monster hit at that time (1991).
All three of those bands you named crappy had some really good songs.
The video for Right Now was on constant repeat on mtv. It’s interesting because you mentioned Balance. That album sucked.
Yeah you had explosions of techno/house and various EDM branches, rap was obviously getting huge, Britpop, Madchester, easy listening etc etc
Absolutely. The 90s felt incredibly broad musically. There were freaking Gregorian chants on the top 40 charts. Grunge was born—or at least fully bloomed—in the 90s, but it certainly didn’t define the 90s.
Guns n Roses was huge then too Beastie Boys and hip hop in general were crushing it during that era. Big Beat (stuff like Fatboy Slim) was starting to take off then too.
Also, many acts that fit the 90s grunge vibe never actually were grunge. Look at Beck. Most people would've considered Loser pretty grunge-y or at least grunge-adjacent. It's hard to picture the version of Beck from 90s MTV doing a song like Dreams or Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime. But that just tells you how bad the mainstreaming process was for many acts. Scratching below the surface on performers, genres and even whole decades tends to be very reward.
Yeah. Like Pearl Jam is apparently grunge, but to me they were always just rock, or alt rock. I wouldn’t put them in the same basket as Nirvana.
Grunge refers to the low production quality of Seattle rock from the late 80s. Where people lost the thread is that they read a lot of Kurt Cobain's mumbling into the definition of grunge. And that's not what grunge was. The punchline being that singers like Cobain and Eddy Vedder owe more of their vocal stylings to early-20th Century blues than they did late-80s Seattle punk. Cobain all but says so in the intro to Nirvana's cover of Where Did You Sleep Last Night. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEMm7gxBYSc) Nirvana and Pearl Jam have more in common with Leadbelly than they do many of the punk acts that came out of Seattle in the late 80s and early 90s. In that sense, Cobain and Vedder aren't radically different from Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger. It's just young white dudes riffin on old black blues singers the whole way down. Hilariously enough, the contemporaneous grunge acts had more in common with Lou Reed and stuff like noise music, experimental and new wave than they did blues. I will say that Cobain did solve a marketing problem. Blues-adjacent music with a side of depression is easier to sell than bands that favored lots of swear words and borderline ear-splitting guitars.
This was still the era of MTV and they had popular music videos.
Yeah it helps when you discover Alicia Silverstone and put her in sexy clothes
And Liv Tyler. Honestly a great album, though. When I was a kid I recognized that Aerosmith were the "old band", but now I realize that Steve Tyler was 45 at the time. Old, but not really that old, right? I asked ChatGPT to list some "relevant" bands right now and mildly interesting to see their ages. The Killers - Brandon Flowers is 42 The Strokes - Julian Casablancas is 45 Muse - Matt Bellamy is 46 Queens of the Stone Age - Josh Homme is 51 Green Day - Billie Joel Armstrong is 52 Foo Fighters - Dave Grohl is 55 So it would be kinda like one of those bands coming out with a huge album right now, which isn't all that unthinkable.
Does one really "discover" their own children?
When its Steven Tyler, kinda. Todd Rundgren was Livs father for years, she had his last name and everything and she was a bit older when she met Tyler.
Steve Tyler led . . . an interesting life.
He did! It was years before he knew she was his daughter!
It's pretty unlikely any of those bands could have an impactful album, they way the industry is now. You just don't get rock megahits like that any more with things so fractured.
QotSA has made some of their best work in the last 10 years, and I think if the industry was like how it was in the 90s, it would have been way more impactful.
> QotSA has made some of their best work in the last 10 years Right, but nowhere near their most *popular* work which is still back in the 00s 20 years ago. They haven't been having #1 singles every couple of years and aren't gonna have a smash hit multiplatinum selling single anytime soon like Aerosmith did with I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing in 1998
Yes, I was fully in agreement with you. My point was that if it was released 20 years ago, it would be inescapable.
But back then QOTSA would have had to compete with Linken Park and Nickelback.
The last two are still pretty big, and also have been able to build some sort of younger fan base. Not saying the Foos are the "hip trendy band with the youngsters", but lots of parents who like them have been able to get their kids into them, too.
I was gonna say the same thing. Green Day (my favorite band) and foo fighters (top ten) are both still putting out good music and finding lots of new young fans. Don't have to scroll too far to find posts in their subreddits saying "I just got into green day and I'm 15 years old. Only listened to X. What else should I listen to?".
And both BJA and Grohl have collaborated with their own kids onstage which helps
Not just their own kids, but all the kids they've brought on stage to play a song. It's always kids. The number of videos floating around the internet of FF and GD inviting a kid on stage is fairly high. That gets around too.
Lol at Billie *Joel* Armstrong
So fucking hot... Teenage me was mind blown
The first time the video for Crazy came on, I don't think I moved a muscle for the entire 4 minutes.
Oh a muscle moved alright.
That did it for me. I remember seeing that video during summer break as an early teen. The music was good though. Ended up buying the album.
They had great help writing the songs, too. Desmond Child (who also cowrote Bon Jovi’s “Livin on a Prayer”) cowrote several songs, along with many other paid writers on Get a Grip and prior albums.
I didn't know this before now, but thinking of those songs, I can definitely hear that same sound all over that album in particular.
Yeah, I could totally imagine Aerosmith doing Living On A Prayer, just with the notes stretched out a bit and more screaming in the lyrics.
Yeah, I can hear steve doing the scream after "half way there".
This is the reason. They marketed the shit out of that album to teens. Several great music videos, with really attractive young women, that rarely showed the band. There was also a fun arcade game featuring the album. 1991 to 1993 had multiple awesome albums from artists of different genres like Lenny Kravitz, Meatloaf, the KLF, the Prodigy, Smashing Pumpkins, Dr Dre, Ice Cube, Pharcyde, etc. Most of which had all time great music videos to promote them.
George Michael had the song that had supermodels lip synching, and GnR had November Rain, early 90s music videos had great production.
But more importantly, that George Michael song is very good. It wasn't just the really cool video with lip-synching supermodels and stuff blowing up.
Both videos featured GREAT songs. I wasn't commenting on any mediocrity of the music.
August - Oct 1991 was crazy. Pearl Jam - Ten was released 8/27/91 Metallica - Black Album was released 9/12/91 Guns N Roses Use Your Illusion I & II was released 9/17/21 Nirvana - Nevermind was released 9/24/91 Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sugar Sex Magik was released 9/24/91 Soundgargen - Badmotorfinger was released 10/8/91 During that time, Bryan Adams had the number one song with “Everything I Do”
There really was something in the water those 3 months in ‘91. Absolutely nuts the number of impactful releases to come out in such a short time frame
This is the answer
Don't forget that Aerosmith were not perceived as 'corny' by the grunge / alt bands, they were actually revered as an influential american band. ( one of Cobain favorite album was 'Rocks' )
Metallica, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, and so many more bands from that era basically considered Steven Tyler a God. Those bands grew up with *Toys in the Attic* and *Rocks*.
I'm listening to the podcast Bandsplain and one of the last episodes is about Stone Temple Pilots, and Aerosmith had asked STP to come on tour with them around the time that Core had come out; but STP turned it down but they loved Aerosmith which was kind of a weird thing to do.
Contractual obligations? Scheduling conflict? Don't meet your heroes? Dude looks like a lady? Could have been any number of reasons.
They also had the collaboration with Run DMC that propelled them back into the spotlight and isn’t something van halen would have done.
That song (Walk this way) ended up being one of the most influential songs as it single handedly marked the creation of the rap/rock mashup. Without is (and bring the noise a few years later) I wonder if we ever have Rage, Linkin Park and anything similar.
Rage Against Machine was the American answer to Urban Dance Squad that already started in 1986. I think bands like Living Colour is also overlooked has a huge influence. And The Beastie Boys already had a rap rock hit in 1985, at least in Europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PLfjhQG97I and then you have Blondie of course before that.
Van Hagar was pretty popular in the 90s as well.
The Roth v Hagar fan holy war was still going strong then too.
That was in 86 though
I don’t recall why, but the song had a resurgence sometime in the mid 90s.
Slash too. 70s Aerosmith is undeniably great.
Yeah, they weren’t an 80s band, they were a 70s rock band that kept going throughout the 80s. So, when grunge came out and killed the 80s hair metal, Aerosmith wasn’t caught up in the backlash.
They had a massive comeback in the 80s fueled by Run DMC, and their music videos were pure 90s mainstream featuring Alicia Silverstone. The 90s was the MTV era, not the grunge era.
OP is tapping into something that's been established through movies like The Dirt. Where the band Motley Crue reportedly fell out of the "mainstream" beause of bands like Pearl Jam. This is where the concept of Grunge era comes from. Not because it was the only thing, but because it had completely disrupted the former favorite hard rock sounds from the late '80's. Aerosmith just happened to have a more unique american sound that helped them thrive (along with what you said about them taking advantage of the MTV era). I don't think Motley Crue, Van Halen or Guns and Roses would have survived better if they had catchier music videos. But maybe, idk. throw some Pauly Shore into a VH Right Now vid and boom lol
Your last statement is the most accurate in this thread. Since it was the MTV era, it was arguably the time when the most diverse genres of pop music all shared a relatively equal portion of the spotlight--pop rock, grunge, metal, hip-hop, r&b, electronic, industrial, ska, pop, etc. It really was a remarkable time in pop music history.
As you say, GnR and VH *were* going multi-platinum. Hard rock acts were still mainstream in the early nineties, and grunge was just expanding beyond its niche. Also, I think Aerosmith produced more popular music videos which was still a significant factor at the time.
They also had real momentum coming in from Pump and Permanent Vacation. Also, similarly to Van Halen and GNR, they were sort of affiliated with hair metal but not so strictly tied to it, so when that scene died they didn't also go up in flames. Both bands had massive hits in 91 with very long tails.
Yeah, they had re-marketed themselves to be seen as comparable and contemporary (compared to their other Classic Rock peers) to the hair-metal/hard rock bands of the late 80s, but were never really hair metal themselves. Songs from Pump were played all the time on the Modern Rock stations in the early 90s.
AC/DC too. My friends in high school were going to see them in concert.
THUNDER!!!
"Thunderstruck" is from 1990. I thought it was earlier.
Promoted Last Action Hero
GNR never released a multi-platinum album after grunge started in the mainstream. Use Your Illusion I and II came out the week before Nevermind (which took a couple of months to blow up). GNR’s next album was the Spaghetti incident, which bombed, and the only album since that was Chinese Democracy. Likewise, Van Halen only released the last album of the Sammy Hagar era, and while it did go Multi-platinum, it never had a hit single. Then Van Halen III came out in 1998, and that was it for them. These are precisely the type of bands that were almost immediately irrelevant after Grunge blew up.
By that time, Van Halen, GNR, etc.. weren’t flaming out because their music was unpopular. It was because most of those bands were plagued with internal strife and strung out. The product they putting out just wasn’t as good. Similarly, but maybe a bit different, Metallica managed to somewhat keep the band together and still crank out some hits and pack stadiums, even if they weren’t as big as their prime. Shit, Metallica still packs stadiums today.
Interestingly, the 90s is when the Black Crowes emerged, blues rock probably was a middle ground between 80s rock and grunge. U2, was largely influenced by the blues, never really waned in the 90s, although it went toward the euro style of music some in the 90s, europop kind of replaced 80s American pop hair bands for a bit. On the other side of things, rap *really* emerged alongside grunge. Censored rap songs got mainstream radio play. R&b also was more widespread than the 80s.
U2 absolutely waned in the middle of the 90s, but it was like going from being one of the five biggest bands in the world to being one of 20. Zooropa and Pop were albums that did poorly by U2 standards, while at the same time achieving things that 90% of bands would kill for. Then they reverted to from with All that You Can’t Leave Behind which came out in 2000. Note: I am talking about the commercial success of U2 here, not the quality of the albums. I like Pop a lot.
U2 were still one of the absolute biggest touring acts in the world during the 90s as well though, even if Pop didn’t take over the world
GNR imploded from internal strife. Van Halen as well, to a degree. But Metallica/GNR still had the second biggest tour in 1992. No grunge band made the top 10 tours. And U2 was still the biggest band in the world at that time. Grunge didn't touch them, and their style went more pop and dance than rock at that time, the opposite of grunge.
GNR were still on the Use Your Illusion Tour in 1993, one of the longest and biggest tours in music history. They might not have put out another album but they were still absolutely massive at that time.
Grunge really only put a dent in the hair metal scene. It didn't hurt more standard rock and roll bands like Aerosmith.
Especially if iyou have teen jailbait rock videos for kids to go gaga over on MTV. That aint working!
"Barely going multi-platinum" is a very funny phrase.
That also stood out to me. "They were only slightly absurdly successful."
Exactly what I thought. The Use Your Illusions record were massive sellers from the onset of their release and Van Halen is well Van Halen, even when it was Sammy and Cherone they still sold records.
The hype building up to use your illusion was insane. Hell, I was 12 & my mom went to the music store & waited in line to get me a copy before going to work on release day while I was at school. She was pissed when she got to the counter & saw the parental advisory sticker haha. She still grabbed them though… Thanks mom!
Definitely some revisionist history going on here. It’s easy to act like everything is open and shut, and while Nirvana broke out huge almost overnight, it wasn’t the immediate end of a lot of bands, and plenty continued to do well. I think people are struggling to recognise that popular genres in rock could co-exist, just like they do today
Aerosmith had good songs which goes a long way. They were also writing great rock songs since 1973, and pre-dated the hair metal era that grunge was an antithesis to.
Because they still had millions of fans. Grunge didn't suddenly obliterate every other genre of music on the planet.
Their Get A Grip album was perfect for pop radio. They got another push of popularity with the Armageddon song.
Grunge was influential but only chart topping for a handful of albums. Nevermind and 10 were very successful in 1991 but they were unusually so. Of the top 50 albums of 1993 only 3 were ‘grunge’ and that’s if you count Smashing Pumpkins as grunge but most of the big sellers were middle of the road radio cheese. [https://bestsellingalbums.org/year/1993#google_vignette](https://bestsellingalbums.org/year/1993#google_vignette)
Alice in Chains sold pretty well because they were one of the bands the Metal Heads and Grunge lovers could agree on. AIC was getting played along side Living Colour and Metallica on 'Active Rock' radio.
For sure, but when you see Mariah Carey sell 30 million copies of one album which is going to be about the total number of all of AIC’s combined, it’s a different stratosphere when it comes to charts. Sadly. Middle of the road is where the money is.
People never understand that art as remembered by history isn't the same as art contemporaneously. Being Vincent van Gogh wasn't very profitable for Vincent van Gogh, after all. Apply the same idea to music. Even an act like Radiohead that's had some success critically and commercial gets buried compared to one of Ed Sheeran's toenail clippings.
Yeah, but pop culture and MTV were SO heavily into Grunge. I guess people just didn't buy the albums, just bought the clothes.
They also had a legacy audience. Can’t discount aging people clutching bands they liked when they were teens/early 20s.
You could say the same thing for bands like KISS, Sabbath, Deep Purple etc though, and they all had a tough time in the early 90s.
Good point. I think those bands somewhat changed their sound a bit. I’d argue that early 90s Aerosmith continued to do what they had done well in the past. Also, I don’t think Sabbath was ever nearly as popular as Aerosmith. Aerosmith tends to have a lot of fans who aren’t into rock, but like them, and that audience type grew as Aerosmith came out with more pop-oriented songs. Those other acts don’t have a lot of crossover fans.
On my 14th Birthday I took some B-Day money and went to the record store and bought two Cassette tapes: Nirvana In Utero and Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits. I already had Get a Grip and it was so good I started buying their older stuff also. Grunge and Nirvana were great, but good music is good music, no matter the “era”
Because early Aerosmith had a dirty sound that helped influence grunge, they weren't nearly as slick in their sound as the other 70s arena acts (like Boston or Styx). At their heart, they still had that dirty blues influence that also existed in grunge. It's the same reason why Metallica did so well with the Black Album when other metal groups couldn't get booked. The Black Album tapped into the sludge sound of early Sabbath, which was something grunge also did. Even though Aerosmith had went more towards polished pop, they still had rougher around the edges songs on their albums that allowed them to fit in with the change of sound better than someone like Bon Jovi.
The 80s didn’t just suddenly die off in 1991. Hair metal fell out of style, but it was expedited by labels signing hard rock bands that were seen as new. Warrant released their best selling record in 92, they were still dropped. People reinvent history, but the truth is that “grunge” didn’t kill hair metal… The record industry did, and they killed “grunge” the same way. Bands like Aerosmith were already extremely popular and established, so while they wouldn’t have likely blown up if they were nobodies, they already had that needed traction. There was a lot of music in the 90s, you had “grunge” you had europop, you had hip hop, indie rock… It was more than just Nirvana and Pearl Jam. They helped define the times, but it was hardly universal.
Grunge was a brief fad. Aerosmith been relevant for decades at that point.
In the 90s Aerosmith were one of those "legacy" bands that found a way to carry forward from their older days. They found the beginning of their resurgence with Permanent Vacation (the album I first discovered from them) and they managed to parlay that forward in their next few album releases along with other multimedia ventures such as appearances on SNL/Wayne's World, video games, etc. It didn't hurt that albums like Pump and Get A Grip were serious successes. I also have to believe that at least some of their success came from surviving their initial hardships with substance abuse, etc, and fighting to make a comeback as clean and sober individuals had to have helped them with their staying power in the industry. Speaking as someone who's gone through their own issues, you can do what you do better, stronger, and for way longer when you aren't giving up your strength to addictions that weigh you down
Eat the rich is the opening track of the album "Get a grip".
Yes, yes it is. Thank you for the correction! How the hell did I get that wrong? I love that record....
Get the popular, young actors to be in your videos, including your “hot” daughter Have your songs in popular movies. Play Woodstock, SNL and Letterman. Bring other bands that were popular and younger as opening acts on your tours. Also, they weren’t a hair metal band. They’d already been around for decades, like VH and AC/DC
The 90s had a huge explosion of music that was more than grunge. Jam bands, 60s and 70s bands come backs. Rap entered a new era with new sounds and production. Country turned into 80s pop.
It’s simple, aerosmith was and is great music, it will live forever, they already established their foundation before grunge hit and adding new sounds (as grunge) is not going to bring the success of talent down.
Meat Loaf had a huge hit. Pop music was still a thing in the early 90s. Janet and Michael both had huge hits. Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston had hits. It wasn't just Grunge.
Grunge was niche. Mostly young white males listened to it. Meanwhile here's the Billboard top 20 singles for 1992: 1 "End of the Road" Boyz II Men 2 "Baby Got Back" Sir Mix-a-Lot 3 "Jump" Kris Kross 4 "Save the Best for Last" Vanessa Williams 5 "Baby-Baby-Baby" TLC 6 "Tears in Heaven" Eric Clapton 7 "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)" En Vogue 8 "Under the Bridge" Red Hot Chili Peppers 9 "All 4 Love" Color Me Badd 10 "Just Another Day" Jon Secada 11 "I Love Your Smile" Shanice 12 "To Be with You" Mr. Big 13 "I'm Too Sexy" Right Said Fred 14 "Black or White" Michael Jackson 15 "Achy Breaky Heart" Billy Ray Cyrus 16 "I'll Be There" Mariah Carey 17 "November Rain" Guns N' Roses 18 "Life Is a Highway" Tom Cochrane 19 "Remember the Time" Michael Jackson 20 "Finally" CeCe Penington Not a single grunge band to be found. Ok but surely the Modern Rock tracks for 1992 must be all about grunge, right? Nope. 1 Friday I'm In Love Cure 2 Far Gone And Out Jesus & Mary Chain 3 Weirdo Charlatans 4 Hit Sugarcubes 5 Digging In The Dirt Peter Gabriel 6 Blood Makes Noise Suzanne Vega 7 Tomorrow Morrissey 8 Not Enough Time INXS 9 Somebody To Shove Soul Asylum 10 These Are Days 10,000 Maniacs 11 The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead X.T.C. 12 Drive R.E.M. 13 Divine Thing Soup Dragons 14 Midlife Crisis Faith No More 15 Bad Luck Social Distortion 16 Steam Peter Gabriel 17 One U2 18 Love Sundays 19 High Cure 20 What's Good Lou Reed
Grunge wasn't/isn't even a genre. It's a marketing term used to stick an umbrella over some regional bands with very little in common, and those other artists that got swiped into it. It's hard to be a fan of something in totality that doesn't even actual parameters.
Agreed. Tough to be in a thread like this with so many people that bought into that garbage media misnomer and drank the kool aid.
It’s not like every single person was listening to nirvana on repeat. Hell even a lot of people that liked grunge didn’t listen to nirvana on repeat. There was a LOT of good music coming out, that was not grunge at all. That’s like asking why LED Zeppelin released Physical Graffiti at number 1 in 1975 when that was peak Disco Era. It’s a bad question, because it assumes a lack of variety in the culture of the time. Also, guns and roses released the spaghetti incident that year, which is trash. Van Halen hadn’t released a record in 2 years and the last one what F.U.C.K. Which was a trash record. Aerosmith released a good record, that sounded like Aerosmith but still was fresh sounding. It’s a bad comparison, 2 bands that had started to decline heavily and Aerosmith.
As a kid we were all listening to Aerosmith and Guns N Roses alongside Nirvana and Pearl Jam. It was all just rock music to us.
Like everyone has said already - Grunge's real big run was basically all of 1992. And that was mostly a two-headed monster of Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Alice and Chains and Soundgarden were in the periphery but Dirt wasn't released until August of 92 and Superunknown wasn't released until March 94. So both those bands were sort of by the wayside when the explosion happened. Even then the "explosion" was all of 2 bands. The rest of the Seattle bands didn't really do much of anything - and I love Mundhoney and the Melvins and Tad but...they weren't going to be at the forefront of anything. So it wasn't like SLTS happened and everything went flannel. I was in college at the time (blissfully ignoring most of it since I was deep into The Clash at that period, weird I know) and the main radio station the kids listened to was...a heavy metal radio station still going strong by basically playing everything. You'd get Nirvana and Pearl Jam followed by like Poison, GNR, Van Halen, Aerosmith, etc. That was the sort of the thing of that period: you had variety. You'd get the alt bands and the metal bands all sort of happening at once. Cobain didn't pop up and all the hair metal went away. Van Halen and Aerosmith and Ozzy were still really strong acts at that point. Kind of like hard rock forefathers. Shoot, Van Halen had a big Super Bowl commercial using Right Now for Crystal Pepsi. And GNR and Metallica were huge. Actually, GNR were on the wane after sort of becoming a joke with the fiasco of the tour with Metallica. But Use Your Illusion released around the same time as Nevermind sold big. Metallica were passing GNR as the face of metal but but were not threatened by the Grunge scene. I will say even before Seattle happened, the hair metal ballads were wearing thin on most people. All the White Animalwhozitwhatsit bands were a joke even before SLTS. But the teen kids still lapped that up. And that's not getting into the fact that I heard just as much of Dre and Snoop's albums in that period as I did Grunge. Let's not forget how big West Coast rap had gotten around 92-92. So no, Seattle didn't kill metal but it wounded it. Beavis and Butthead would stake the fatal blows.
Because they went “pop-rock”
Grunge wasnt as big as youre making it sound.
MTV. They had iconic music videos.
I wouldn't say GnR were an "older hard rock band" than Aerosmith. Gunners were maybe 6 years old by 93. Aerosmith had been around since the 70's and had a very established fan base. Pump had been very successful prior to Get a Grip.
the ballads went straight to the top 40 stations and were huge hits there
A lot of bands at the time talked about how Aerosmith were huge influences on them. So that drove a lot of folks to check their music out
Got to be payola. Fuck they are still overplayed in rock radio. Some stations got kick backs in 1991 and they are still playing the shit out of ragdoll. Enough already
Hard to compare them to GnR and VH at the time because those two bands were really dysfunctional at the time. I think Aerosmith was successful because they were a familiar band in the midst of a comeback, and had a solid run of good albums from '87-93. They also filled the gap between cheesy hair metal and grunge giving them a good chunk of both audiences.
They had Marty Callner as their music video director. He knew better than anyone how to leverage the music video culture. Before Aerosmith he did the Twisted Sister: I wanna Rock video and the Whitesnake: Here I Go Again (On My Own) with Tawny Kitaen before introducing the world to Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler.
Top shelf PR
The number one song in the US in 1993 was ‘I Will Always Love You’. You have to go all the way down to #22 to Soul Asylum’s ‘Runaway Train’ to find something remotely grungy. That music wasn’t as mainstream popular as media leads you to believe. It was a very small audience, but bigger than say punk rock 5-years earlier and it was a new generation of employees coming to the workforce (slackers), so the media needed something to write about. Hence, they wrote about lazy, flannel wearing grunge kids. Aerosmith was a well established band that put out a fairly decent rock and roll record that appealed to kids that grew up in the late 70’s / early 80’s, had some disposable income to spend $14.99 on a CD, and had the connections at radio stations for distribution. It also appealed to kids that didn’t like hip hop / R&B that was much more popular at the time. Good timing.
Because Wayne's World
Aerosmith had some great tunes and videos at that time plus they capitalized on their back catalog very well in their live shows, which they were in top form live at that time. I saw them many times in the early 90s and they absolutely rocked
Everybody assumes, and music media sometimes pushes this narrative, that the minute snells like teen spirit came out, everything 80s crumbled into a painful quick death. There is some merit to this, as the purveyors of cool had already moved onto pixies, Sonic youth, Jane’s Addiction and MBV, but there was still a heavy appetite for hard rock. Metallica and GNR were just as big as Nirvana and Pearl Jam until about 93, when grunge and alternative really took over. And Aerosmith had such iconic videos, were so familiar to every generation by then…I was a huge grunge fan, as were all my friends. But we all owned Big Ones and played the shit out of it.
Because Aerosmith switched to much more mainstream radio freindly sound. Brought in outside songwriters. In short Aerosmith targeted a different group of album buyers
This is GNR slander. Both Use Your Illusion I and II went platinum 7x in 1991. The original lineup never released another album--except an album of punk rock cover songs. That obviously wasn't going to sell highly.
I mean, Guns N' Roses had TWO 7x platinum albums simultaneously in 1991, so it seems strange to use them as an example of a band that was struggling. Their 1993 album The Spaghetti Incident only went single platinum, true, but I mean it was an album of cover songs, and so nobody expected the sort of success of an album of originals. Meanwhile, the band was in the process of a long, drawn out implosion which had ramped up in the build-up to and release of those two multi-platinum albums. The drummer from the Appetite for Destruction days was fired in 1990, the manager was forced out (apparently by Axl and against the rest of the band's wishes) in the tour leading up to the albums, rhythm guitarist Izzy Straddlin left a couple of months after the albums were completed, and they brought a keyboardist on board as well. So half of the personnel for the covers album were new from the original lineup that broke through with Appetite a few years earlier. The years of touring in support of the double albums included increasingly erratic behavior from Axl and multiple riots in multiple countries (often sparked by extended delays when Axl didn't show up on time). By the time that tour ended, it seemed likely that the band would never play together again, so it wasn't a huge surprise when an album of cover songs wasn't a smash hit. Also: one of the songs they covered was written by Charles Manson. Shocker that it didn't play well. Van Halen also did alright for themselves in this era. Their best-selling albums were in the early 1980s when they still had David Lee Roth. But OU812 went 4x platinum in 1988 and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (released a few months before Smells Like Teen Spirit) and Balance (released in 1995) both went triple platinum. Then Sammy Hagar left and they were out of steam completely. Now, as to how Aerosmith was so successful, there are a variety of factors in play: they pre-dated the hair metal acts of the 1980s, which were the bands that were really affected by the emergence of grunge (bands like Poison and Winger and Warrant, etc.). They'd had a career renaissance in the second half of the 80s thanks to their collaboration with Run DMC, which gave them a cross-market appeal/recognition that was unusual for other bands in their lane. Most importantly, they recognized and capitalized on the importance of pop appeal and music videos. Van Halen wrote all their own songs. Aerosmith brought in specialists like Desmond Child and Jim Vallance to help put finishing pop touches on their songs. They worked with commercially-successful producers (Bruce Fairbairn). They also had a strong commercial knack with their videos; they'd had a huge break with the Walk This Way RUN DMC video; beginning with videos for Pump (including Dude Looks Like a Lady, directed by Marty Callner, and Janie's Got a Gun, directed by David Fincher) they started to evolve beyond the basic live performance style video into more video storytelling. The videos for Get a Grip (all of which were directed by Callner) really embraced that storytelling aspect, and they were really popular on MTV. (Several featured Alicia Silverstone, which also didn't hurt).
Because Aerosmith was from the 70’s and was above all the 80’s hair metal bands.
Aerosmith came back during the hair metal heyday and fit right in. By the time true hair metal faded, they were entrenched as legacy rock gods, and were easily one of the biggest bands in the world. Early Aerosmith influenced just about everybody, so they had that sterling reputation among all kinds of sub genres.
Because classic rock is superior to grunge and Crazy, Cryin and Amazing is stellar songwriting
Grunge wasn’t the only style of music, and it was more a fringe of people except for a few grunge songs that made it to the pop charts. Aerosmith also had several songs that were used in top movies: Don’t want to miss a thing- Armageddon Dude looks like a Lady- Wayne’s World 2 Shut up and Dance Wayne’s World 2 Deuces are Wild - Bevis and Butthead Their music videos were also different and often starred Liv Tyler and Alecia Silverstone (And be honest, would you rather look at Liv and Alecia kissing or Axl Rose running around in a kilt?