Re: rock music, country music, and cultural shifts. Sociopolitically speaking, I’m much more bothered by the fact that the...
Re: rock music, country music, and cultural shifts. Sociopolitically speaking, I’m much more bothered by the fact that the Springsteen/Mellencamp school of blue collar rock was superseded by country music in the rust belt. I’m not exactly bigoted against southerners, but the dixification has accompanied other cultural shifts I dislike (mainly anti-unionism and associated ideas), so I’m just gonna go ahead blame Garth Brooks et al. as scapegoats.
As for KISS vs glam metal pretty boys, I’m solidly team pretty boys. Kiss just always rubbed me the wrong way somehow, and musically they were far inferior to the other hard rock acts of the era. Kind of a shame the way pop metal also lost a big chunk of its core audience to country; how that exactly happened has always baffled me. As an aside, don’t count out the contributions of east coast pretty boys to the glam scene, it was really just Bon Jovi, but they had some serious jams
Yeah, back in high school the kids who hadn’t internalized a degreed white-collar norm listened to “hard rock”. I jokingly called nü metal “some college rock”, riffing off 80s proto-alternative and the educational demographic it seemed to suit, but I don’t really see that these days and wonder what they could have moved on to, everything now is the classic “everything but” genres: rap and country