7 responses so far ↓

• 1 nic // Jun 21, 2002 at 10:39 pm

  I’m sure their labels paid them well to make those anti-establishment, rebellious comments.

• 2 tikihead // Jun 22, 2002 at 8:52 am

  I didn’t think of that, but I’m sure their A&R guys approved of the content prior to publishing..Elton John made a few comments as well, but he is spared the ridicule because at least he was around during the FM heyday.

• 3 Scotty The Body // Jun 22, 2002 at 9:21 am

  I can’t think of a period during which, overall, commercial radio has not sucked ass. It’s a fact. We remember most of the good stuff, but for every time you heard something off “Nevermind,” you had to hear “Evenflow” or some shit off of “Achtung Baby.”Corporate radio does not, for the most part, play what people want to hear, it plays what it is paid to play. Sure, it’s ALWAYS been hard for independent acts and/or labels to penetrate it. The “revolution” of Nirvana was, in fact, a Geffen product. David Geffen has more money than God, and it was used to catapult Nirvana to the top. This was supposedly the beginning of an era of independent artistry and quality music on the radio. The fact of the matter is that as good as the songs are on “Nevermind,” they are nearly all computer. Loops and samples of the best bits, strung together with icy precision—the thunder and passion of the Blitzkreig funneled through an array of TeknoTools and reassembled as pop. Nirvana was a trick played on the world. Now the shitheads in Matchbox 20 and Everclear, which are nothing more than monkies repeating a task they’ve been trained to do—mimic a product they’ve consumed, are whining about the fact that they’ve collected fat checks and, through corporate tactics such as pay-to-play, slush funds and just flat-out multi-million dollar marketing jobs, managed to force the good people of the world to hear their terrible, terrible music. With the exception of hip hop’s independent lables coming out of nowhere with platinum sales (a fact the music industry bodies had to adjust to since they didn’t even imagine it to be possible), nothing revolutionary has happened in the music business since the single. Think about it: Pollstar (or whatever the system is named) wasn’t even really tracking sales of “units” (cd, tape, LP), but polling. There were multi-platinum hip hop records that didn’t show up on the charts because it was so far off of their radar. Once they adjusted for sales, hip hop, soul and country began to dominate the charts.

• 4 nic // Jun 23, 2002 at 3:00 am

  Nirvana sucks. No, wait. That was Primus…I think. They all pretty ran together except for the Meat Puppets.

• 5 Elliott // Jun 24, 2002 at 3:26 pm

  I don’t know about radio playing only what they are paid to play, Scott, especially when the example is Nirvana. I think even the people who are running radio are in a somewhat reactive mode.The thing I remember most about Nirvana on the radio was that it rocked solid, and everyone thought so. If it was a set-up, it was a thing of beauty, because it was different than everything else on the radio then. Someone took a risk with the machinery of promotion and it paid off.What stinks, I think, is what came next, when the machinery of promotion fed us the Grunge Sound of Seattle. “Jeremy” stunk. Pearl Jam stinks.By the way, have you ever been tricked by a Contemporary Christian song? There you are, driving along, and you catch the middle of a catchy pop tune, only to realize, too late, that it’s Con Christ? Oh, I hate when they think they have saved me…

• 6 tikihead // Jun 24, 2002 at 10:37 pm

  I’m all for musical acts getting on the radio and selling gazillions of records; Beck comes to mind. Most of the rest of it though, just has that force-fed feel to it. The big producers, Butch Vig for example, mix the records with radio in mind; everything is so compressed on contemporary radio. It’s like we used to be served orange juice, now it’s “synthetic orange drink.”

• 7 Anonymous // Mar 2, 2004 at 12:58 pm

  NIRVANA IS THE BEST BAND EVER!

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