Everything sucks! And, I’m going to sing about it

Untitled – August 25, 2026
00:00:00 Dwayne: Welcome back to Whatever the Gen X podcast. I’m Dwayne, your host.
00:00:21 Heather: And I’m Heather.
00:00:21 Dwayne: We are very sorry we missed a week in there. We were suffering through a heat wave. We normally record out of a studio that’s on the third floor of a building that is not air conditioned. So that wasn’t going to happen. Uh, hopefully as summer is starting to fade now and autumn is starting to come into play.
00:00:37 Heather: Sweater Weather!
00:00:38 Dwayne: All right. This week we have got a very special episode for you. We are taking a listener comment. Mark E wrote to us and said that he wanted to hear our thoughts on whether or not the nineties alternative rock grunge was really a reflection of Gen X alienation, or was it a package sold to us by corporations? We’re going to touch on that. We’re going to get to all sorts of dirt and grittiness on all of that. But first, this is this week in Gen X history for the week of August twenty third through the twenty ninth.
00:01:07 Heather: Whatever. On August twenty third, nineteen eighty five, Teen Wolf hit the theater starring Michael J. Fox, riding right off the back of Back To The Future. He had two lead roles in the theater at one time. Wow. Just a four million dollars budget, and it pulled in eighty million worldwide. Basically, he was a he thought he was a nobody and discovers he was secretly extraordinary the whole time. Kind of a you had it in you moment instead of working to earn it.
00:01:35 Dwayne: I’ve seen the movie. I don’t really remember much about it other than I remember Michael J. Fox on the basketball court. Yes, he kind of turns into a werewolf and in one scene there and everybody loves him for it because I don’t remember that we’ve got to sit down and watch it.
00:01:52 Heather: It’s a classic.
00:01:53 Dwayne: Movie, just acquired the movie, and we’re going to sit down and probably watch it tonight or tomorrow. I really can’t wait. Coming up on Monday, August the twenty fourth, nineteen seventy five, Queen entered the studios in Wales. It was Rockfield Studios. Spent about three weeks there recording Bohemian Rhapsody. A large portion of the movie Bohemian Rhapsody is about the making of this song.
00:02:16 Heather: I think it was a gift to me because it came out two months after I was born.
00:02:19 Dwayne: Just two months after you were born, so I’m sure you don’t remember it. Heck, I don’t remember it, I remember. And most of us, most folks of our generation, even remember this song. It was on radio a little bit in the seventies when it came out, but it really became huge.
00:02:34 Heather: With Wayne’s World.
00:02:35 Dwayne: Absolutely. Party on.
00:02:37 Heather: Party on, party on. Garth.
00:02:39 Dwayne: The band Queen were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in two thousand and one. The song itself went into the Grammy Hall of Fame in two thousand and four. The song has over one point six billion streams as of like six years ago. It is officially the most streamed song of the twentieth century. It’s well ahead of Smells Like Teen Spirit and Sweet Child of Mine and all those others. A lot of that was boosted by the biopic in twenty eighteen. That movie made over six hundred million dollars at the box office.
00:03:10 Heather: It was a good movie.
00:03:11 Dwayne: The video for this song became the first pre nineteen nineties video to hit a billion YouTube streams. And in July twenty nineteen, this thing was crazy. And it’s you know, I recall I forget which magazine it was, but they dubbed it as the best song of the twentieth century.
00:03:28 Heather: It is. It’s an amazing song. Of course it’s Freddie. On Tuesday, August twenty fifth, nineteen eighty nine, Voyager two Neptune flyby. It was launched in nineteen seventy seven, so it took twelve years and a billion miles to get there. So it basically grew up beside Gen X.
00:03:45 Dwayne: Yeah. It’s still the only spacecraft to have ever flown by Neptune. That’s the only one we’ve ever sent out there. Supposedly this thing stayed within like twenty two miles of its planned journey to all the way out there. Yeah, that’s crazy, considering the distances.
00:03:59 Heather: I mean, I was just a teenager, but I don’t even remember this.
00:04:02 Dwayne: I remember each of the the Voyager, both Voyager missions. I remember when they launched because I was I was a youngster in elementary school. I remember as they were each, you know, starting to make their, their big tours of the, especially the outer planets, the big gas planets and everything. That was kind of always covered heavily on the news. And it was a lot in, in school, they would talk about it a lot.
00:04:24 Heather: Right now it is about thirteen point three billion miles away, with a radio signal taking almost twenty hours to reach it one way. It’s still transmitting and expected to keep going until the early twenty thirties.
00:04:37 Dwayne: Yeah, I think we’ve lost. We didn’t actually lose contact, but it’s near the end of us ever being to contact it for Voyager one. Wow. On Thursday, August the twenty seventh, nineteen ninety, Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash. He had been playing at an all star encore jam with Eric Clapton, buddy Guy, Robert Cray and his brother Jimmy at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Wisconsin. As we seen or heard several times in rock and roll history. He grabbed a seat on a last minute flight of one of four helicopters that was ferrying everyone back to Chicago.
00:05:12 Heather: They never learned.
00:05:13 Dwayne: The pilot lost visibility in dense fog and crashed less than a mile from takeoff. Stevie had just come through a highly public recovery from addiction and was, by all accounts, playing the best he ever had that night. He was one of the few guys that made it on to MTV at a time that his music was very, very bluesy and heavy compared to what was on MTV at the time. In the late eighties. There was a lot of power metal and a lot of synth pop, and everything that was on dance music was was really popular. But Stevie Ray stands out. I didn’t own any of his albums or anything. Me neither. But you can hear his style.
00:05:48 Heather: You know him. If you hear.
00:05:49 Dwayne: Him, anytime you hear it. Come on. You know it’s.
00:05:51 Heather: Him. All right. On Saturday, August twenty ninth, nineteen fifty eight. Michael Jackson was born in Gary, Indiana. Technically a boomer by birth, but definitely a Gen X defining musical childhood figure thriller. RIAA certified for thirty four million units in the United States, which was the best selling solo album in the US history. Worldwide estimates run from seventy million to one hundred plus million, depending on the source. Spent thirty seven weeks at number one on the Billboard two hundred, the longest run for a studio album, and was the first album to produce seven top ten hits.
00:06:30 Dwayne: Thriller was huge, but across his whole career he still. He had thirteen number one singles more than any other male artist in that whole era. He holds like thirty nine Guinness World Records, including the umbrella title most successful entertainer of all Time.
00:06:46 Heather: I can see that his huge. His videos helped force MTV to start playing black artists in regular rotation.
00:06:53 Dwayne: His nineteen eighty seven nineteen eighty eight Bad World Tour drew over four point four million people in fifteen countries. He sold out seven nights straight in Wembley Stadium. That was over five hundred and four thousand people. That was a Guinness record at the time. I can’t imagine who’s broke it since.
00:07:10 Heather: Right. Is there anybody today at that level? Beyonce, Taylor, Bruno Mars they’re huge.
00:07:16 Dwayne: But you know I still I go by the could you walk into a small village in Central Africa. No. And mentioned Taylor Swift and get a reaction. No I don’t think so. But you absolutely could have with Michael Jackson for sure. He was.
00:07:33 Heather: Everywhere.
00:07:34 Dwayne: No matter what may have come out later about him. I don’t know that there’s been there’s been a lot of speculation about Michael’s past. Uh, but I don’t want to get too much into all that right there. We’re here to celebrate the fact that, uh, he was born at this time. Musically he was. Musically he was a huge influence on our generation. All right, let’s get on into this week’s episode. We’ve been. Heather and I have been working on this for a couple of weeks now. Based on the listener feedback, I initially titled this Thing Everything Sucks and I’m going to sing about it.
00:08:13 Heather: And I’ve been dreading this episode because people are going to hate on me.
00:08:17 Dwayne: I was not the biggest fan of grunge. You could tell in the early nineties that radio was starting to take a turn. Music was starting to take a turn. What was popular?
00:08:29 Heather: What was being played?
00:08:31 Dwayne: We had come through a rather long period of hard rock, and I hate the term hair metal. Um, because.
00:08:38 Heather: It’s just because I had big hair.
00:08:40 Dwayne: Well, and very few of the bands had very much metal to them, honestly.
00:08:44 Heather: Honestly, a lot of them were more poppy with heavy guitar.
00:08:48 Dwayne: They really were big hair, spandex, leather party girls.
00:08:53 Heather: Yeah. Drugs.
00:08:54 Dwayne: Yeah. But that hair metal term that really dominated the MTV era. It looked good on. It really did. It made for fun music videos. So it really just was everywhere. Sadly, what started to happen was there was a lot of movement within the industry to sign bands that if they had the look, we could make the sound, we can make the sound in the studio. So you started getting a lot of bands coming up that most of them were relegated to being opening acts for the bigger bands that were out there, but they would try to get them airplay. There were so many of them too. I was just thinking earlier of the cookie cutter bands that I called them. There was Bourgeois Tagg, Faster Pussycat, Bang Tango. There are so many.
00:09:35 Heather: Bang tango, man.
00:09:37 Dwayne: These were, these were, these were bands that they weren’t bad, but.
00:09:41 Heather: They could have been great.
00:09:42 Dwayne: You could play a song from any of those bands to me right now, and I could not pick them out of a lineup.
00:09:48 Heather: Oh, I could.
00:09:49 Dwayne: I could not, because they all, to me kind of just sounded the same.
00:09:52 Heather: They have the same style, you know, big guitar intro, big drums, the scream.
00:10:00 Dwayne: Another big problem from the music of this era that a lot of folks had mentioned online. And I really kind of agree with them and that they would push these, especially the newer artists, they were pushing them really hard for the ballad, the big power ballad. Yes. You had to have a power ballad. There was a time when most, most rock bands would not be caught dead playing a power ballad.
00:10:22 Heather: But, you know, girls really got into music with those power ballads.
00:10:27 Dwayne: Oh, absolutely. Um, you look back that, you know, the first arena rock ballads to come out were the right around the same time when journey put out Open Arms and Foreigner’s Waiting for a Girl Like you. So those really opened up the door for the big ballads. Ozzy was one of the first ones with a power ballad out there from the hard rock scene with Mama I’m Coming Home.
00:10:47 Heather: Oh, that’s a good song.
00:10:48 Dwayne: It really is. I remember he didn’t really want to record it and put it on the album. He wrote it for Sharon and would love to play it on the bus and was playing around with it. And a producer at the time just absolutely insisted that needs to go on the album, and that’s how it made it on there. But yeah, the during the, the hair metal era and we’re going to talk a lot about hair metal next week. I believe that’s our upcoming episode there. We want to do a deep dive on the early bands, the rise of the really good ones. I want to talk Your Rat’s Cinderella’s Bon Jovi, even though they don’t want to be considered a hair band. John, are you are.
00:11:19 Heather: You are.
00:11:19 Dwayne: You are you were and you are.
00:11:22 Heather: You have the big hair. Therefore you are a hair band.
00:11:25 Dwayne: There were some bands from that era that survived, ones that tried really hard. One of my favorite attempts at any of this was Def Leppard. Def Leppard went through some huge changes. I mean, not just, you know, with the band, they lost a couple of members over the years to, to whatever. One member lost an arm to a car accident. They had a really heavy guitar sound early on. Their sound kind of adjusted for the hair metal era, and they introduced more synths. And it’s not necessarily a synth sound, it’s just the sound of the guitars, because the two lead guitarists there that made it sound more full bodied. I consider it.
00:12:04 Heather: Well, and Rick with his drumming. Yeah, they had to adjust.
00:12:07 Dwayne: Yeah, he had to go to electric drums, uh, which, uh, you know, helped drive that sound as well. They went along with the grunge sound with slang.
00:12:14 Heather: Yeah. Which coincidentally was probably my least favorite album.
00:12:18 Dwayne: It was my least favorite when it first.
00:12:20 Heather: Came out, but now I’m getting to where I love it.
00:12:23 Dwayne: Yeah. When slang first came out, I listened to it and said, what the hell is this? Yeah, there was not a good song on there.
00:12:28 Heather: Yeah, I was like, they’ve gone grunge. Why, why, why would they do this to me?
00:12:33 Dwayne: Exactly. I put that CD away for a good long time.
00:12:36 Heather: I didn’t even buy it.
00:12:37 Dwayne: Oh, I had it because it’s Def Leppard. I had to buy it and I was. I was severely disappointed at the time. Now it’s one of my favorite in their whole collection. Yeah, there’s, there’s some really good songs that are on there when you look back musically and that that same could be said for the entirety of the grunge era, when grunge was grunge, when it was big, when it was pushed down our throats, uh, I hated it.
00:13:02 Heather: I hated grunge, I dare I say it, I still hate grunge, I hate Smells Like Teen Spirit. I never liked it. Never liked Nirvana. There. It’s out there. Come at me.
00:13:12 Speaker 3: How could you not love this?
00:13:16 Speaker 4: The most annoying song ever.
00:13:22 Dwayne: I hated it then. I can stand it now, basically because the drumming in it and the guitar riffs in it are very catchy. I was never a huge fan of the vocals in that song. It reminded me I’m sorry, but most all of Nirvana’s music and most of the grunge songs themselves, to me have. I mean, they’re all in this very down tuned key and they all sound alike. Very much so. I know there are those out there who are going to hate that I said that and are going to, you know, want to come at me. You can do that.
00:13:56 Speaker 5: But I’ve got a new Cobain forever in debt to your presence.
00:14:06 Dwayne: You will never, ever convince me that that was a worthy replacement for what we had.
00:14:12 Heather: I’m sorry. Maybe he had a good voice at one time, but it does not come out on albums. I just don’t understand it.
00:14:24 Dwayne: So where did all this stuff come from? Apparently, uh, because we had to go down the rabbit hole on this one because both of us kind of went through this phase where we both were not big fans of it. We were wondering, where on earth did it even come from? How did it come at us? And that’s why I love with Mark’s question. Was this something that was, you know, manufactured and pushed on us? There’s there’s some truth to that assumption, really. Apparently in the mid eighties, around nineteen eighty six or so, Seattle wasn’t really on the map. There was a movement of these bands as they were forming their the mid eighties of Pearl jam, Soundgarden, Nirvana.
00:15:04 Heather: Mother Love Bone. They were like one of the very first underground bands in Seattle that really pushed grunge.
00:15:11 Dwayne: Mother Love Bone.
00:15:13 Heather: Mother Love bone, never heard of. Would is the lead singer.
00:15:17 Dwayne: Never heard of him, but supposedly it was. The Seattle underground scene was an easier place to get started in as well. Things were cheaper up there. It wasn’t like all the big bands that were coming out of la. La is an expensive place. It was super expensive then. It’s super expensive.
00:15:32 Heather: Today. It’s cheap. In Seattle, tickets were cheap. You could go to concert studio.
00:15:36 Dwayne: Time was cheap. There was. There were tons and tons of small venues. You have to remember the mid eighties, early 90s. This is when a little company like Microsoft was being founded up there. They were starting to bring some people in. There were other. The whole Seattle scene was starting to come online. There was supposedly a company there though, Sub Pop Records, which was formed in nineteen eighty six. They started with a whole plan to basically take over the music world, and they kind of did they.
00:16:08 Heather: For a few years.
00:16:08 Dwayne: Yeah, for a few years there, they really did. They they were the ones who were behind the whole grunge scene. Everything from the music, the bands they signed, most all of these acts that we knew as grunge bands came out of Sub Pop Records and Sub Pop also pushed along with that. Not just the music, but the whole scene. Yes, it was dirty, it was grungy, it was flannel, it was ripped jeans. And when you have an entire identity that can be wrapped around something, it made it a lot easier for other industries to jump on board with it. If you can push a look, well, then the fashion industry is going to jump on it. And I remember in the nineties, flannel was suddenly everywhere. Everywhere there was designer flannel labels and they cost an arm and a leg for the same flannel that Wrangler had been selling for years.
00:16:59 Heather: Come out of this?
00:17:00 Dwayne: Probably. Quite possibly. But yeah, I think they were. I can get behind that whole thing. They’re just looking at some of the research that’s been done that Sub-pop was really the ones who pushed the Seattle sound. They pushed the Seattle look and they signed all the bands and they marketed it very, very heavily. It was it was cool. It was alternative. It was something different. They started off going to college radio stations, going to independent radio stations and pushing indie labels.
00:17:30 Heather: In ninety five, the label signed twenty million dollars joint venture with Warner Brothers Records. So, you know, they were all about it was underdogs.
00:17:39 Dwayne: So it was really a kind of a corporate push. It was part all part of the business plan.
00:17:44 Heather: Yeah, it was part of the business plan.
00:17:46 Dwayne: Absolutely. So who were these bands? Where did they come from? Oh well, we know they came from Seattle, but who were they? And we’ve already touched on Nirvana a little bit. And Nirvana was probably the biggest. Their album, Never Mind, came out in September of nineteen ninety one. That was the one that really exploded. Smells like Teen Spirit was everywhere.
00:18:04 Heather: Everywhere.
00:18:05 Dwayne: It really exploded. And it’s kind of funny or not funny. It’s sad in a way. Kurt Cobain was very reluctant to be the front man of this movement. He was an artist at heart and wanted his music to mean something and not just be the face of this whole movement. And what he probably saw, I can’t say for what he actually thought, that it’s highly likely that he saw it for what it was, which was that corporate machine pushing everything.
00:18:32 Heather: Yeah. I watched several videos of interviews with him trying to get into the mind of grunge. He seemed like a decent person, like he wanted his music out there. But he also didn’t want the fame. He talked about how much concert tickets were costing. I couldn’t believe that Madonna was selling tickets for like seventy dollars a ticket when theirs were twenty five.
00:18:55 Dwayne: Those were the cheap tickets these days, seventy dollars. Seventy dollars if you’re.
00:18:59 Heather: Lucky. Nosebleed section. Yeah. All their music was just so depressing.
00:19:03 Dwayne: It really was. And speaking of Pearl jam, Eddie Vedder, he had a decent voice. He could sing. Um, but.
00:19:10 Heather: I just never hear it because he’s always mumbling.
00:19:12 Dwayne: So.
00:19:14 Speaker 5: Oh. Maybe he’ll sing a little bit of Saturday. Oh, yeah.
00:19:24 Dwayne: I mean, Eddie has a good singing voice. I thought he was one of the few from this whole era whose voice I thought was good and rather distinctive. He’s not truly distinctive. They all kind of have that.
00:19:35 Heather: They all kind of sound alike.
00:19:37 Dwayne: They sound very, very similar. But Eddy’s lyrics are so depressive. Most of the music was about depression, homelessness, suicide, and this particular.
00:19:48 Heather: Song wanted it to be real life kind of music.
00:19:52 Speaker 5: That didn’t give attention. To the fact that mommy didn’t care.
00:20:02 Dwayne: This is Jeremy by Pearl jam and this song is one I. Personally. I hated the song when I. When I first heard it and I saw the video for the first time on it, the video is very much all over the place, but it tells a story of a young boy, Jeremy, who comes from an abusive household, came from and, you know, was a victim of child neglect. Children bullied him and pushed him around at school, took a gun, a loaded gun to school and shot it up and ended up dying himself.
00:20:28 Heather: Yeah. And that’s to me, glorifying that whole situation.
00:20:33 Dwayne: Yeah. As an adult, you can look at this and go, well, that’s a terrible thing. But adults aren’t the ones who are watching MTV, right? Weren’t the ones who are watching the videos and listening to the music. It’s kids. And I always just saw that as as a young teen. Teens are so impressionable. They might talk like they know everything because they do, apparently, but they they are certainly very, very impressionable. And when you leave the impression on a young teen that kids who come from bad households and kids who, um, are picked on and teased in school that what they, what they do, because people like us do things like this, what those kind of people do are, is they take guns into schools and they blow everybody up so they can be shot and get out of their misery.
00:21:17 Heather: Yeah, that’s.
00:21:17 Dwayne: I did not like this song. I did not like the industry pushing this song. I did not like all the airplay that it got. It was really, truly one of the things that drove me really hard away from, uh, grunge to begin with.
00:21:29 Heather: I mean, I get it. Each different type of music had their drugs, you know, hair metal had the cocaine, grunge had heroin and literally everything else. And they glorified it. I mean, a lot of these guys would go to rehab ten times and then kill themselves. Like all these guys have all killed themselves. I’m like, why? Why were you not going to counseling? I mean, the one good thing that came out of grunge was it got people talking about mental health, but.
00:21:56 Dwayne: That it did. But it may have been a little bit too late. And I think it was a little bit after, uh, things were glorified a little too much.
00:22:02 Heather: Way too much. Yeah.
00:22:03 Dwayne: Even though, I mean, there, there are those who will come at us, I’m sure, and say that this isn’t glorifying this. No, but it is shining a spotlight on it. And there are those who, anytime you shine a spotlight on a subject, will take it the wrong way. Yeah.
00:22:19 Heather: Take it to an extreme.
00:22:20 Dwayne: Uh, another band that was really big that came out of this era was Alice in Chains.
00:22:25 Heather: Okay, let’s talk Alice in Chains. I will admit, it was the one grunge concert. Yes. I went to a grunge concert in nineteen ninety two, and it was Alice in Chains and Peony Park in Omaha. And yeah, I think I probably wore a flannel shirt because that’s what was expected of me.
00:22:43 Dwayne: People like us do things like this, right?
00:22:46 Heather: So I had to fit in. But I have always liked Layne Staley’s voice.
00:22:57 Speaker 5: They found a way to kill me. I burn with stinging sweat. Seems every pair fits me to know.
00:23:19 Dwayne: This particular song here was rooster. It’s about, uh. It was really written about his father and him dealing with PTSD. Yeah, he was a Vietnam vet who suffered from PTSD, and that’s what the song was all about.
00:23:30 Heather: My favorite song is man in the box. I just love it. But I always thought Laine’s voice out of all the grunge singers, Laine have the best vocals of all of them. Just the intro is amazing. I can still see him climbing the ropes on stage.
00:24:04 Dwayne: And there’s nothing at all wrong with this. Um. I do remember this song. I was trying to find a song earlier of theirs that I might know.
00:24:18 Heather: Yeah, I thought he had the best vocals of all the grunge singers.
00:24:22 Dwayne: And he’s not terrible. I can tell you, we we did attend together another grunge concert. It was in twenty thirteen or so, I believe. We were at Virginia Beach at the Rock and Roll Half Marathon, and Stone Temple Pilots were the headliners.
00:24:37 Heather: Hated.
00:24:37 Dwayne: Them. We walked out, I did not I was not a huge fan. I mean, I knew the band, I knew some of their music.
00:24:45 Heather: Yeah.
00:24:47 Speaker 4: I don’t like them.
00:24:49 Dwayne: My problem was the vocalist by this time was shot.
00:24:53 Heather: Um, Scott Wheelan. Yeah, yeah.
00:24:56 Dwayne: His his vocals were just totally.
00:24:58 Heather: That’s the same thing that happened to Layne Staley towards the end.
00:25:02 Dwayne: He didn’t sound anything at all like the recorded studio versions, and he seemed to be either drunk or drugged onstage.
00:25:12 Heather: That was the norm. Yeah, that.
00:25:13 Dwayne: And this was in twenty thirteen. This was, you know, long after their heyday. They were, uh, I mean, the year before that we had attended the Rock and Roll Half Marathon, and the main acts that night were. The opening band was REO Speedwagon.
00:25:27 Speaker 6: And I’m Gonna Keep on Loving You, cause it’s the only thing I wanna do.
00:25:37 Dwayne: And the headliner was Pat Benatar.
00:25:39 Speaker 6: Kevin with the best shot.
00:25:42 Speaker 7: Why don’t you hit me with your best shot? Hit me with your best shot.
00:25:49 Heather: Who? Sounds off subject amazing.
00:25:52 Dwayne: She was amazing.
00:25:54 Heather: She sounds exactly the same in the studio as she does live.
00:25:58 Dwayne: Exactly as she did then. This was a couple of years ago. Yeah, but she sounded amazing when we were kind of expecting the same out of this one here. And it was just. Nothing like this at all. Musically, the band was just all over the place vocally.
00:26:16 Heather: They just got Chaotic. It was, you know, they didn’t sound like they were cohesive as a band.
00:26:24 Dwayne: No, not at all.
00:26:28 Speaker 5: What they said was real. Makes me want to stay.
00:26:37 Dwayne: I mean, you can understand his vocals here. You can understand in all three of these clips that we’ve played so far. Voice isn’t horrible for that show, but I could not understand a word.
00:26:45 Heather: He died.
00:26:46 Dwayne: When did he pass away?
00:26:47 Heather: Twenty fifteen.
00:26:48 Dwayne: Okay, so it was shortly after this. But that’s not to say that that was the only kind of music that was happening in the early nineties. It was kind of what so many people expect or think or claim that Gen X is all about grunge. Grunge was our music. These bands were were us. No, no. These bands were a a very much a flash in the pan. I think to say that would be the same to say that the boomers, the only thing they had was disco.
00:27:18 Speaker 6: Have you heard about the new dance craze?
00:27:22 Dwayne: Disco actually lasted longer than than grunge did. Grunge pretty much lasted for what, ninety one to ninety four?
00:27:30 Heather: Ninety four. Ninety five. Yeah it was. Had a real good four year run.
00:27:34 Dwayne: Yeah. Whereas disco was around for like seven years. Uh, that it was kind of the defining style of music that was out there. Uh, which I think that’s kind of crazy myself is a little bit excessive, but people could move to it, at least.
00:27:47 Heather: I think a lot of the problem was the record labels pushed grunge so hard, so fast and over, commercialized it, and people grew tired of it so quickly. You couldn’t understand the lyrics. And that’s not to say I’m old because I’m not old. Get off my lawn.
00:28:05 Dwayne: We weren’t old then for damn sure. Yeah. In nineteen ninety one I was twenty four.
00:28:12 Heather: At ninety one, I was still in high school, but I even then I did not understand the allure of this depressive, sad, angry music.
00:28:22 Dwayne: That was my problem as well. It just seemed so depressive and sad. We had been in an era when music was, you know, everyone talk about hair bands excesses.
00:28:32 Heather: But it was all about excess. And it was.
00:28:35 Dwayne: Fun. And yeah, it was fun in excess. And we went, you know, one hundred and eighty degrees out from that. Totally the other way. But they weren’t the only thing that was around. I mean, you know, come on, Janet and Michael were out there putting out tons of music.
00:28:46 Heather: Great pop artists.
00:28:47 Dwayne: Mariah was huge at the time. We had boys to men that were coming up, boys.
00:28:52 Speaker 6: All through the night. I’ll make love to you when you want me to and I will not let go. They’ll tell me to. Yeah.
00:29:07 Dwayne: Also, hip hop was exploding at that time. I found a quote from Gene Simmons. I can’t find it right now. But essentially, Gene was saying grunge was responsible for the rise of rap at that time, because rap artists were the real rockers at that time. They were the ones who they were dropping the beats. They were out there with those, uh, very edgy lyrics, very edgy. Uh, the outfits, they looked more rockstar than what you were seeing from Nirvana or Soundgarden or any of these bands. Uh, they, and they were all huge. Nobody wanted to see spandex anymore. And big hair because those were very eighties things. And for some reason we all at that time, especially, we had this opinion that when you flipped the calendar over from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty and from nineteen eighty nine to nineteen ninety, the world will be different. Right. I think we all kind of realize that when two thousand came around and things weren’t that different, that since then, it’s all pretty much been the same.
00:30:04 Heather: Yeah.
00:30:05 Dwayne: There’s not a huge, uh, difference in the musical styles stylings of the late nineties and today.
00:30:11 Heather: Yeah.
00:30:11 Dwayne: And we kind of had the rise.
00:30:13 Heather: American radio is just. Yeah, I don’t know.
00:30:16 Dwayne: The scene is dead.
00:30:16 Heather: It’s stale.
00:30:17 Dwayne: We had as far as musical stylings go, we had the rise for a while of Auto-Tune. But that’s pretty much, you know, been. Thank God. Yeah. That’s been that’s been come and gone. Uh, here in the last couple of years, we’ve had the rise and demise of AI generated music, thankfully. Uh, I think music is something that artists should create, but at that time and back then we had our choices. Some people chose grunge. I still think it was probably, as with so many other things that Gen X has done, it’s the very vocal minority of people who made it seem like it’s more than it actually was.
00:30:51 Heather: I understand I get that those artists were wanting a real authentic this is real life, this is what’s happening. But that’s not really what was happening to everyone.
00:31:04 Dwayne: Right? Like, and I’m sorry to, but if I’m going through a hard time or through bad times, that kind of depressive music is not what I want to hear.
00:31:12 Heather: Right.
00:31:12 Dwayne: And not what.
00:31:13 Heather: You should listen to.
00:31:14 Dwayne: Either. Exactly. Absolutely not. Heather and I both found ourselves really being driven to country around this time in the early nineties. We had guys like Toby Keith coming up. Uh, Toby, you know, produced a whole string of hit singles at this time that were all happy love songs. Uh, or like this one here, one of my favorites of his.
00:31:38 Speaker 8: This is a great song.
00:31:39 Speaker 6: I bet you never heard Omar.
00:31:42 Speaker 5: So, darling.
00:31:43 Speaker 6: Say, miss Kitty, have you ever thought.
00:31:46 Speaker 9: That’s a great song?
00:31:48 Dwayne: Not only do we have Toby, we had Garth.
00:31:52 Speaker 6: Garth.
00:31:53 Speaker 8: I don’t care who you are.
00:31:54 Speaker 6: You standing outside.
00:31:57 Dwayne: I still say that Garth Brooks had.
00:32:00 Speaker 9: A bigger.
00:32:01 Dwayne: Impact on American music than most any other artist has yet, based on the fact that Garth is the one who pushed this kind of country. It was more of a country rock sound. It was a very, very popular popular music and.
00:32:19 Heather: Very radio friendly.
00:32:20 Dwayne: Radio friendly sound. A lot of people hate hating on country today. Uh, and what country music has become today. It is still that stuff that was just the groundwork for it was laid by Garth Brooks and his insane popularity. The man in Central Park. Yeah. In what year was that? Nineteen ninety seven. He put on a free concert in Central Park, packed the park with hundreds of thousands of people. I really wanted to go to that, but I was on the wrong side.
00:32:51 Heather: You know, when I’m thinking about it, hair, metal and country, they aren’t super different if you look lyrically. Like, I know you know Ozzy, oh, Satan the devil. But if you actually listen to the lyrics of any A hair metal band. It’s all about love.
00:33:10 Speaker 10: The angel’s smile is what you say. You promised me heaven. Then put me through hell.
00:33:18 Heather: It’s love or heartbreak.
00:33:20 Dwayne: Yeah, a lot of them are absolutely that. Or they’re, you know, a ways to have fun.
00:33:25 Speaker 10: Take a ride on the wild side.
00:33:32 Speaker 6: Of life.
00:33:35 Heather: Or. Or stories like Iron Maiden.
00:33:38 Dwayne: Yeah.
00:33:39 Heather: Well, iron.
00:33:40 Dwayne: Iron Maiden, I would never put them in the hair metal category, but they are definitely at the, at the pinnacle of the hard rock category.
00:33:47 Heather: Yeah, definitely hard heavy metal.
00:33:49 Speaker 6: Can I play with madness? The prophet stared at his crystal ball. Can I play with madness? There’s no vision there at all.
00:34:02 Heather: Yeah, but they told stories. If you actually listen to their lyrics, their stories.
00:34:07 Dwayne: I’ve always considered maiden to be the the the the educated person’s heavy metal band. They really are. They really are. Because every time I hear a song of theirs. And Chris, if you’re listening. Yeah, I have become a convert. Anytime I listen to a song by Iron Maiden, I have to go look at the lyrics. I have to look up the lyrics. Let’s get the story behind this one here because they’re always so deep.
00:34:28 Heather: Yes.
00:34:28 Dwayne: So yes, Wrathchild, I am a convert.
00:34:31 Heather: So yeah, they think, you know grunge. They always thought they were more authentic and more real. But were they? Yeah, I just, I just don’t see it.
00:34:39 Dwayne: I never thought so. I never thought so. I was born in nineteen sixty seven at the peak of grunge. I was between twenty four and twenty seven years old in there. So at that time I was, I was still in the Army. I was I had done time in Texas and in Germany and in the Middle East. When I first heard it, I was not that impressed whatsoever. I was very fortunate. And during most of that entire period there I was in Germany and in Germany, we had the American Forces Radio Network, AFN. It would feature music from all different, uh, across all different genres, but they did it in kind of blocks. So we’d have like a one hour show in the morning that was news and talk, followed by an hour of pop, followed by an hour of hip hop and then an hour of grunge. And that would be when we’d turn the radio off at the office, and we would turn it back on at one o’clock, because there was a two hour block of country music that came on. That’s kind of how we all that was kind of how I migrated to. It was like, oh, I can stand to listen to the radio again. And I would turn it back on.
00:35:51 Heather: Yeah. In in ninety one, I was a sophomore in high school. And I would say I leaned heavily into the metal and hair bands and I was finding bands that really weren’t in the mainstream, like Pretty Boy Floyd, LA guns wasn’t so much in In demand at the time. Dexter, you know, they came in the end of these were the.
00:36:16 Dwayne: These were the bands that were the the considered the cookie cutter. They’re all starting to sound, look, feel the same.
00:36:23 Heather: What was dangerous toys. Dangerous toys. Love them. And they, you know, they all to me had a different sound. I could pick out the singers because they all. Musically, they sounded a lot alike because, you know, they had the the big guitar riffs, the big screams, the big drums, of course, a power ballad somewhere in there. But the lead singers all had their own distinctive voices. Right. So I leaned more. I leaned heavily into that when grunge came out because I just I just didn’t like grunge at all. I did not like the sound. I did not like the look. I didn’t like the messages.
00:37:00 Dwayne: I was trying to figure it out too. Then, you know, because grunge, to me, it appeared to kind of disappear just about as quickly as it came around. That’s not to say that the sound died, but the movement died.
00:37:11 Heather: The movement died, and it’s kind of coming back again.
00:37:14 Dwayne: We’ve had well, we’ve had a, I think pretty much since about, what was it, ninety five or so. A ninety four was considered, you know, the pretty much the end of the grunge era.
00:37:25 Heather: Kurt Cobain’s death.
00:37:26 Dwayne: When he died. Yeah. There have been a lot of post-grunge bands that have become highly popular, been very successful, but it was all by using the same similar sound, right? Downtuned vocals, Downtuned guitars, and yet using more positive rhythms and lyrics. Obviously I think of bands like Creed.
00:37:49 Speaker 6: You Take Me High. To a place where blind men see. Can you take me?
00:38:03 Dwayne: I think of bands like Three Doors Down.
00:38:06 Speaker 11: I’m here without you, baby. But you’re still on my lonely mind. I think about you, baby. And I dream about you all the time.
00:38:19 Dwayne: Uh, Staind.
00:38:21 Speaker 6: It’s been.
00:38:22 Speaker 11: A while since.
00:38:23 Speaker 6: I could hold.
00:38:27 Speaker 11: My head up high.
00:38:29 Dwayne: Tons of bands that have come up in the post-grunge era that were much more positive and, and much better in in my personal.
00:38:39 Heather: Oh yeah. Post-grunge. Yes. Much better.
00:38:43 Dwayne: So where are these bands today? I understand Pearl jam is still together. Yeah. Uh. Still touring. Soundgarden reunited after Chris Cornell’s death in twenty seventeen. Alice in Chains still out there. I mean, Layne Staley died in two thousand and two. Nirvana Cantor Kurt Cobain died in nineteen ninety four, but we’ve got. Dave Grohl is still out there with.
00:39:05 Heather: The fighters.
00:39:05 Dwayne: The Foo Fighters, which would be considered another post grunge bands because they play a lot more upbeat things as well.
00:39:12 Heather: Which I. When you. When you look back on it and you see Dave Grohl as the drummer in Nirvana.
00:39:19 Dwayne: Yeah, he was a better frontman, I think, and he would have probably been a better frontman for Nirvana.
00:39:24 Heather: Oh yeah. And he didn’t really fit the grunge.
00:39:28 Dwayne: I mean, now he grew out of it.
00:39:29 Heather: He did grow out of it. Yeah. But even then, if you watch him in interviews, he just didn’t seem to quite fit the whole grunge theme.
00:39:37 Dwayne: No, as far as the hair bands go, a lot of the hair bands are older by several years. You’ve got guns N roses is still out there. Axl, hang it up. Uh.
00:39:46 Heather: I mean, come on. His voice was still.
00:39:49 Dwayne: Yeah, well, his voice is kind of. It’s going over the last few years there, but I think it’s because he took so much time off and then went out touring. Uh, you know, he toured with Queen for a bit. He toured with. Did he sit in for for sub in for rush at one point. Um, and, and then of course, doing the stuff with GNR, uh, Aerosmith, they just quit last year. I think they’ve, they finally got off the road. Motley crew, their, their final tour happened in twenty twenty two, but they’re still.
00:40:17 Heather: Still out there. Come on guys.
00:40:19 Dwayne: Vince, hang it up, guy.
00:40:21 Heather: Come on dude.
00:40:22 Dwayne: Yeah. Poison. They were a huge hair band. We’re going to talk a lot about them next week. Poison.
00:40:28 Heather: They’re still out there.
00:40:29 Dwayne: Well, Bret’s out there with a backup band. The the other guys in poison keep trying to get him to to reunite another one of the huge ones from the era, Whitesnake. They just they just hung it up just this past year. Yeah. Uh, Coverdale said, I’m done.
00:40:43 Heather: Yeah, they just did a they just had a song about a year ago. Yeah. That was really good.
00:40:49 Dwayne: Yeah. He kind of released it as a, a final battle.
00:40:51 Heather: Yeah. It was a really good.
00:40:54 Speaker 6: Fare thee well. I’ll soon be gone. Fare thee well. Back where I belong.
00:41:15 Dwayne: But back to Mark’s question. Was it authentic or was it corporate packaging? I’m going to go with a little bit of both.
00:41:24 Heather: I think so, too.
00:41:25 Dwayne: There was some authenticity to the music originally, but like so many things, um, I think the term for it that we use on the internet today is in Citified, uh, where corporate gets brought in to things.
00:41:41 Heather: And ruins everything.
00:41:42 Dwayne: And just ruins it and just turns.
00:41:44 Heather: It. I think it could have been better if it hadn’t grown so fast, you know? So big, so fast. It probably could still be popular today If that hadn’t happened.
00:41:55 Dwayne: The, you know, bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl jam, there was some talent there, not going to lie. They weren’t trying to be superstars. It happened to them because of Sub Pop.
00:42:06 Heather: And do I think Nirvana would still be together if if Kurt Cobain had lived?
00:42:10 Dwayne: Oh, I don’t know about that. It’s really hard for any band, especially one that has, um, when you look at, you know, just what their music was about, I don’t know that they could have.
00:42:20 Heather: I know any of them. I don’t know if any of them could have survived had their singers not killed themselves. But hey, Courtney love survive. So I mean, anything’s possible.
00:42:33 Dwayne: Oh my goodness. All right. So I think that’s pretty much going to wrap it up for this week. Hey one thing before we go, we have a huge request of all of you who are listening out there. If you enjoyed this show, please go to wherever you’re listening to this and leave us a rating. And even more importantly, Subscribe. So you always know when we’re coming out with new ones, that helps our numbers. And it also helps the platforms that are behind it, push it out to more people. Even more importantly, because right now, you, the listener, are our marketing. You’re the ones who can spread the word for us. Every time we post a new episode, we put posts on social media. What we would really like for you to do is on Facebook or on Instagram. You can follow us at whatever Gen X pod, follow us there and then share our posts. Share them with your friends. Let them know if you enjoy this thing, if we’re worth listening to or not.
00:43:24 Heather: And talk to us, we’ll we’ll answer back.
00:43:26 Dwayne: Yes, please do leave comments. We try to address every comment.
00:43:30 Heather: But be nice. Be nice kids.
00:43:32 Dwayne: Even if you’re nice, we can be nasty too. I’d be nasty, nasty, nasty. I ain’t got a problem with that. But that’s going to do it for this week. We will see you back here next week, we promise.
00:43:44 Speaker 12: Okay, bye.