If by making it impossible for rock musicians to act stupidly we're neglecting the contributions of Fred Durst and Kid Rock to the cultural discourse, sure, I'm sure you could probably make that point.

How was all of hair metal awful? I don't see how anyone can write off an entire genre/classification/grouping of music with any certainty. Just because you don't like it and popular tastes deem it bad that doesn't calcify it as fact.

I'm not saying they didn't write a few great songs after Badmotorfinger, I just have this confusion over the praise those later records get because they're so wildly uneven. And I love "Ty Cobb" precisely because it sounds nothing like what they were recording at the time.

Riiight, and that was partially my point. Punk had a strong enough influence on society as a musical genre to create a subculture based around its ideas and ethics; grunge didn't, it was as much a shallow rallying cry as the scene that preceded it.

I think the writer meant in terms of cultural currency, as in there is a thriving punk subculture in every major city in almost any Western country. You don't see that with grunge. You don't see kids affixing Nirvana smiley face pins to their jackets as a sign of rebellion and "fuck you, man" ethos, but you definitely…

An interesting idea (I know is completely ridiculous): was grunge so embraced by the critical press of the era because it was slavishly devoted to replicating the bands the music press doted on like early Sabbath and Zeppelin while only paying lip-service to its punk roots (beyond Nirvana, what grunge band really…

Which Soundgarden? Because post-Badmotorfinger Soundgarden was just as awful and careerist in objective as Candlebox, Bush and so on. I mean, Soundgarden helped to establish a template for post-grunge bands with "Black Hole Sun" by showing the dollars were in saccharine pop-rock not complex metal riffing ("Jesus…