Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure if this was covered in the video, but the other conspiracy I heard a few years back now makes a lot of sense.

Mark Slaughter of the famous hair metal band Slaughter came out and said that there is a widespread misconception that grunge killed hair metal. He claims MTV hired a new president who was also a program manager at KROQ in California and he came out and said he wasn't going to play hair metal any more - and it was his decision not to play that music any more that killed that entire genre.

He readily admits there was an undercurrent brewing with people getting tired of the hair metal scene and labels essentially trying to create the next big thing, all in the image of these successful bands, but its interesting to note how one guy basically cratered the entire genre in the span of less than a year.

This is like an artificially created mass extinction event (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event ). Without it the ecosystem could maintain itself for very long time changing slowly and gradually. An extincting event wipes out most of the existing organisms, creating open niches to be populated with something new and maybe weird-looking.

Yep. Rock's dominant days were numbered when MTV decided to go all-in on rap at a time that rock was still outselling it. I thought it was a smart move because it was clear that that was the way things were heading, anyway. Grunge didn't stop rock's inevitable decline. It was more of a signpost. "Exit".

Hard to say.

Was it Steve Dahl (Disco Demolition) that took down disco or was he merely the catalyst for the inevitable pushback of a genre that had come to be a parody of itself.

People didn't "backlash" against disco in the sense that people who used to like it started disliking it because of changes within the genre. People who culturally identified with rock never liked disco and never would, to a significant extent because it was very black and pretty gay. And as popular music it was already in significant decline. Dahl harnessed lynch mob energy to allow people to do something they had always wanted to do.

"Last straw that broke the camel's back" might well describe this whole thread and original post. Rather than the one thing that did it.

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