The 1990s genre Dave Grohl was absolutely sick of: “So caveman”
There aren’t many pieces of rock and roll history that Dave Grohl doesn’t pay lip service to.
Despite being a punk rocker before anything else, every single artist that he’s ever worked with makes him look like he’s got a rock and roll bingo card and is trying to check off every one of his idols off the list in terms of potential collaborations. It’s insane to think of how well he works in any genre that he finds himself in, but he did understand that there were some styles that he needed to stay as far away from as possible.
But the fact that Grohl managed to hold his own next to some of the biggest bands in the world is still commendable. No one would have thought that he would have had the strength to pull off working with the former members of Led Zeppelin or play drums behind Paul McCartney, but a lot of those opportunities weren’t made by design. It all came from musicians communicating through their instruments, and Grohl was willing to do anything he could to keep up with what he saw in his heroes.
When Foo Fighters began, though, a lot of the rock and roll heroes had seemed to fall by the wayside a little bit. Everyone was way too burned out by the time Kurt Cobain passed away, and while the rest of the world needed to move on, no one really found the right person to take his place. Everyone was still wondering where the hell they were supposed to be going next, and it turned out that there were a lot more people that weren’t exactly over the 1980s when hair metal officially died.
Sure, there weren’t many people that were going to be walking around in leather pants and pretending that they were the next incarnation of Van Halen, but bands like Korn were ushering in a new genre of music. Rage Against the Machine had already pioneered rap-rock as we know it today, but when the biggest bands in the world suddenly became acts like Limp Bizkit, Grohl wasn’t exactly willing to go along with the program.
Which probably explains why There is Nothing Left to Lose came out as breezy as it did. Grohl didn’t want to go along with what the nu-metal trends were doing, and whereas everyone was attempting to throw a rap verse into one of their songs and spend the lion’s share of their singles complaining about the problems they had with their parents, Grohl was willing to smile his way through everything and make genuine pop songs like ‘Learn to Fly’ and ‘Next Year’.
It wasn’t the most marketable decision in the age of the backwards hat crowd, but Grohl would have rather done anything else than try to make nu-metal songs, saying, “At the time the nu-metal thing had become huge with Korn and Limp Bizkit so the dynamic of popular rock music had become so caveman! I thought, let’s write some songs. I’m sick of screaming and I’m sick of my distortion pedal! So that album is a really clean record and it’s totally based on melody.”
In all fairness, there were many nu-metal bands that did have some great tunes behind them, but there’s a stark difference in listening to what a band like Staind was doing compared to Linkin Park. Both of them were talking about their pain, but whereas Aaron Lewis was content to wallow in his sadness for most of his songs before becoming a rage-fuelled country star, Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda were trying to make songs as a means to move on from the problems that they had growing up.
While Grohl had grown out of that phase of his songwriting, the fact that he could still hold his own even when going in the opposite direction is what endeared him to every stripe of hard rock fan. He could have shown up at one of the gnarliest heavy metal festivals ever created, and even if he played nothing but tunes like ‘Learn to Fly’ and ‘Monkey Wrench’, he would still get the hero’s welcome that is reserved for only the finest singers.
