The artist Dave Grohl said was the “sign of the apocalypse”
It’s hard to find a more firm believer in the power of rock and roll than Dave Grohl.
As much as people like to proclaim that the genre is dead and that the final nail has been put in the coffin every other year, Grohl is always there to act as the driving force behind the genre whenever he fires up his guitar for a new Foo Fighters record. But even if rock and roll wasn’t dead, Grohl could tell when the standards of the public were going off a cliff when his band first got started.
But when looking at the era Foo Fighters began in, it’s not like the public had a clear place to go. Grunge was the catch-all for every kind of interesting rock music coming out of Seattle, so once Kurt Cobain died, people didn’t want to have songs that made them feel sad and depressed every time they turned on the radio. They were already sad and depressed knowing that their hero had died, but no one expected it to swerve all the way in the opposite direction.
Because looking at 1991 and 1999, for instance, is like night and day. There were certainly pop artists on the charts at the dawn of grunge, the same way there were rock acts in the late 1990s, but it all felt so sanitised by the turn of the millennium. The biggest names in rock were Christian adjacent acts like Creed, and while the pop princesses of the time were great for what they were, it was going to take a lot to convince a rock fan that Britney Spears was any good.
Then again, there’s a good chance most of us could thank reality TV for that kind of business model. The entire MTV generation had started to switch over to becoming a lot more “authentic” and “real”, and while they seemed to forget the meaning of those words half the time they were filming their shows, it did make for some interesting moments when people like Paris Hilton started becoming the biggest names in the world.
She may have been seen as the height of fashion at the time, but when looking at her time in the spotlight, there was definitely a line drawn when she started getting into music. No one with rose-coloured glasses on is necessarily going to call her songs underrated gems, but Grohl felt that he needed to check it out even if it meant laughing at it.
As much as Grohl could be charitable when it comes to musicians, he felt that the music industry was going down a very dark path with someone like Hilton, saying, “Her forthcoming singing debut: sign of the apocalypse or inevitable career move? Perhaps both. Either way, this baby’s going to get some serious play on this D.J.’s deck. Granted, I haven’t heard it yet, but I’m looking forward to this like I look forward to the next Christopher Guest movie.”
And looking at how her singing career shaped up, it’s not like Grohl was exactly wrong when talking about where music was going. None of the songs are exactly bad per se, but since they’re being delivered in her voice, the fact that people were enjoying it either to slag it off or for the pure star power behind everything was a clear sign that the personality of an artist was overshadowing their music.
This was a new era, and whereas MTV had artists change the way they looked to suit whatever was going on, Hilton’s rise to the top was proof that people cared more about those playing the instruments than the music. Whether that was a good or a bad thing is up to interpretation, but music was already taking a back seat here.
