I missed Megan’s Q altogether, I’m 37. I think the real break though is probably more like under 30, rather than under 40, I’d suspect most people who were in high school or higher when Nirvana became popular (I was in my 3rd year of college) would, if they liked Nirvana, have the perspective of knowing what music was like BN (before Nirvana), and wouldn’t be as quick to discount their influence as someone who grew up with their music.
I would look back 40 years for a parallel. From 1968 to 1971 you had Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin who had the same meteoric rise as Nirvana did between 1991 and 1994. The people who didn’t get into high school until say 1973, by which time all 3 had been dead for a couple years, that was the music their older siblings or even their parents and aunts and uncles may have listened to. They were listening to Zeppelin, Queen, Aerosmith, Sabbath. Jim, Jimi and Janis probably seemed old hat to them by the time they were exploring their musical tastes, because they had been innundated with that music before they’d really formed their own musical palates. And so they discounted it in favor of what was still of very high quality, still worthy of legendary status at some point, but which was nonetheless to the exclusion of the stuff that had come before recently. Now, this generation may have been far enough removed from the Beatles and Elvis and what not to have developed an appreciation, while not receiving an overdose, so that they could accept the legendary status of those contributors. But I’m wiling to be that circa 1978, few of the contemporary music afficianados of the day would have put those performers in the proper context.
That is what I think I see happening here. We have a lot of people who are in their 20s on Fluther, and they did not get into listening to music until shortly after Nirvana was really history, but not history in the way Zeppelin was, where their Godlike status had been firmly enshrined and was simply a fact to be accepted, but recent history where a slightly older generation was still stuck in the (albeit recent) past in regards to their treatment of Nirvana. And they have their own widely divergent, ridiculously talented pickings in the music scene, todays stars…some of whom will become legendary in their own right. So you get something like Foo Fighters, admittedly an insanely great band (one which I don’t think will stand the test of time as well as Nirvana, but which is still better than the majority of what’s out there), seeming to this just slightly newer generation to be somehow more fresh, more talented, more influential.
As such, it’s not as though these same people who slag off on Nirvana (or who maybe don’t diss them, but who still don’t regard them as highly as history will come to) don’t have an appreciation for musical history and those who broke ground, it’s that they take for granted some of the ground that has been broken, in part because Nirvana was in their musical upbringing seen not as a forefather of the other music out there but as a contemporary, and one does not think of a contemporary as an influence.
And there are those to whom Foo Fighter’s style would just be more appealing…there are those for whom influence isn’t as important as other characteristics. Indeed, I’d suggest from iwamoto’s endorsement of Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal and the comment that Cobain was not a good guitar player, that iwamoto is a fan of guitar virtuosos, which is somewhat of a niche. There are those who think Satriani, Vai and Malmsteen are the true masters of the craft and deserve far more recognition than history will ever give them, whereas most of the world looks for something more than just mastery of a particular instrument (though I’m not saying this is all Bumblefoot has to offer). Some of it’s just what you’re into.
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