When it comes to rock 'n' roll on the radio today -- outside the ghetto of rock-only stations --- to paraphrase punk patriarch Lou Reed, there's almost nothing going down at all.
Take a look at the Billboard singles charts in 2011. The only relatively new artists to successfully cross over from the rock and alternative rock charts to the Hot 100 have been Mumford and Sons and Foster the People, and the ubiquitous genre-buster Adele has gone the other direction.
It's like 1989 to 1991 all over again, when the likes of Milli Vanilli, Bell Biv Devoe and Roxette dominated the airwaves and the charts.Twenty years ago, two little-known Seattle-based bands released albums that would change the music industry, both commercially and artistically.
Pearl Jam's debut "Ten" came first. But that now-revered album, full of weighty anthems, took several months to gain traction.A few weeks later, Nirvana released its second album, "Nevermind," a disc rife with noise, but also verse-chorus-verse pop structures. It quickly burned up the charts behind its lead single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
Nirvana had just finished a two-week tour of Europe, opening for the underground trailblazers Sonic Youth. Filmmaker David Markey documented the tour, then returned home with his film. Soon, he realized his movie, "1991: The Year Punk Broke" (which was released on DVD on September 13), was going to have an adjusted focus."
Every day, we'd come into the editing room (and say), 'Oh, yeah. Nirvana sold another million overnight,'" Markey recalls. "It was just surreal. It was also very exciting, because for the first time, something from my end of the world -- you know, something from the left-of-the-dial end of the world that was previously relegated to college radio (made it big)."
Read the rest at CNN.
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