Word: rocke
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Semmel's class spends time on the increasinglyimportant pop music of post-war Britain, from therelatively wholesome "Teddy Boy" rock stars of the1950s, to the mods and rockers of the 1960s andthe punks of the 1970s...
...just as soon as Bush's popularity dove with the post-war recession of the early '90s, so too did arena rock fall off the map. Nirvana stormed the music scene in 1991, bringing Seattle grunge to the rest of the country and making alternative suddenly mainstream. By 1993, Winger, Damn Yankees and Bad English had disbanded, and Warrant, Poison and Nelson had fallen off the map entirely. Pushing them aside were bands like Pearl Jam, the Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden and the Smashing Pumpkins, turning the airwaves from a place of possibility and power--where our average triumphs were...
Powers has it only partly right. Some of us young middle-class males could surely share Nirvana's frustrations; being 15 only made the alternative explosion more relevant. But at the same time, arena rock had held out the possibility of transcendence--of rising above confusion and bleakness to a more emotionally simple plane. Its disappearance was thus as much a loss for us as for the working-class men who identified with Jon Bon Jovi...
...power ballads ever. And in 1995, Van Halen chipped in with the confident "Can't Stop Lovin' You." Still, with Steven Tyler headed for membership in the American Association of Retired Persons and with Jon Bon Jovi headed nowhere, given his quiet 1997 solo single "Midnight in Chelsea," arena rock is rapidly nearing extinction. In its absence--if recent Grammy Awards are any indication--we face pop airwaves dominated by the mushy background music of Jewel, Celine Dion, Hootie and the Blowfish, Shawn Colvin and Paula Cole...
...power ballads of the late '80s and early '90s were too full of life to die so suddenly. Yet it's not only a shame in the musical sense that arena rock is near-dead. Every other musical genre of the last 50 years seems to have its place on the radio today. But those of us who did some major growing up in this period must now rely on the tunes in our head or on our dusty tape collections to bring back those bus rides to camp when we sang along to "Paradise City," or those hours camped...