Skid Row bassist Rachel Bolan recently had a conversation with Rodrigo Altaf of Sonic Perspectives as he reflected on how the rise of grunge in the early 1990s compelled most hard rock bands off the radio and MTV, with album and tour sales plummeting.
Rachel Bolan talks about the grunge bands:
“When a musical genre becomes just a point of sale, that’s kind of the beginning of the end for the genre, ’cause they’ll sign a million bands that kind of sound like a band, and then it just dilutes everything,” Rachel said.
“So that’s what was kind of happening right around when grunge came out. And then when grunge came out, it was the next big thing, and then it happened to them too. Every band that kind of resembled Nirvana got signed, and they were nowhere near as good as Nirvana. So it dilutes the market and eventually just poisons it.”
It is no secret that following the release in September 1991, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” created a turmoil upon the hair metal scene, putting an end to an era dominated by glamorous, androgynous and sparkly rock stars who absolutely saturated the radio waves and were almost exclusively what aired on MTV.
Back in 2014, Bolan admitted to the Dallas Observer that “grunge put a lot of bands like us out of business. You just have to wait it out. We came back because people wanted to have fun again. There were some grunge bands that I liked, but it was such a different vibe and a different scene. People started to miss bands from our era. There was a certain nostalgia involved.”
