Will 90's rock ever be considered "classic rock"?

I remember being into classic rock during the 00's and enjoying 70's and 80's classics.

Eventually I kinda fell out of it and gradually shifted to current mainstream pop, though I also developed an appreciation of 90's rock. I then thought that since 70's and 80's rock was considered "classic" in the 00's, 90's rock would eventually be considered "classic" by way of being Two Decades Behind.

But on the occassion I go back to classic rock, it's still the same 70's and 80's stuff. Thankfully, the hard/mainstream/active/whatever you call it rock station plays 90's rock, but I want 70's, 80's, and 90's rock in one place, dammit.

Is there some kind of divide between 90's rock and 70's/80's rock that prevents the former from being "classic"?

^{Bonus Semi-Related Question} I'm starting to think 70's/80's mainstream rock isn't all that great, or at least suffers greatly from Sturgeon's Law. Can someone point me to... niche 70's/80's rock artists?

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It depends on the station. Our local station (which i mainly only listen to while about to go to sleep or to wake up to) does have 90s stuff by Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, Green Day, Pearl Jam, and Black Crowes in regular rotation with their 70s and 80s (and a smaller selection of 60s rock) classic hits. Im more wondering about if rock from the 2000s will ever be considered "classic rock". Maybe some of the lighter post-grunge stuff like Creed and Nickelback will get airplay, but a lot of the nu-metal and hard rock might be a little too "hard" for that format (stuff like Korn, Slipknot, Godsmack, Disturbed, and the like come to mind). Ditto the pop-punk of that era (MAYBE Blink 182, but i'd be shocked to ever hear Good Charlotte, Simple Plan, Bowling for Soup, or Fall Out Boy played next to Aerosmith and Van Halen, or even next to Nirvana).

edited 27th Oct '16 8:48:30 PM by J79

Our local hard rock station which is usually overplaying Led Zeppelin, The Who, AC/DC, and The Beatles puts on Nirvana and even Green Day more and more. In time, everything becomes classic. In the metal community alone a lot of albums from the 90's are considered classic and there's even multiple eras of classic in the 90's for some - the 1990 to sometimes 1995 period and then 1995 or 1996 up to 1999.

My rock station plays Nirvana, Pearl Jam, STP, Green Day, etc. So I think it's already considered classic rock.

I can't wait until 20 years from now when Imagine Dragons and Maroon 5 start becoming classic rock :)

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My local radio station they play Classic Rock and they play 90s rock.

My other local station I like even though they were known as a Classic Rock station but their tagline in the 90s and 00s was "New, 80s, and Classic Rock."

But since we have a modern rock station that "New, 80s, and Classic Rock" station mainly played Classic Rock.

Batman Ninja more like Batman's Bizarre Adventure

FUCK THAT; THAT MUST NEVER HAPPEN!!!

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Hey man, don't diss on early Maroon 5. That stuff was great.

"If you spend all your heart / On something that has died / You are not alive and that can't be a life"

It seems to me that the term "classic rock" is less about the music having the overall status of a classic and more about the whole rock subgenre that defined the rise of rock music in the 70's. So basically classic rock is gonna be the 70's hard, psychedelic, folk and southern rock for a long time. It's just that in the 90's the whole "rocking" thing became entirely different. It was the definitive weird era of music, when some rock bands steered really far from traditional rock tropes. These will be classics, no doubt, but on their own level. Perhaps they'll think of a new name for this music.

Nonsense is better than no sense at all.

There already is one: Alternative Rock.

Granted, that name has been distorted so much by marketing that it's incredibly ambiguous to what "alternative" actually means, but still.

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Adam Levine has always sounded like a goose on helium, even on the early stuff. Can't stand the man's voice. And this is from someone who has no problem with Gary LeVox.

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I think it's strange that the same thing has happened to country. "Classic country" still seems to cut off around the late 80s, save for a few chestnuts like "Friends in Low Places" or "I Swear". There doesn't seem to be anything representing the 90s and early 2000s, and as a result, people think that Randy Travis had absolutely no hits after "I Told You So". I would love to hear a show where I can hear "Ain't Nothin' 'bout You", "How Forever Feels", and "I Just Want to Dance with You" and stuff like that.

Why is it that the 90s and early 2000s, in other genres, seem to be stuck in such a limbo?

Also, like i said about 2000s rock, there's a lot of 90s rock that doesnt fit as comfortably into the classic rock format. Stuff like Rage Against the Machine, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, while staples on rock radio in the 90s and still getting airplay on active and modern rock stations, would sound out of place on classic rock.

Hell, there was a progressive rock revival in the 90's (partially assisted by the rebranding and rise of progressive metal) with groups like Spock's Beard, Anglagard, Discipline, Ars Nova (Japan), Anekdoten and so on. I mean you'd think the musical climate would've been antithetical towards that kind of thing but as it turns out what was the dark age for some was a time of rediscovery and ascension for others.

The period immediately before that was the heyday of first-wave math-rock like Don Caballero, Polvo and Trumans Water, which in turn grew out of the progressive tendencies in hardcore and its children cross-breeding with '80s noise-rock and all those rangy indie outfits that burst out of the post-punk D.I.Y. boom, so the groundwork was there already. It's just that the attitudes are different, mods and rockers as it were, and it shows in the sound: Lots of virtuoso playing but no heroic solos or showpieces. As the songs start to breathe more, and the ambition overtakes the desire for leanness, you begin to see the transition from bands like Drive Like Jehu to, say, The Mars Volta.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

I'm honestly surprised that there hasn't been anything resembling a proper grunge revival; most modern acts in that vein tend to skew towards either post-hardcore or sludge metal, and the closest thing that I can find to a genuine modern grunge album is the last KEN mode, which honestly could have come right off of Sub Pop circa 1990. The rest seem to want to be Helmet or Unsane more than they want to be Mudhoney or Tad.

edited 23rd Nov '16 6:39:32 AM by HasturHasturHastur

Dope Body and Wavves, maybe?

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

I'm gonna take a guess and say that since grunge is kinda an edgy teen sort of deal, and the internet has taken to mocking edgy teens, that has dampened efforts to revive grunge.

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then explain the popularity of vaporwave

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I can't even explain what vaporwave is in the first place.

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I feel like the problem with making modern grunge is that the scourge of tepid post-grunge so ravaged the popular musical landscape in the years following the grunge explosion that forming a new grunge act in earnest feels like trying to revive something that should have died long before it did and lingered on in a form unrecognisable from where it started.

I'd compare it to how electro-industrial has all but died out since the early 2000s while many former noise and power electronics figures have turned from the fringes of industrial culture to create new industrial dance music that bears little resemblance to what was the mainstream form of the genre in the mid-1990s, helping fill the niche with other marginal forms that did survive like EBM and aggrotech. This is not to say that there aren't a handful of good new industrial dance acts that aren't coming out of the noise-techno fringe, nor that there are no new or evolving bands experimenting successfully with grunge sounds, but that there is no movement because the movement burnt itself out and dispersed into something entirely alien in spirit to its point of origin.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

It's rather telling that pop-punk managed to make a quasi- nostalgic comeback (see Defend Pop Punk) before grunge did despite pop-punk coming after grunge.

Post-grunge was so damn bad and generally SHIT that it managed to basically kill the mainstream credibility of "rock music" as a whole with it when it died. Metal only managed to survive due to metal and rock essentially becoming two separate unconnected scenes after post-grunge ruined everything.

Like, fuck, as a college aged 20 something I feel like a god damn relic because all of my friends listen to vaporwave, djent, Love Live songs and dumb meme mashups and if I try to blast like, Double Nickles on the Dime or pretty much anything that came out on Sub Pop or SST or Epitaph back then nobody will even recognize it unless it was a song that was in Tony Hawk or some shit.

To answer the thread question, eaely 90s rock is already considered "classic rock" and is probably the last decade that "classic rock" will ever encompass because let's be honest, rock music as a cultural "thing" basically died into the late 90s. Not that no good rock albums were made after that (plenty are and will be made), but that "rock music" is no longer the zeitgeist of the youth culture and probably never will be again.

Eh, the genre split was kind of inevitable, this kind of thing comes and goes in waves. I mean, look at the gaping abyss between underground/experimental and popular music in the 80's. And with metal's hyperbolic ambition, it was bound to break away along with some subgenres of hardcore. The 90's embraced almost all kinds of extremity and weirdness, and it was just natural for the music as a whole to swing in the opposite direction ten years later. I think the 20's are going to be the time of fondness for the 90's, seeing as a lot of genre borders are once again getting blurred.

Nonsense is better than no sense at all.

Hey, don't knock Love Live!! music. They had a melodeath song with two breakdowns and slam riffing about where to go for lunch. I have respect for that level of dedication to the absurd. :P

But in all seriousness, your friends might be lovely people, but they probably need to get out more.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

Pop punk didn't come after grunge, it was created in the early eighties.

"If you spend all your heart / On something that has died / You are not alive and that can't be a life"

Arguably earlier, if you count The Ramones as a pop punk band.

Honestly, and I mean this as lightly as possible, it just sounds like your friends are a bunch of fuckin' nerds and you should probably get more friends who actually listen to this music. Like, I dunno, find a rock or punk club near your college and go to shows, there's gotta be something.

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