(Credits: Far Out / Andrew Stuart)
Thu 12 June 2025 18:30, UK
Rock and roll has never been known as the most brain-melting genre ever conceived. Most people can get a handful of great Chuck Berry tunes under their fingers in no time, but it takes a lot more power to do them justice live than jamming away in your bedroom. And while Dave Grohl knows a thing or two about putting in the hours to create something great, he remembered looking through many of the biggest names in music over the years and wondering where all of the fun went in the genre.
Granted, it’s not like Grohl started in the cheeriest era for rock, either. Most of Nirvana’s catalogue was channelled through Kurt Cobain’s pain and frustration, and that usually came at a cost of them being either transcendent or a trainwreck whenever they got onstage. There were definitely some moments where things could fly off the rails, but that’s almost allowed in rock and roll to a certain degree.
Everything doesn’t need to be locked into a grid, and Grohl found beauty in appreciating the moments where artists don’t necessarily get everything right. They still had to work to make sure there was some kind of feeling to it, but it turned out that manufactured anger could work just as well when the likes of post-grunge started taking over the world after Cobain’s death.
Because as soon as grunge started taking a nose-dive, it wasn’t long before everyone from Days of the New to Creed to Nickelback began to rise to the forefront. Not all of those bands were necessarily bad, but out of them all, Foo Fighters seemed to get a pass strictly because they were fronted by Grohl. They never exactly fit the post-grunge model anyway, but if melodic baritone singers talking about pain sold in droves, it would be a hit factory when metal got hold of it.
The biggest names in the genre had fallen by the wayside when the alternative generation hit, but when Korn and Limp Bizkit started making their way into the public eye, it was much more depressing than before. This was the sound of artists bleeding for their audience at best and whining about their problems at worst, and Grohl felt that rock and roll wouldn’t recover from it.
Compared to every other genre of music, Grohl knew that nu-metal was giving the next generation of rock a bad name for being a dumbed-down version of what had come before, saying, “With a lot of bands nowadays, the emphasis is placed more on them becoming famous, becoming huge, rich, rock people rather than the actual music. I think music has become a lot less challenging over the last five years. Not that ours is fucking rocket science. But the absence of melody in a lot of new music and the basic caveman dynamic that’s quiet-loud quiet-loud quiet-loud has become too easy.”
Then again, there was always good music in the genre if Grohl knew where to look. Pantera had been the ones who unintentionally started the whole thing with their heavy approach to the genre, and looking at what bands like Deftones and Linkin Park did later on, it’s easy to see them taking things to new heights that were well above what people like Papa Roach were doing.
It definitely wasn’t the kind of music that Grohl could get behind all the time, but nu-metal has followed in the footsteps of other hated genres of decades past, like disco. Not all of it was great, and in fact, there were a ton of songs that should be in the bargain bins until the end of time, but when there was a great song out in the wild, it was enough to stop anyone in their tracks.
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