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doomster999
Keeper of the Dreary Realm

Joined: Sat Aug 04, 2012 2:58 am
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 16, 2015 3:17 am 
 

Ancient_Mariner wrote:
TrooperEd wrote:
Don't forget the s/t Motley Crue album with John Corabi. :lol:


They were obviously trying to ride the trends but that is a pretty good album.


Yea, the s/t album is solid and probably their heaviest. Never liked Vince Neil as a person or as a singer.
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kalervon
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 20, 2015 9:58 am 
 

Heavy_Liquid wrote:
no kurt no nirvana no success no term grunge no nothing, we wouldnt be here to discuss anything about this
Completely false. Pearl Jam's success had little to do with Nirvana's success. Even without grunge, we would have been in for a period of college-oriented alternative bands during most of the 90s, and a period of established heavy bands changing their sound so as not to sound dated. Established heavy bands had already begun changing their sound for something more "mature", before Nirvana broke big.

This "Smells Like Teen Spirit killed hair metal" cliché is just like the cliché saying that the E.T. cartridge video game is responsible for the video game industry crisis of 1983.
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Opus
Metal freak

Joined: Sun Sep 22, 2002 11:06 am
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 20, 2015 1:36 pm 
 

kalervon wrote:
Established heavy bands had already begun changing their sound for something more "mature", before Nirvana broke big.

What bands? Not disagreeing, I just want to know.
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DoomMetalAlchemist
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Joined: Mon Dec 27, 2010 6:10 am
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 20, 2015 6:42 pm 
 

Opus wrote:
kalervon wrote:
Established heavy bands had already begun changing their sound for something more "mature", before Nirvana broke big.

What bands? Not disagreeing, I just want to know.


Assuming Nirvana didn't break big until the 1992 release of Nevermind, Metallica comes to mind.

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Turner
Metalhead

Joined: Fri Aug 23, 2002 2:04 am
Posts: 2247
Location: Australia
PostPosted: Thu Aug 20, 2015 10:55 pm 
 

Christ, add the hair bands to that list (as already discussed) - almost all of them had been dressing less like drag queens and more like pretty bikers for a few years by the time Nirvana came along, and they'd all gone heavier. Here's Motley Crue in 1989. Here's Poison in 1990. You get the idea. And think of the difference in sound between albums like Look What the Cat Dragged In and Open Up and Say Ahh, or Night Songs and Long Cold Winter. You know what I think may have caused it? Albums like Girls, Girls, Girls ('87), or Bon Jovi's New Jersey, which was '88. I look at the much more "grown up" approach those bands took with those albums - dialling back the glam aesthetic and opting for a hybrid rock/metal/blues sound - and I reckon there's an argument to be made that a lot of the other glam bands were inspired to "grow up" as well.

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kalervon
Metalhead

Joined: Sun Sep 23, 2012 10:43 pm
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Location: Canada
PostPosted: Sat Aug 22, 2015 8:41 pm 
 

Yes. Another band who was getting more serious: Voivod. Angel Rat came out in 1991.

Faith No More, Red Hot Chili Peppers.. there were plenty of bands out there (other and prior to Nirvana) who were getting famous and eating into metal territory without adhering to the familiar imagery of either thrash or glam bands. Warrant's "Cherry Pie" sure sounds and looks silly for a latter-day-glam album, but it was meant to be entitled "Uncle Tom's Cabin" until the label pressed them to use "Cherry Pie". A glam band naming an album after a 19th century novel.. though the lyrics had little to do with it, they were still about "social issues".. that's a sign of the times.
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Acrobat
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 23, 2015 4:56 am 
 

I wouldn't say Angel Rat is more serious than, say, Hatross or Nothingface. But it is a successful album for them and they had mostly dropped the metal from their sound at that point. There's a lot of proggy, Husker Du-esque stuff and some of it is awesomely catchy ('The Prow'!). Quite unique in that sense, but then again, Voivod always were.
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Heavy_Liquid
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Joined: Wed Aug 22, 2012 1:11 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 23, 2015 11:52 am 
 

kalervon wrote:
Heavy_Liquid wrote:
no kurt no nirvana no success no term grunge no nothing, we wouldnt be here to discuss anything about this

Completely false. Pearl Jam's success had little to do with Nirvana's success. Even without grunge, we would have been in for a period of college-oriented alternative bands during most of the 90s, and a period of established heavy bands changing their sound so as not to sound dated. Established heavy bands had already begun changing their sound for something more "mature", before Nirvana broke big.

This "Smells Like Teen Spirit killed hair metal" cliché is just like the cliché saying that the E.T. cartridge video game is responsible for the video game industry crisis of 1983.


"completely false" haha, don't be a ... ;)
you contradicted yourself there and misunderstood my posting

because as you wrote pearl jam was its own thing (as i wrote each band basically was), they would have been successful anyway, but on a much smaller scale, and off course nirvanas success had influence on them, nevermind released a bit later but was much more successful, it dragged the whole thing till it all collapsed with kurts death, bands changing sound has nothing to do with the term grunge, nor do some college orientated bands whatever that means, they are always there, that has nothing to do with the success of grunge and the term as we know it today

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kalervon
Metalhead

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Location: Canada
PostPosted: Sun Aug 23, 2015 12:14 pm 
 

Nevermind didn't drag the whole thing down.
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Grave_Wyrm
Metal Sloth

Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2012 5:55 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 23, 2015 5:11 pm 
 

They failed .. as they were thrown to the ground.

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CF_Mono
Metalhead

Joined: Thu Jul 08, 2010 5:21 pm
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 24, 2015 2:55 pm 
 

Desperta_Ferro wrote:
Metal getting weaker in the '90 is a common myth.

I agree with this answer. Metal changed for sure, and you missed out on some of the classic vibes in the 90's like the raw, fast, speed-inclined ripping shredders of the 80's, but bands like Acid Bath, Sleep, Voivod, and Melvins showed that you didn't necessarily need to have those qualities to be a good metal band at the time. Not to mention, while it may look like metal went through a dumbing down phase if you observe 80's bands putting out sub-par albums, extreme metal was quickly rising in popularity, and would soon be the sound people associated with metal as a whole. Part of the reason for the lack of good thrash, speed, and heavy metal releases in the 90's is because many of the musicians who were fans of that music indeed wanted to do something more groundbreaking and play music that was heavier.
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Turner
Metalhead

Joined: Fri Aug 23, 2002 2:04 am
Posts: 2247
Location: Australia
PostPosted: Mon Aug 24, 2015 9:01 pm 
 

Heavy_Liquid wrote:
"completely false" haha, don't be a ... ;)
you contradicted yourself there and misunderstood my posting

because as you wrote pearl jam was its own thing (as i wrote each band basically was), they would have been successful anyway, but on a much smaller scale, and off course nirvanas success had influence on them, nevermind released a bit later but was much more successful, it dragged the whole thing till it all collapsed with kurts death, bands changing sound has nothing to do with the term grunge, nor do some college orientated bands whatever that means, they are always there, that has nothing to do with the success of grunge and the term as we know it today


You're barking up the wrong tree. Nirvana might have been the biggest spoke in the wheel for a (fairly short) time, but their lasting success was fairly limited before Cobain died. Nevermind's explosion only propelled what was already "big indie" into stadiums. Soundgarden and Mother Love Bone (PJ by later extension) were already "big indie", and the argument can be pretty easily made that it was just a matter of time. Nevermind wasn't a game changer, it was just the arbitrary pick of the bunch. Plus, you gotta look to contemporary popularity. Sub-pop-esque grunge was replaced very quickly. Compare the influence (93-95 or so) of In Utero or Incesticide to the that of bands like the Smashing Pumpkins, Bush, Live, etc etc - Cobain committed commercial suicide long before he gave the real thing a shot, and no one in the mainstream was following his model. He was just Lennonised from '94 onwards. My own reckoning is that, had Cobain not died, Nirvana would be thought of today in the same way Motley Crue is.

Also, I'd argue that Pearl Jam's popularity (after their second album) followed much more of a Dave Matthews Band-type trajectory than grunge. My ex-gf and her friends were all massive PJ fans, but they could not and would never have connected the band with the grunge movement. PJ existed completely apart from all that - their popularity dwindled in the mid-late 90s and they later built their own fanbase up (fairly successfully!) as an alt-rock band, with Vedder as a counterculture-for-the-middle-class figurehead. I'd have thought it obvious how that could be seen as college-oriented.

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ZenoMarx
Metalhead

Joined: Fri Aug 22, 2008 11:38 am
Posts: 853
Location: United States
PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 10:28 am 
 

Can anyone think of other songs with drumming like Soundgarden's "Jesus Christ Pose"? I hadn't listened to Soundgarden in a very long time, and I realized this is somewhat how I'd hoped Kylesa would sound with their two drummers. I don't know how Kylesa managed to make two drummers so mundane, but they did. Other favorite Matt Cameron songs? Did he write very often? According to their wiki page, JCP came out of a jam session, which makes sense. It sounds jammy, and in the past when I heard live versions, I'd wished they extended the song into the 10-12 minute range. Between it being a hit song and the hard rock audience, that might not have gone over well, but I feel that song is built for extended heavy psychedelia.

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pressingtoplead13
Metalhead

Joined: Thu Jun 18, 2009 6:05 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 1:43 pm 
 

Suffocation must not have gotten the memo that Grunge killed metal.

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LithoJazzoSphere
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 1:55 pm 
 

ZenoMarx wrote:
Can anyone think of other songs with drumming like Soundgarden's "Jesus Christ Pose"?


A lot of alternative rock has those sort of tom-heavy beats. Something like Muse's "Stockholm Syndrome" or Tool's "Ticks and Leeches" or "The Grudge".

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Nocturnal_Evil
Metalhead

Joined: Mon Apr 19, 2021 12:00 am
Posts: 668
Location: United States
PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 2:21 pm 
 

This whole idea of grunge "killing" metal is pretty absurd. Yes, it changed the musical landscape greatly, but so far as metal goes, the only true casualties were bands/genres which were already on the way out already: namely hair metal/rock and aging thrash bands. Another thing it did was expose which bands in metal were just chasing trends.

Thrash happened to suffer in that area, but I think there's another factor at play there. Thrash was the heaviest metal there was in the early 80s, but obviously they were dethroned in that regard with the arrival of death and black metal. Once the 90s rolled around, the thrash scene was just trying to stay relevant, either by edging further toward death/black metal (hello death/thrash!), or trying to conform to trends.

Grunge weeded out the "poser" bands, by largely destroyed the hopes of gaining mainstream success by playing metal. It trimmed the fat so to speak, and what remained were bands that were in it for the metal's sake, as opposed to hopes of arena tours. Metal has always been a reactionary genre in some respects, and I don't doubt the appearance of grunge reinvigorated metal to go further into the realms of musical extremity in response to the radio-rock being passed off as "the new rebellious thing to be into." Seeing as heavy riffs are really what this is whole metal thing is about, I'd say that in a weird way grunge was a blessing to the genre.
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King_of_Arnor
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Location: United Kingdom
PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 2:55 pm 
 

Nocturnal_Evil wrote:
This whole idea of grunge "killing" metal is pretty absurd. Yes, it changed the musical landscape greatly, but so far as metal goes, the only true casualties were bands/genres which were already on the way out already: namely hair metal/rock and aging thrash bands. Another thing it did was expose which bands in metal were just chasing trends.

Thrash happened to suffer in that area, but I think there's another factor at play there. Thrash was the heaviest metal there was in the early 80s, but obviously they were dethroned in that regard with the arrival of death and black metal. Once the 90s rolled around, the thrash scene was just trying to stay relevant, either by edging further toward death/black metal (hello death/thrash!), or trying to conform to trends.

Grunge weeded out the "poser" bands, by largely destroyed the hopes of gaining mainstream success by playing metal. It trimmed the fat so to speak, and what remained were bands that were in it for the metal's sake, as opposed to hopes of arena tours. Metal has always been a reactionary genre in some respects, and I don't doubt the appearance of grunge reinvigorated metal to go further into the realms of musical extremity in response to the radio-rock being passed off as "the new rebellious thing to be into." Seeing as heavy riffs are really what this is whole metal thing is about, I'd say that in a weird way grunge was a blessing to the genre.


Interesting interpretation. I think thrash metal suffered as much as it did because it diverged in two directions in '86. Master of Puppets was the first to make thrash artsy and, well, accessible, but that same year albums like Pleasure to Kill were pushing the boundaries of extremity and helping inspire death metal. Eventually, the mainstream camp (Metallica, Testament, Megadeth, Anthrax etc.) became the 'face' of thrash metal so to say, which caused the earliest death metal bands to distance themselves from the aesthetic and sound of thrash to stay underground (Pestilence is a good example). Already by the late 80s, many thrash bands were taking stabs at commercial singles (Metallica's 'One' being most notorious), so even without grunge I think they still would have eventually lost relevance within the metal underground to make way for death/black metal.
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oldmetalhead
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 3:13 pm 
 

Four bands, from the top of my head, that I really liked that suffered from grunge, either by losing big labels or members wanting to change style are Death Angel, Galactic Cowboys, Sanctuary and Skid Row.

Edit- Another band that I love, which still managed to put out great stuff but never got to the status from their breakthrough album, The Real Thing, was Faith No More. They were under constant pressure from their record label to do something else, not be so weird, whatever. It eventually led to them breaking up for a long time.


Last edited by oldmetalhead on Sun Jul 18, 2021 3:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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ZenoMarx
Metalhead

Joined: Fri Aug 22, 2008 11:38 am
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 3:34 pm 
 

I don't know if what Nocturnal_Evil said is accurate, but it was amazing how many bands thought they could be the next Metallica. No recognition that they were a true anomaly. Even if grunge hadn't come along, it was crazy to think that. I do like the idea that something came along, like grunge, that squashed all that nonsense. There was no way the public was going to make room for more fast, thrashy, and heavy music.

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ZenoMarx
Metalhead

Joined: Fri Aug 22, 2008 11:38 am
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 3:35 pm 
 

LithoJazzoSphere wrote:
ZenoMarx wrote:
Can anyone think of other songs with drumming like Soundgarden's "Jesus Christ Pose"?


A lot of alternative rock has those sort of tom-heavy beats. Something like Muse's "Stockholm Syndrome" or Tool's "Ticks and Leeches" or "The Grudge".
I know Tool, but for some reason, I didn't think of them in the same way. Thanks for the recommendations. I'm always open to more.

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oldmetalhead
Metalhead

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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 3:41 pm 
 

While on the subject of grunge, it spawned the most copy cat bands ever. There were only a few bands from that era and genre I genuinely liked because they had their own style. Alice In Chains, Soundgarden mostly. Every other band had that same bass line as any Nirvana song and it really got boring to me.

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insanewayne253
Metal newbie

Joined: Tue Mar 29, 2016 4:04 am
Posts: 231
Location: United States
PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 4:14 pm 
 

TrooperEd wrote:
Don't forget the s/t Motley Crue album with John Corabi. :lol:

Sometimes I can't help but wonder if the claim of "Grunge killed metal" is Vh1 revisionist bullshit. Especially since one of the people parroting that was Scott Ian, whose real reason for being mad was bad karma decided to cash in on him. Cobain offed himself in 94 and grunge more or less fell apart after that. So how does one explain the 95-99 commercial drought? Particularly since in 95, 97(sort of) and 98 power metal was rising everywhere else?


Between around 94 to about 98/99 industrial was going strong. NIN was at the top and shortly after you had Marilyn Manson; not to mention Ministry was in its prime along with stuff like KMFDM getting commercial appeal. Then Nu Metal came around about 97/98 and slowly took over.

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RainyTheBusinessPerson
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Joined: Sat Oct 29, 2016 10:50 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 4:28 pm 
 

oldmetalhead wrote:
While on the subject of grunge, it spawned the most copy cat bands ever. There were only a few bands from that era and genre I genuinely liked because they had their own style. Alice In Chains, Soundgarden mostly. Every other band had that same bass line as any Nirvana song and it really got boring to me.


This happens to anything that becomes popular unfortunately, you have a few acts that actually do things their way, and a bunch of ones that just copy them. I actually consider one of the biggest offenders of this to be groove metal.
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collingwood77
Metal newbie

Joined: Wed Jun 23, 2021 3:43 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 4:42 pm 
 

gabber wrote:
Excuse my ignorance, but I have a nagging question.

Over and over again, I hear the phrase that 'grunge changed music' or that 'grunge killed music'. In a nutshell, a very widely accepted consensus is that grunge did indeed change the music world during it's emergence in the mid 90's.

And then you look at how some bands put out some forgettable and quite frankly disappointing releases in the mid to late 90's. Whether you like these albums or not, it is widely accepted to be true of albums like:

Risk by Megadeth
Reload by Metallica
Halford-less Priest albums
Outcast/Cause for Conflict by Kreator
Dogs Of War/Unleash the Beast by Saxon
Stomp 442/The Threat is Real by Anthrax
Requiem/Octagon/Destroyer Of Worlds - Bathory
Angry Machines - Dio
Virtual XI by Maiden
Into The Unknown - Mercyful Fate
Kill Fuck Die by WASP

There are probably many many others, these were just the obvious ones. Like I said, you might LIKE some or all of these albums. But these albums are widely considered to be 'one the weaker ones' in bands' discographies, and subject to more criticism, or less popularity, than albums both earlier and later in their career.

It seems that metal went through a 'rough patch' that coincided with the rise of grunge in the 90's.

What I would like to know is - why and how could grunge influence the quality of the songwriting on metal releases? If a band was to stay true to their own methods that made them well known in metal, how does whether or not a band like Soundgarden churning out a new album or Curt Kobain appearing on MTV make any sort of difference to a metal band and their songwriting? Wouldn't they be mutually exclusive events?

So does anyone have any explanation as to why metal did undergo this period of 'less popular releases' due to the influence of another genre entirely? No doubt that grunge did change things to an extent (at least temporarily), but how did it happen?


Dogs of War and Unleash the Beast by Saxon are widely regarded as outstanding albums, although they were mostly ignored at the time as Saxon were viewed as a typical 1980s band. I especially like Dogs of War myself.

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collingwood77
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 4:47 pm 
 

waiguoren wrote:
The early/mid 90's weren't just about grunge, you had the rave/ecstasy scene, the Brit pop explosion, and of course that's when black metal took off. Definitely a rough patch for thrash bands like Anthrax and glam bands, but do we really care about those fellas and their problems?


You also had the SoCal punk scene aka the second wave pf punk, which peaked in 1994-96 - Rancid, NOFX, MXPX, Green Day, The Offspring, Social Distortion.

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insanewayne253
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 4:58 pm 
 

One thing I noticed with a lot of thrash bands that’s already been touched on was a lot of them chasing the groove/Pantera sound, or some of them went the industrial route during industrial’s heyday

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collingwood77
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 5:05 pm 
 

[This post was deleted by the author.]


Last edited by collingwood77 on Sun Oct 17, 2021 11:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
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LithoJazzoSphere
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 5:27 pm 
 

Well, I still hear, even from musically active people, about grunge killing metal and the 90s being a lost decade. And from a mainstream point of view, it is fairly correct. Nothing since Metallica or Motley Crue has really captured anywhere near the same level of public awareness. Pantera kind of came close, maybe nu-metal (though plenty don't count it), and then metalcore, deathcore, djent and such were all much more niche and arcane to people who didn't already listen to heavy music. Nowadays metal is pretty much completely off the radar for the average household. The only "newer" popular band is someone like Sabaton or Ghost, and I doubt the average person on the street could name a song of theirs. Honestly I'm not sure I even could myself, though I've listened to both. Whether this has been a positive development is a whole separate topic, which we loosely spent pages hashing out a few months ago in another thread.

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ZenoMarx
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 5:52 pm 
 

After grunge, or maybe during grunge, hadn't MTV also moved away from music and music videos into beach parties, TLR, and reality TV catering to fraternity row college kids? Radio presence dwindling. Shortlived TV exposure drying up. Then all the other stuff previously pointed out directly happening in music. Metal was one of those forgotten youngest children. A perfect storm to push metal underground.

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LithoJazzoSphere
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 5:53 pm 
 

oldmetalhead wrote:
Four bands, from the top of my head, that I really liked that suffered from grunge, either by losing big labels or members wanting to change style are....Galactic Cowboys...


Super underappreciated band. I think a lot of their later material is really good as well though. Their Anthrax meets The Beatles vibe was so addictive.

ZenoMarx wrote:
LithoJazzoSphere wrote:
ZenoMarx wrote:
Can anyone think of other songs with drumming like Soundgarden's "Jesus Christ Pose"?


A lot of alternative rock has those sort of tom-heavy beats. Something like Muse's "Stockholm Syndrome" or Tool's "Ticks and Leeches" or "The Grudge".
I know Tool, but for some reason, I didn't think of them in the same way. Thanks for the recommendations. I'm always open to more.


Yeah, Tool has a ton more as well. But for most bands it's more on a song by song basis. A few others that come to mind: Alice In Chains "Would?" and "No Excuses", Alter Bridge "Metalingus", Blackball "Chasing Everyone Away", Breaking Benjamin "Evil Angel", Disturbed "10,000 Fists", Foo Fighters "My Hero", Grammatrain "Rocketship" and "Believe", Green Day "Longview", Incubus "Wish You Were Here", Jane's Addiction "Mountain Song", Kings of Leon "Family Tree", Porcupine Tree "Anesthetize", System of a Down "Chop Suey" and "Toxicity". Probably others, including from the same bands, these are just ones I find fun to play along with or pop into my head.

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oldmetalhead
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Location: Helltown, United States
PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 6:13 pm 
 

LithoJazzoSphere wrote:
oldmetalhead wrote:
Four bands, from the top of my head, that I really liked that suffered from grunge, either by losing big labels or members wanting to change style are....Galactic Cowboys...


Super underappreciated band. I think a lot of their later material is really good as well though. Their Anthrax meets The Beatles vibe was so addictive.


Yeah, I discovered them (GC) when they were opening for Savatage, the original version, with Jon and Criss. The bayou in Georgetown. Got to hang out with both bands. Yes, Galactic Cowboys definitely had a great Beatles like harmony between Ben and Marty on their songs. They were signed with Geffen and then Nirvana came and they lost their deal, had to go to Metal Blade.

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Yuli Ban
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 7:17 pm 
 

LithoJazzoSphere wrote:
Well, I still hear, even from musically active people, about grunge killing metal and the 90s being a lost decade. And from a mainstream point of view, it is fairly correct. Nothing since Metallica or Motley Crue has really captured anywhere near the same level of public awareness. Pantera kind of came close, maybe nu-metal (though plenty don't count it), and then metalcore, deathcore, djent and such were all much more niche and arcane to people who didn't already listen to heavy music. Nowadays metal is pretty much completely off the radar for the average household. The only "newer" popular band is someone like Sabaton or Ghost, and I doubt the average person on the street could name a song of theirs. Honestly I'm not sure I even could myself, though I've listened to both. Whether this has been a positive development is a whole separate topic, which we loosely spent pages hashing out a few months ago in another thread.

Part of the reason being that, ever since glam died, most metal bands that aren't novelty acts don't really like being "fun" and "poppy" per se. At least not in the USA. I can't speak for bands in Europe or Japan that top the charts, but seeing as the USA still drives global culture, it's inevitable that we view metal's mainstream health through the lens of our own charts. And to be fair, metal was never exactly "mainstream" here like it's been elsewhere. As we've deduced in another thread, it took a full decade before the USA even caught up to the UK and Europe in terms of metal bands back in the '70s and early '80s because we USicans were content with '70s white-boy-blues rock, shock rock, and disco. We've always been extremely trendy here, at least in the mainstream.

Glam metal was successful because it wasn't afraid to be "pop." It came at the tail end of hard rock being true "pop" music after all. If you swap out the instruments, a lot of glam songs would fit just fine over a trap beat or dance-club rhythm. But since it's also widely seen as heavy metal music, it carried the flag for the sound in mainstream thought, and thus because of that, people see the 80s as metal's peak.

I've heard some types try to play revisionist history to say heavy metal didn't actually break through into the American mainstream until 1991 with Metallica's S/T, but the cold fact is that it all really started with Quiet Riot's Metal Health in 1983, the first metal album to go to the #1 of the Billboard Charts.

People often talk about how bad or weird vocals can ruin a band for people. Well another cold fact is that, for a lot of the mainstream, harsh/cookie-monster vocals hit the exact same way. Since most prominent metal acts since the '80s has featured harsh vocals, there's already a wall preventing it from crossing over before we've even started talking about the musicality itself. Non-harsh vox in metal obviously still exist, but that brings up the issue of how non-poppy metal has become. It arguably never was particularly "poppy". Metal from the word go was like if you crossed folk rock, acid rock, and progressive rock, but certain styles made it work... to an extent. But the genres most listen to now are not made to appeal to a wide consumer base on principle.

It also doesn't help that some of the bands that do try playing with pop structures aren't the best bands. I'm still in awe that Psychosexual is a thing. And no, that's technically not a metal band, but remember that to the average pop listener, "heavy guitars and screaming" = metal.

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Yuli Ban
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 7:54 pm 
 

More on topic....

I love talking about grunge and its relationship with metal. I'm especially impressed by that mention of how similar the "grunge killed metal" argument is to the Great Video Game Crash of 1983— I came to the exact same conclusion independently because it's amazing how many similarities there are.

In that situation, people often say that ET the Extraterrestrial for the Atari 2600 was the worst video game ever made because it led to the death of video games until Nintendo saved the industry with the NES and Super Mario Bros. In fact, the truth is much more nuanced; the "industry" didn't crash as much as the console gaming industry in North America (almost exclusively); home computer games and arcades recessed somewhat, but didn't come close to dying, and console games were still thriving in Europe, South America, and Japan.


Funny how many points seem to line up with heavy metal and grunge. It's popularly believed that heavy metal was on top of the world until Kurt Cobain ruined everything, leading to metal nearly dying save for Metallica and Pantera, until nü metal started a revival. The only thing that really died was mainstream metal because it's mainstream; the mainstream music industry is controlled by trends. Trends change. So when heavy guitar music trends changed, the genre of glam metal was eviscerated because it was almost totally just a mainstream trend. There wasn't a big "underground" glam scene save for bands trying to reach the top of the pops. And once the top of the pops started sounding fuzzier, more riff-based, with perishing voices, and wearing flannel, those same bands shifted gears. Glam metal didn't die immediately, either; there were still a few hits as late as '92.

Not to mention that metal didn't die outside of the USA, nor did it die in the underground. Now I will say that metal was seen as an old trend by the mid-90s, that one 80s genre from yore. A good analog? Think of how emo was seen in the mid 2010s. Extreme metal wasn't big enough to change people's perceptions as of yet.
Thrash metal? That one died of its own accord. And traditional heavy metal was already trying to stave off irrelevance. I recall a statistic that said more trad-metal albums were released in 1990 than just about any other year, but it's hard to recognize that because this was still the late era of glam and thrash metal dominating perceptions, with power metal about to take over traditional metal's niche.

But what about sludge? If there's any genre of metal that grungers were likely to adopt, surely sludge metal was it. Except "sludge" wasn't really a thing yet. If they were going to identify as a sound marked by extreme distortion and fuzz, "noise rock" would've been a better bet. Doom metal, too, was about as underground as you could get barring Candlemass. A lot of grunge was metal-adjacent but they wouldn't be caught dead admitting it because, circa 1992, what was "metal?"



It was either that or the "good" stuff like Dio and Judas Priest, but even that was stained by loads of machismo and fantasy-gawking that was a far cry from the reality of the world. People wanted to hear more about internal demons while metal was still singing about infernal demons. Not universally; there were plenty shifting their subject matter. But it was too little, too late. So when grunge broke through, they had to be marketed as almost the antithesis of metal.

But nowadays we often see grunge as adjacent to metal, especially with certain bands. Even Mudhoney and Nirvana dabbled heavily into the world of stoner and sludge.






Things have changed and metal is no longer just "Iron Maiden, plus or minus hairspray." It can be a lot of different things.

I actually despise how Nirvana's been marketed because of how raw they were trying to be. Nirvana, outside of their radio hits, was basically someone trying to take '70s garage rock and play it as explosively and raw as possible and I love them for that. In fact I see a lot of Sub Pop-era grunge as being "high energy stoner rock." Stoner rock is not a high-energy genre but back in the '90s you saw plenty of those stoner bands (before they were called stoner rock) play with more punk-like gusto. Kyuss and Fu Manchu outright being considered grunge, if more acidic takes on the genre ("acid grunge" is probably what stoner rock would've been called if Sublime and Sugar Ray's "Fly" came out three years sooner than they did and stole that moniker— I've always felt that "stoner rock" fits that sort of jammy quasi-rap 90s alternative rock style far more than what it's actually used for). If you take stoner rock, kick out the jams, and listen to more Butthole Surfers and Smiths alongside Black Sabbath, you get something that definitely approaches what grunge actually was. I've long maintained that grunge and stoner rock are sister genres, with sludge metal being the "true" descendent of grunge (and post-grunge and nü metal being pretenders), and I'm stunned at how controversial this statement is. I'm convinced half the people who downvote this probably have never heard a stoner rock or sludge metal song and instinctively reject it because they're unfamiliar with it, and the other half are comparing "Even Flow" and "Fell On Black Days" to "Dopethrone" and writing it off altogether from there. That, or people hold strictly to genre labels too much against what they're actually hearing, something I hate and wish people would stop doing since that's how we get shlock like Crazy Town's "Butterfly" being considered a metal song.

Indeed, I'd like to go further and say that there's even an argument to be made for "90s Heavy Rock" as an alternative-tinged analog to '70s Heavy Rock. In the alternative underground between 1987 and 1994, there was a massive wave of riff-centric throwback heavy rock, this time filtered through punk rock but still rooted somewhat in blues rock and also taking heavy influence from the now fully-formed heavy metal. It was a much wider scene than just grunge and stoner rock; just about all alternative hard rock of that era was this, from Jane's Addiction (just listen to "Three Days" or "Mountain Song") to Rage Against the Machine (their first album is literally "funkified Black Sabbath meets Public Enemy") to Sleep (needs no introduction). It was all trying to bring back that spirit of the early '70s, and it just happened that the 80s was so over the top that it felt like simplification. It was a return to melody-following and blues-based guitar solos and the death of shredding.

Even the fashion was similar. People say that grunge was trying to look homeless, and I do see it, but in practice I see a return to the "heavy rocker" look a lot of proto-metal and proto-punk artists used before they got big: that of long, shaggy hair and basic denim clothing. No hairspray or make-up, no costumes, just "blues artist" stuff, except now even scruffier. It wasn't until '93 to '94 that the hair started getting cut shorter en masse to fit in with that punk/alternative look we know now and even then that era of the Shag lasted at least until '97.

Think about how alternative rock and alternative metal sounds now and has sounded since roughly 1997 or so, and compare it to how they sounded in the late '80s and early/mid-90s. It's night and day; classic alternative metal sounds genuinely metallic, more in the vein of "this is heavy metal that doesn't fit into the traditional genre formats" or taking metal music and mixing it with other genres to create something that wasn't metal but wasn't worse because of it. Whereas nowadays if I go onto any alternative metal playlist, it's going to be pretty much the same 7th-generation Alice in Chains/Killswitch Engaged/Tool/Slipknot knockoffs with the same downtuned guitars and angsty lyricism.


It's easy to recognize and appreciate all this in retrospect when it would have flew by everyone at the time. But I don't think recognizing it in retrospect makes it any less true.

TLDR: Grunge is a thin layer of sludge.

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Required Fields
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 9:50 pm 
 

Grunge had no impact on the thrash metal scene.

What I'd say did were groove metal/post-thrash (Pantera released Vulgar Display of Power in very early 1992) and death metal (there were a few death metal bands in the 1980s, but the genre didn't really start to take off until 1990-1991). It seemed to be 187 on thrash metal around 1992 or so.
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des91
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 10:27 pm 
 

Required Fields wrote:
Grunge had no impact on the thrash metal scene.

What I'd say did were groove metal/post-thrash (Pantera released Vulgar Display of Power in very early 1992) and death metal (there were a few death metal bands in the 1980s, but the genre didn't really start to take off until 1990-1991). It seemed to be 187 on thrash metal around 1992 or so.


Well, it was the death of the more “melodic Thrash Metal around 92. Death/Thrash was fully alive and well in the underground, thanks to pure Death Metal itself rising up and bands mixing the styles.

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Dungeon_Vic
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 4:56 am 
 

Acrobat wrote:
gabber wrote:
Unleash the Beast by Saxon


This is a really random choice.


Seriously though, this was the first thing that I thought as well, only I would most definitely include Dogs of War next to UtB. Both are STELLAR heavy metal albums and quite frankly among the band's best (esp. UtB) and they have no place on that list whatsoever.

TERMINAL VELOCITY!!
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~Guest 2944
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 11:13 am 
 

I don't think "grunge" crushed/killed metal. The biggest names had key members leave and bands changed their sounds to fit more into the mainstream. Bands like Morbid Angel went platinum didn't they during this time? Really what got crushed was what was known as hair metal (which I love). Bands like Enuff N Znuff and Pretty Boy Floyd, oversaturated the scene with shit music and men that went way over the top to look like women. I never considered these bands metal, even though I love Warrant and Poison. They were the ones that got crushed by incoming grunge. The style of men wearing heavy makeup, can only last so long. Eventually people are bound to get sick of it. It's not something that had the potential to become timeless. Just like the grunge look, never had the potential to become a timeless look. This and a lot of metal bands, changed their sound as I said. One to have a hit album like Metallica or two to fit more in with grunge fans. It completely destroyed mainstream metal. Deicide, Morbid Angel and Sinister among others put out their most killer material, when metal was supposedly dead. When people say metal died, or was crushed my grunge, its really a reference to shit music bands did. They ruined their own careers. Also if you look at any style of music that becomes popular, it becomes popular then the new generation gets into something else. Big band music and disco, are two examples that were the biggest music of their times. A new generation came in and said we like this instead.

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Hexenmacht46290
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 4:56 pm 
 

Grunge, like glam, and nu metal, is sometimes metal, sometimes not. Motley Crue is heavy metal. Slipknot is borderline, Alice In Chains is metal. Nirvana isn’t metal. But, in the interviews where Kurt Cobain denigrates cock rock, calling it “heavy metal,” he also talks about being really into Metallica and Black Sabbath. I know everyone likes to hate Dave Grohl, because Foo Fighters is butt rock, but he used to play in hardcore bands, and hang out with The Obsessed. He and Krist Novoselic said that the heavier sound of Bleach was influenced by Celtic Frost.

Glam was the most mainstream metal ever got, but I don’t think metal needs to be mainstream. The only arena show I’ve ever seen, was Black Sabbath. It was good, but I’ve also seen good shows in small clubs, so, being popular doesn’t always mean better. The existence of another style of music can’t “kill” a style of music. If it’s more mainstream, than yes, it can make it less popular. But ultimately, glam fans who really hate grunge, have only heard themselves to blame. Because if they really cared, as much as they say they do, they would’ve just formed the sickest glam band possible, wrote the greatest music they could’ve, and not cared about not being popular, or rich.
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Svarthavid
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Joined: Fri Jul 28, 2006 6:44 am
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 6:23 pm 
 

hots_towel wrote:
[cquote="metalistkrieg"]Those bastards even poke fun at me about how i haven't outgrown this "phase" yet but they can fuck off! I'll never stop being a metalhead.
i hate that so much. i don't get it as much from my friends anymore because they know i listen to other styles of music, but just that mentality in general is really immature in itself. "haha, they like something I used to like. how cute. grow up kid."[/quote]


Immature yes, and I'm slightly cringed out by the fact that I myself went through a similar phase in my early 20's, but I think it's sort of mandatory for a certain type of guy to experience this, let me explain.

Weather we like it or not, internet metal culture during the 2000's was pretty narrow-minded to the point that a lot of people parented viewpoints that metal and only metal could be listened to. As a teenager that went through everything teenagers do, I was impressionable as fuck and trusted my older and wiser peers, because I looked up to them and their vast knowledge of anything metal. I listened to metal exclusively from late 2002 until about 2011 when I discovered a lot of what I used to listen before my obsession with metal. I was one of the first in class to hit puberty, but the absolute last to go through that changing phase every youth with a bit of rebelliousness is destined to go through at some point. Point being, when I realized that there were other cool stuff to listen to than metal I sorta felt lied to/deceived, like a guy that grew up in a religious cult his entire life and suddenly experienced something that changed him completely. Like, hey them homos are just people like us and doomsday will not occur, and I probably won't go to hell if I masturbate. If you've read a bit of how those people react when they come to those understandings, it's often with anger/vitriol towards what their peers taught them. The fact that I also got introduced to psychedelics around the same time changed me completely. As I've gotten older I obviously knocked off that shit, as those people also do. I still love metal (but nowadays more as an old friend you used to be best buddies with when you were kids but life got in the way but you sort of drifted apart, but it's always super nice to take a beer some day and talk about the old days and get sentimental), and I absolutely love this place! I don't post a lot but lurk much, and it's so Wonderfull seeing the guys who have posted here for years coupled with some new ones just banter, argue or have fun. It's like going to that restaurant where you ABSOLUTELY KNOW that not much has changed, and that is the strength of this site in my opinion. Besides, a lot of you appear to be rather nice fellows, I still love you even if some of the general sentiment here is a bit behind the times, when come to think of it, that's part of the charm reading through posts here so why the fuck am I complaining?

It's always been this debate about metal vs. hip hop, but take this from a guy that considers himself a hip hopper, what drew me to hip hop in the first place is the similarities in opinions to metalhead. We have a lot more in common than punks in my opinion, it was actually a Norwegian rapper that first made me think of this and I think he is absolutely right! Hardcore metalheads and hardcore hip hoppers (not the lil dis or lil dat types) have very similar ways of how they perceive their music, it's just esthetically the exact opposite of each other, but the philosophy, the reason why they do this and that, the rules and such, the exact same thing! That's why I one day can discuss with out of touch hacks and prove their claims wrong that hip hop is dead and the next day come here and do the exact same thing, just metal instead. Granted, a lot of people have done that for me already on here but it's stunning how similar those two universes are when it comes to these things!

Well, this was a rant from a guy that's currently stoned out of his mind, cary on with the grunge discussion! May the encyclopedia metallum live on forever!
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Kanonenfieber, Shylmagoghnar or Minenwerfer.


These names sound like you just made them up lol...I'll tell my kids these were the names of the three wise men.

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Vadara
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Joined: Wed Mar 16, 2016 11:14 pm
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 8:27 pm 
 

I think a thing a lot of people struggle to remember or realize is that the music scene back then was simple not like the scene today. Today's status quo where each and every genre of music has a dedicated fanbase and bands that very specifically keep within that genre's core definition is a relatively recent thing. Back then, bands just made music and absolutely did not care for genre hair-splitting (they still don't--most actual musicians would find music nerds' hair-splitting to be an insufferably dorky waste of time). Metal bands did not go "haha, if we incorporate grunge into our music, the riches will flow endlessly!"--grunge was a new thing that bands took interest in and then tried to incorporate with mixed success into their music. We were a decade and a half or so off from the era of being able to just put your music on bandcamp and spotify and instantly get to fans of your subgenre from around the world, and for fans to just google "best atmoblack records" or ask their fellow fans for reccomendations of [specific subgenre]. Experimentation--too much experimentation, really--was a hallmark of rock (and thus metal) at the time. Hell, this "let's try shit and see if it works" mentality is what led to death metal ("what if we made THE HEAVIEST FUCKING METAL POSSIBLE") and black metal ("death metal is too clinical and showy, let's strip everything back and also get racist"), so it wasn't a complete waste of time.

Obviously people used terms like "grunge" or "death metal" or "thrash metal" at the time. But the modern conception of "if you make X subgenre, you are going to make NOTHING but X subgenre until you break up" was absolutely not a thing back then. This mentality explains so many of the baffling things that were going on in the 80's and 90's like Metallica trying to make mainstream rock or Judas Priest inexplicably trying to make shitty pop music in the 80's. Bands just fucked around and did shit, sometimes incredibly stupid shit, actually mostly stupid shit, but that was how it was back then, until the internet let bands suddenly have an audience from around the world to support their niche music instead of just one or two countries.

By the time nu-metal was a thing, the current status quo was mostly forming, hence why metal bands barely dipped into that genre. By the time of deathcore and metalcore's breakout, the status quo had firmly been set in place and we have only a tiny few dying gasps of this concept left, such as The Unspoken King, all of which were miserable failures.

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