Ehwmatt wrote:Grunge gets a bad name for ruining guitar solos and what not, but those guys were still soloing - even Cobain soloed here and there. They just tended to be simplistic. Cantrell can seriously play, Corgan and Iha did some whacked out shit, and the DeLeo on guitar for STP had some great riffs and solos.
Grunge marked a significant change in music because, IMO, it brought
emotion and some truth back that had been missing. Gone were the slick,
over-polished "rock" songs with singers that sounded like their balls were locked
in a vice, being replaced by a more stripped-down sound with "
singers" that
communicated through growls, howls and unintelligible garble at times.
I listen to music from this genre still today and I look at most of my favorite frontmen of that time
more as "
storytellers" than "
singers". Vedder can be down right horrible and off-key but
he conveys so much emotion and conviction in his delivery; he was believable. Same goes for
the likes of
Cobain, Layne, Corogan, Lannigan, Cornell, Andrew Wood... They were/are "
singers"
in the vein of
Springsteen, Dylan and Young.
The idea that grunge "
killed the guitar solo" is ridiculous. Sure, there were no
VH-Tapping
marathons and the song structures weren't cut & paste like 99% of "
rock" from the 80's
(intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, guitar solo, chorus, outro...), but guitarists
like
McCready, Cantrell, Coragon, Iha, Deleo & Thayil (just to name a few) could still spit
out monster runs; solos that added more to the "
emotion" than they did to just show off.
But again, this is all just IMO.
