"destroooooy!"

 

I personally don't think Michael Jackson's 1991 album DANGEROUS was worth a #1 spot on any music chart.  It was a good album.  It was perhaps even a GREAT album.  It did a good job at giving Mr. Jackson a singer/songwriter kind of outlet while at the same time being bombastic and flashy enough to be commercially viable while also being in line with the then-current musical trends, perhaps more so than it should've.  

However, it is LIGHT years ahead of the album that people look to as the PRIME - example of music consumers change in taste.  The album that "famously"/"infamously" knocked Michael Jackson's DANGEROUS off of the #1 spot on the Billboard album chart.

I can't say the changing musical tide was necessarily a bad thing.  Lots of good music was being successfully well marketed alongside Nirvana's 1991 breakthrough album NEVERMIND.  Sponge's 1994 album ROTTING PINATA, Soul Asylum's GRAVE DANCERS' UNION (1992), the first 4 albums by Counting Crows, and then of course the countless seminal emo albums, many of which gave me a small sense of belonging back in my final year of high school and the years i would've traditionally been in college, before I turned my attention to God, years later.

Most of the music I like probably would have existed in some fashion or another with or without Nirvana.  HOWEVER, with Nirvana, and more importantly, the FAME OF Nirvana, music that I probably would never have known existed became very difficult to ignore.  Green Day's 1995 album INSOMNIAC probably would have been a cassette only release available only in record shops nearby where the band is from, wherever that is (I may or may not look that up later).  Green Day took the plunge into major label recording because of Nirvana's example.  I mean, it's not like I would have been destitute had I not heard Sponge's "Plowed" or Live's 'All Over You", or Bush's "Swallowed", but then again; when I get to thinking about it --- I saw a movie, well, most of it, from 1986 titled RIVER'S EDGE.  It was about a bunch of misfit kids whose loyalties become divided when some of them start wrestling with their conscience, considering what course of action to take when one of their friends ends up killing his girlfriend.  Those kids LIVED OUT the destructive lifestyle that is common in bands like Nirvana and Green Day.  Not only did they do things that were harmful to their health, but their whole mentality was on the cusp of being sunk forever.  Some of them had already reached that point and the characters in that film ranged from 11 to 19 years in age (apprx).  I'm 37 and I have, statistically speaking if you just go by health data from recent history, another 50 years in my life.  My head is not forever sunk, at least too far to be recovered, I don't think.  Yes, I have some bad habits in my thinking patterns and my ideals are a bit warped, even though I have an opposing ideology to contend with which intellectually I find to be far superior, but I do have an ever present sense of optimism that has kept me on guard toward the possibilities and the promise of what life can be and should be.  I can't and often don't do anything to make justice in this world, but I do believe it is not impossible for people in the positions of power to do so and I truly am flabbergasted that they don't, but in the end it all comes down to habits.  One mild vice can be an encouragement for others to take that vice to an extreme yet uncharted.  I stand guilty.  My point is if i did not have an outlet to safely explore "the wild side", I don't think I would have been safe.  I think I would have been lonely and desperate to find a sense of "real"ness in the company of people such as those in RIVER'S EDGE.  It's also possible that I would have simply been disassociated from everything I know, more so than I am already as it is.  A lot of melodious pretty songs came out in the 1980s, but most of it was ultimately stuff that I don't resonate with personally.  I hear stuff like "Always Something There To Remind Me" by Naked Eyes or "Shattered Dreams" by Johnny Hates Jazz, and I don't connect with it emotionally.  It gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling, but songs from when I was in my late teens/early 20s, stuff like DREAM TO MAKE BELIEVE by Armor For Sleep and THE FORGOTTEN ARM by Aimee Mann (who has had a tough as nails time getting the recognition she should even with the alt rock tide of the 1990s), stuff that really struck a chord with me and actually caused a WHOOM to my psyche, rather than just a ringing of ear candy, probably would have been a lot harder to discover had it not been for the crescendo of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that got the world talking about alternative rock.