I don't get it, if people can't even tell the difference between those two lists then humanity is honestly dead to me. You think Nirvana is soul less, and these paid by the parents fake bands convince you...
Kurt was paid for by his girlfriend. Not the one who shot him in the face, a different one before that.
But anyway, three of the bands on the list were active in the 1990s. Did they automatically become soulless fake bands on January 1st 2000? Morcheeba even sounds the same as they did back then! Incidentally, Kurt's favourite band was Shonen Knife, who began in the early 80s and are still active now. For the most part they make music roughly the same as they did back in the "Let's Knife" days, only with better production quality, so there's another for the list.
Serious question: what do you think of these two pop songs?
Neneh Cherry - Buffalo Stance
Nicki Minaj - Super Bass
They're both very similar - rap verse with amusing lyrics leading into a great pop hook for the chorus, with a calmer bridge section towards the end. Both have strong, memorable synth hooks for the instrumental track. Both have the singer assuming an exaggerated overconfident persona for comedy effect. They even reached a similar position on the charts - Buffalo Stance at #4 and Super Bass at #3, I think.
One big difference is that Super Bass is from 2011, 11 years after The Shit Cutoff Point, whereas Buffalo Stance is from 1988, 12 years before the cutoff. They sound very similar in style and genre to me, and I think both songs are fantastic. Does Buffalo Stance have a quality of being "real deal music" which is "made legitimately" which Super Bass lacks as a result of being made 23 years later? Is Neneh a real musician while Nicki is "paid by the parents"?
Another question: were you around in the 90s? I'm old enough to remember stuff like Sheryl Crow being on the radio and the general consensus was that it was insufferable made-for-radio crap (though I actually like her big self-titled album). Similarly, my dad grew up in the 60s and 70s and he genuinely believes music died in the year 1976. I tried as a kid to show him all the 90s rock bands, even throwing in a bunch of grunge bands I didn't even like just to try and get through to him, and he described it all as "worthless pap", including the likes of Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, etc. You made me think of him when you used the phrase "posing as rockers", because he accused a lot of the grunge artists of being weak Led Zep ripoffs. Showing him the likes of Green Day went even worse, Billie didn't even get to finish the line "do you have the time to listen to me whine" before dad yelled "turn that shit off".
Trying to show him stuff from the 80s went even worse, because he deemed The Cure to be "a band for poofs" and literally any pop song as "awful shite", except Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears which he called "the worst shite". He called Enola Gay by OMD - objectively the second best song ever written - "a load of new romantic bollocks," when it's NOT EVEN NEW ROMANTIC. He was a fan of Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac, and considered the Buckingham/Nicks era (which me, you, and everyone with basic taste knows is actually the good era) to be a travesty. Tried to play an Erasure song for him and the old fucker nearly had a heart attack.
I'm only asking because I think the eras we grow up in and the attitudes we have towards the music at the time can really influence the way we view the present. My dad genuinely thinks that no good music was released after '76, and he's very generous to anything released before that, even total shit like ELO. He's endlessly delighted to go back and find literally any record released between 1965 and 1976, because he knows it'll be good by default, because it's from the good era, even if it's shit. I see a lot of people who grew up in the 90s doing the same thing now. I've admitted I think media has gotten measurably worse since then, so maybe I'm affected too, but if you get into the mindset of saying that
nothing is good anymore and dismissing everything new as "fake", you're in serious danger of ending up like my dad - fat, diabetic, and listening to Incredible String Band all day, with a son who posts on the Codex. A grim fate.