Almost overnight, flannel and ripped jeans were in style and 80s power ballads outdated. They were a transformative force despite fewer than five years in the limelight-a phenomenon abruptly ended with front man Kurt Cobain’s suicide in April 1994.įor starters, Nirvana launched grunge music with its 1991 breakout album, “Nevermind,” and a music video, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” that juggernauted the band to superstardom and has since become only the decade’s second to reach one billion YouTube views. It is hard to overestimate Nirvana’s influence on both the music scene and pop culture. Nirvana was the best rock band in one of its best decades: the 1990s. I leave you with this: The Ramones Greatest Hits Live is the greatest (and at 37 minutes, the fastest) “best of” album ever. We can and should enjoy “Rockaway Beach,” “Sedated” and “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” in their natural habitat: live, loud and at machine-gun pace. No, the Ramones are the type of band whose music is meant to be played at warp speed and ear-splitting volume. If you’re listening to “Blitzkrieg Bop” on the radio, slowed down to less than half measure, you’re doing it wrong. ![]() Their music was never meant for the airwaves. Emerging from the depressing early 1970s, their music, appearance and attitude were an amplified middle finger to everything from the societal status quo to conventional rock music. Along with the Sex Pistols, the Ramones are generally credited with birthing punk rock. 18 The Ramonesįrom this point forward, the list is in no particular order, except for this writer’s opinion that the greatest American rock band ever is and always will be The Ramones.įor starters, the Ramones were genre pioneers – a distinction that should elevate a band on any list (SEE: REM, Nirvana). When a band has two of the greatest songwriters of all time, timing and even consistency mean nothing. Meanwhile, songs like “Wild Horses” and “Angie” reflect neither their times nor the band’s remaining catalogue their commonality is that they are, quite simply, damn good songs. This anecdote is a microcosm: The Stones are a refreshingly stubborn counterpoint to the Beatles while the latter quickly adapted to reflect the tumultuous 1960s, the Stones catalogue is defiantly unaffected by its surroundings.ġ971’s “Brown Sugar,” a song about sleeping with a black girl, seems out of place amid the Civil Rights movement, while 1966’s “Under My Thumb” is antagonistically misogynistic, flying in the face of the simmering women’s lib movement. Several years later, Sopranos creator David Chase chose the lulling, haunting “Thru and Thru” to close the show’s second season, cementing the record’s legacy. The breakout single, “Love is Strong,” was testament to the fact that, even in the heart of the grunge era, a good rock song is a good rock song, period. The album was “Voodoo Lounge,” and the band was the irrepressible Rolling Stones. That summer, a band that had been going strong for three decades dropped its 22nd studio album. I was in high school in 1994 as the rock world mourned the death of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain. They went from “Hard Day’s Night” to “Revolution” to Abbey Road’s “Come Together” and, along the way, tripped out with “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”Īny band in which the infinitely talented George Harrison is only the third most influential member is going to rank among the greatest ever. In less than a decade, they went from suited pop stars strumming simplistic ditties like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to serve as soundtrack to the fast-changing times. Įqually impressive is the band’s maturation. ![]() Perhaps most tellingly, no reliable figure exists for concert attendance… because fans were so rabid that the Beatles stopped touring in 1966. They’ve sold 183 million records, the most ever. Over an eight-year run the Beatles had an astounding 27 #1 hits, and dozens others nearly adding to that total. In the process they became bigger than Jesus and had their own mania named after them. From 1963 until their breakup in 1970, the Fab Four enjoyed the most condensed run of brilliance in history, bar none. ![]() Let’s get the obvious ones out of the way: no list of top rock bands would be viable without the Beatles and the next band, the Rolling Stones.
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