As a younger boomer (born in '61) I understand what your friend was saying but would argue that his observations have little to do with the decade in which one's formative listening occurred. By the time Tears For Fears came along my "formation" had already largely been completed, my primary influences in that regard being U2, REM, and Talking Heads. Other bands/artists were on my radar, obviously, but those were the big three for me, and I still listen to all three frequently.

Thus as a boomer myself, I can say that 80's music was every bit as "formative" for me as it was for him, but it was the music of the early 80's, as opposed to the mid-to-late 80's. I happened to be high-school/college aged when the big transition occurred between "classic rock" and punk/new wave, and was paying a lot of attention at the time. I always tell people who complain about 80's music that if they think it's bad they're listening to the wrong stuff.

I'm five years younger than you Rob, but completely agree with your assessment. I would say that the best U2 song remains "New Year's Day", the best REM song is the one Mac has offered for us, and with Talking Heads (my favorite of the three bands you mention) they were really just around a decade or so, but managed to film Stop Making Sense which I still think is the most thrilling live concert you can watch without being there!

Those are all great records, Craig. The Van Morrison is also a personal favorite of mine, but really quite obscure in his catalog. I remember hearing "Be Thou My Vision" in church one Sunday and perking up (!!) "what was that?" I grew up Presbyterian. My favorite Tom Waits will always be Rain Dogs; it's the first one I bought (likely on cassette at the time) and listened to it over and over until I knew all of the songs by heart, and probably still do.

" I recently heard a Madonna song playing in a store and I couldn't believe how horrible her voice was! I suppose it was the fault of MTV, partly, that she became so popular."

She was definitely a very visually-driven, sensation-driven phenomenon, similar to what's currently going on with Taylor Swift, only not as big and fanatical. I had a similar experience with her music. She had been very widely publicized and discussed as a phenomenon, an early manifestation of feminism embracing the sexual provocation it had formerly decried. "It's empowering" and all that guff. And I didn't have access to MTV and didn't listen to the radio very much. So I was very aware of her as a celebrity without having heard her music. When I finally heard "Material Girl" on the radio, I was amazed. "That's it? That tinny little voice and flimsy song are what this is all about?"

I tend to be one of those possibly annoying people who says "Their first couple of albums were pretty good but after that they went downhill." :-) That's pretty much my view of R.E.M. and U2. It's really not fair, because I didn't really listen to their "later" stuff, i.e. anything that came out after about 1986 or so. I will say though that I don't really get why people like Achtung Baby so much. A friend taped it for me and I gave it plenty of hearing but never really cared that much for most of it. I don't think I've heard anything of theirs since.

Listening to Joshua Tree not too many years ago, I realized that I've never liked an entire U2 album. There were always several tracks that I just didn't much like. I never heard anything past Achtung.

I like the not-great sound of Murmur. That's part of what gives it that sort of mysterious quality. Like the weird cover and the unintelligible vocals.

The Joshua Tree is one of those albums I simply cannot deal with, sort of like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road for Mac. It was so overplayed during that time period that if one of those songs comes on I have to turn it off.

Iirc, Chronic Town came out before Murmur but I didn't hear it until well after. I was underwhelmed too. The third album did take somewhat of a turn from the first two, but I liked it just as much. It includes what I think is one of their best songs, "Driver 8." The one after that wasn't bad, but it was with 1987's 'Document' that I started to lose interest.

I’m born in 1980, and my father in 1951. He loved the alternative scene in the 80s and wasn’t immune to pop. My mother’s guilty secret was hair metal. Music was always on. All the while, I watched Solid Gold with my mother every week as soon as I could walk and spent plenty of time watching MTV from 1986 onwards. By the time the late 80s happened I was an elementary school kid who was aware of all the popular music. I had begged my parents to buy me thriller on LP when I was in Kindergarten. By middle school in the early to mid 90s, I was fully onboard with glam metal and heavy metal. From my perspective, MTV changed everything.

When grunge exploded in 1992, my 12 year old brain knew it was junk. I stand by that assessment. Heroin and depression songs suck. Smiling won’t kill you.

"Different flavors of decay" almost seems like it needs to be trademarked on a coffee mug or bumper sticker, with little photos of anonymous rock stars....LOL

No one listening to late 80's alternative, at least that of the guitar-oriented "underground" sort, was surprised by grunge. To those of us who were listening to The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., Ride, etc., it just seemed like a continuation. What struck me as odd was its super-fast rise in popularity. This may have been fueled by MTV, but by that time I had stopped watching it so I don't really know. I think that if grunge would have stayed "alternative" it might have served as a shot in the arm to a fairly moribund rock scene. But instead it went viral and as you say, "ruined everything."

The arrival of grunge did help kill the shoegaze scene, but the latter survived under the surface in the UK in BritPop, a separate scene that because of grunge never really caught on in the U.S. The two biggest BritPop acts, Oasis and Blur, had success over here but the scene was much more robust across the pond, with lots of other bands contributing/competing that never got much attention in the States.

Re R.E.M. and "Driver 8," I remember buying Fables of the Reconstruction, getting it home and throwing it on, and at first being put off by the opening track, with its dissonant guitar line and apparent lack of melody. Fears were quelled by the end of it, however, and the next two tracks confirmed reality -- this was the same good stuff, just in a slightly different guise (partly due to a change in producers from Don Dixon and Mitch Easter to UK folk-rock pioneer Joe Boyd).

Maybe the downfall of shoegaze is just that people have never heard of it, or the bands. Case in point, the only place I've ever heard this term or of any of these bands is on this blog, and I'm more than a little interested in music. This is not meant as criticism, just an observation.

Shoegaze was pretty big in the very late 80's and early 90's among the "alternative" and MTV crowds, except at the time it wasn't called that, and by the time the moniker was more familiar in the US the style was already on its way out. That's why a lot of American music fans aren't familiar with the term, coupled with the fact that all of the associated acts were from the UK, and in those days music on UK labels was not always easy to find if they didn't have a US release or US distributorship. Even then there was often a lag time between when it was released in the UK and when it showed up in the States. Note too that the entire scene, such as it was, lasted only three or four years, and featured only about ten prominent bands all told.

I remember both Ride and Catherine Wheel getting considerable attention in the early 90's pre-grunge alternative scene but I don't recall the term "shoegaze" being used at the time in either case. It's similar in some ways to the term "post punk". I was listening to a ton of that stuff in the late 70s/early 80s but I don't recall anyone ever calling it "post punk" at the time. To us it was all "new wave."

Wow. What a long list of people who are wrong about the superiority of glam metal. I’m going to write a Replacements style song about how right I am.

https://images.app.goo.gl/6KGGB8zB8WkmHczq5

Hairspray and smiles.

I don’t think the Replacements qualify as glam.

I might even give a slight edge in preference to grunge. Less stupid posturing. Maybe. I remember that 70s-80s hard rock and pop metal made me wonder if I actually hated rock.

I wondered what happened to the term “new wave.” Didn’t know it was the same as post-punk :-)

Of course it is. Depends on one's idea of a good time. Looking at hair metal band: not a good time. Hearing hair metal band: not a good time. Looking at hair metal band while hearing them: super not a good time.

Lyle Lovett concert: good time.

I basically thought they all sounded like rather uninspired '70s hard rock. I'll give Nirvana credit for having a lot of energy. Not sure I've ever actually heard anything by Foo Fighters.

Every now and then I have an impulse to sign up for the abomination formerly known as Twitter, just to see a bit more of the war. And then I think "are you crazy?"

I'm pretty sure that no one reading this is going to take your bet.

I can actually date that because I was teaching high school religious ed at the time, and my students liked GnR. Right at the end of the '80s, probably '89. I moved to another city in '90.

My impression of Pearl Jam is: why is something so boring so popular? :-) There must be more to their music than I think.

I think Nirvana's "Teen Spirit" song might have been the last glorious triumph of the 1-4-5 chord progression.

No surprise there

GnR also may be my least favorite popular band, and it is certainly that guy's voice that puts it over the top. I also find that their music is omnipresent, in places where canned popular music is played. So it is a struggle (ha ha).
Pearl Jam made one good album, the first one I think called Ten. Only song title I can recall is "Jeremy", I think. Everything else they put out from album two until now sounds terrible to me, and I no longer listen to the first one either.
The entire Nirvana thing is just incomprehensible in how big they seem to still remain, and I guess it's just the death of their lead singer. I see lots of young people who would have never known their music will Cobain was alive wearing Nirvana t-shirts. Perhaps they just buy t-shirts and don't listen to the music? But that one song is quite good, "Smells Like Teen Spirit". I don't go out of my way to listen to them either.
Grunge must have been a response to something going on in the culture, musically or otherwise, but I can't quite recall what that was. My taste has always been for the bands and personalities that came before that period. I've been listening a lot to the new Rolling Stones and Pretenders albums, for instance. Oh, and the newest Deep Purple is great! That might be a band that Fr. Venuti can get behind. :-)
Some bands I've just been so happy to see fade away, like Van Halen. Though it was sad that EVH died. Nowadays music doesn't quite take hold of you like it used to, with so many ways to access it. But there is till Guns and Roses to contend with!

Hackney Diamonds is really great, Mac. I drove up to Birmingham a few weeks ago and this might have been the first time I listened to it in its entirety with no interruption. I would say one weak song. Goats Head Soup played (also in its entirety) before, which I think is a very good album. I thought Hackney Diamonds sounded, cleaner, fresher, better production, and for the most part great songs. I don't know how Jagger can still sing like that in his 80s, not to mention still dance around a stage. It may be further verification that the miraculous can occur.
But you were never much of a Stones fan to begin with, right?

~~I've heard serious music fans and critics say that when they first heard grunge in general and Nirvana in particular they were instantly excited, overwhelmed, fascinated, etc.~~

I don't get that either, especially among people who were paying any attention whatsoever to late 80's alternative rock. What Nirvana did was to take that stuff to the mainstream rock audience, so in that sense I understand it -- if you were younger and had only ever heard mainstream rock Nirvana probably seemed like something fresh out of the blue.

Yep -- I had that CD at one point and remember that song very well. If I remember correctly, Cobain was a big Pixies fan.

I had three of their CD's at one point but the only one I actually liked was "Doolittle." Haven't listened to it in ages, though. It was refreshing at its time but I feel like I've moved beyond it -- although I still like some of the tracks the overall weirdness doesn't appeal anymore.

Early score. Dvorak is playing the long game.

For anybody else who had to look it up:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_Deathmatch

The two things that killed GnR for me were the "wickedness and vulgarity" and Rose's voice. Just one of those would have been bad enough, but the combo was insurmountable. To me, his voice was like the proverbial fingernails on the chalkboard. I have same problem with Geddy Lee, despite the appeal of Rush's music.

As someone who had liked U2 from the early days, by the time they got to The Joshua Tree to me they had lost their edge and grown tiresome. I tended not to like bands that noticeably opted towards "accessibility" in seeking a larger audience.

"Dvorak is playing the long game."

Right. You could just as easily say
Dvorak: 150 years
REM: 40 years

"But I've heard serious music fans and critics say that when they first heard grunge in general and Nirvana in particular they were instantly excited, overwhelmed, fascinated, etc.--the sort of things people said when Sgt. Pepper appeared. I really don't get it at all."

I think what's going on here is that in the same way that an older generation of listeners experienced the energy, novelty, and leap in sophistication of Sgt. Pepper (or insert Beatles album of choice) and looked everywhere for a hint of the same spark, the next generation of music critics were desperately looking for something to match the emergence of punk rock in 1977.

AMG agrees with Craig and Matt about GnR, and then some.

https://www.allmusic.com/album/appetite-for-destruction-mw0000192878

I can't comment because I don't think I've heard more than maybe 1 in 5 of those, and of the ones I have heard most were not heard on the radio. Our local station that called itself alternative was not really all that alt. And I didn't hear the radio all that much, either.

I never have liked that piercing high-pitched scream that so many hard rock and metal vocalists use. I guess Robert Plant was the original, but his voice had more substance, texture, or something than others. Not to mention that their music in general had way more variety than the hard rock that came later. At least in my experience.