I've Kind of Been Wondering the Same Thing

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If you want to know how rock died, go to Steven Hyden's 10-part series Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?. It takes forever--I'm only halfway through--but it's worth it.  

I particularly appreciated his evenhanded assessment of Guns N' Roses: in revealing how fraudulent metal bands had become, they were a psychotic precursor to Nirvana.
Yes, it helped that I was only 10 at the time, but GNR was unnerving in a way that even the scariest of metal bands couldn't touch ... Nirvana is credited with making '80s hair-metal bands look silly with Nevermind, but GNR had already done that with the "Welcome To The Jungle" video several years earlier.

It's this GNR that I remember--not those purveyors of cheese that brought us Use Your Illusion. Only a couple of weeks after the band filmed that "Jungle" video, I saw them open for The Cult in Halifax. They were loud, crude, clearly drunk. Best of all, they weren't Poison.

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