(Credits: Far Out)
Tue 21 April 2026 10:00, UK
Sometimes, a band just enters the rock and pop world at the worst possible time.
What does 1991 immediately burn into your musical thinking the moment you see those four digits? Much like 1977’s punk insurrection or the free rave acid house clubbing around 1988, the year of Gulf Wars and Soviet collapse will invariably prompt a kneejerk carousel of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ snuffing out the likes of Mötley Crüe within the first few seconds of its opening power chord riff attack, unleashing the grunge revolution and killing hair metal overnight.
The fact is, Nirvana came in at the absolute best time, ultimately too good for their troubled frontman, burdened with the ‘voice of a generation’ tag he never asked for. Without minimising Kurt Cobain’s fantastic songcraft, the Seattle grunge swell was ballooning and ballooning to bursting point by September 1991; all it needed was Nevermind’s lead single to make that one final pin prick to flood the charts with the decade’s alternative explosion.
Around Nirvana’s hometown were Alice In Chains, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, who all counted major label albums before the world saw baby Spencer Elden swim after that fishhooked dollar bill.
Yes, it’s a tired piece of rock lore that grunge killed hair metal, but Nirvana et al indeed accelerated its sorely-needed demise, a potent and rich US punk and alternative underground simmering with fatigue at the spandex buffoonery flaunting its completely unrelatable decadence on the day’s MTV across much of the 1980s. A changing of the guards was well underway as the 1990s arrived, as revealed when perusing Billboard’s Hot 100 singles of 1991.
In at number one, to no surprise for whoever’s old enough to remember, is Bryan Adams’ ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ power ballad, but in the rock department? It’s none other than Extreme’s ‘More Than Words’ acoustic love song, dropped in March and peaking at number one three months later. An atypical number from the hair metal outfit, the drippy cut brought bucketloads of commercial attention, if fantastically misreading the musical winds signalling a very different direction in a short time.
If Nirvana rode the wave of fortuitous timing, Extreme just didn’t get the memo. There were certainly worse examples of hair metal’s arse end, cutting a strutting Boston hard rock echoing Aerosmith’s rawer heyday a decade earlier and smattering some funk elements in the mix.
Nelson, they weren’t. In fact, hardcore Seattleites may even spot a similar swaggering ostentation with the city’s much-loved Mother Love Bone, the Pearl Jam predecessor fronted by the glammed-up Andrew Wood, who tragically died before seeing his home city thrust to the world’s musical map.
1991’s rock story is both one of swift upheaval and bubbling change, when a band like Exchange could drop a record like the previous year’s Extreme II: Pornograffitti that attempted in its own, unwitting way, to toughen the rock climate, while lapsing into the anthemic stodge of the era’s worst contenders and reach its nadir with ‘More Than Words’ soggy dross. Extreme would drop follow-up III Sides to Every Story in 1992 to a very different world, positively received by fans but selling nowhere near as many copies, and forever consigned, no matter how fair, as the last of the hair metal brigade.
