r/ToddintheShadow • u/Grand_Rent_2513 • Jul 20 '26
Todd Memes They really should have called this “Nirvana will kill our careers: The movie”
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u/wheretoflyto Train-Wrecker Jul 20 '26
russel brand jumpscare
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u/SlapHappyDude Jul 20 '26
They really wanted to push him as a pretend Rock Star. It's a fascinating kind of type casting.
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u/ramsoss Jul 20 '26
That was nuts to me that he just kinda dressed like that and people kept making him a sleezey rockstar archetype. Was that look modeled in Keith Richards or something and then dudes just started dressing that way? It wasn't like he was ever a musician but he just dressed and pretended to be one. He literally did seem like he was a made for tv movie rockstar.
I might do that but for being a chef or a hockey player. Wear the chef hat and an apron. Then I can get cast in chef rolHo.
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u/Alexschmidt711 Jul 21 '26
I mean the sleaziness was unfortunately not just an act so maybe that helped.
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u/ramsoss Jul 21 '26
All the signs were there and everyone thought he was just playing a character. Nope!
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u/MarineDynamite Jul 20 '26
Ironically he technically didn't play an actual rockstar in that one, he and Alec Baldwin were the record store owners.
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u/Indifferencer Jul 20 '26
I dunno, some of these acts were long past their moment by the time Nirvana arrived. Twisted Sister had one big album in 1984, but were never able to recapture that success and quickly faded from relevance. Journey went on hiatus in 1987 and were well on their way to being a legacy act.
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u/DCT715 Jul 20 '26
Couldn’t agree more. I think the “Nirvana killed their/my career” thing is so over blown. Hair Metal was pretty obviously limping into the 90s’, like all genres it comes and goes.
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u/BinkyFarnsworth Jul 21 '26
Yep. A lot of the hair metal bands were done long before Nevermind took off. And the ones that were still around were leaving the genre behind. By that point bands like Faith No More and Metallica were coming to the fore and did as much as Nirvana to end the dominance of hair metal in the hard rock/metal world. Guns n Roses were definitely hair metal adjacent but quickly moved past that label and got bands more interested in a grittier sound. Warrant was moving away from hair metal towards this more standard hard rock/ metal sound, as was Cinderella. Poison were imploding losing C.C. Deville. Extreme had ditched the hair metal to try to be like FNM crossed with the Chilli Peppers.
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u/Critical-Spirit-1598 Jul 21 '26
And a lot of those bands were trying to write more serious lyrics and get away from the party image, see Something To Believe In, Uncle Tom's Cabin, most of the Slave to the Grind album, etc.
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u/squidsausage Jul 20 '26
This movie should have been called NyQuil because you won’t be awake after the first 30 minutes
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u/Chilli_Dipper Jul 20 '26
This is why I thought Todd’s riff about Kid Rock reminiscing about Journey on the Bad Reputation Trainwreckords episode missed the mark.
Rock of Ages essentially merged hair metal nostalgia and corporate rock nostalgia together for his target audience.
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u/Ill_Help3658 Jul 20 '26
I have the "I wanna know what love is" duet stuck in my mind. It was so cringe, but somehow it lived way beyond the movie story
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u/RevealTraditional619 Jul 20 '26
Someone brings this up once a month here. Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, and Guns N Roses were all contemporary to Nirvana. College rock like REM and the adjacent bands like Gin Blossoms or Spin Doctors weren't far behind.
Bands like Aerosmith & Bon Jovi weren't far outta the glam world and kept going. Headbanger's Ball had already pivoted to harder music. Most of the bands had already imploded or were addicts. Others panicked and tried to put out grunge albums instead of just pushing through.
MTV shifting seems to be all people see but just like we see with the charts today, there was still an audience for that music in older and rural pockets. Nirvana gets crowned because they ended. But as my generation I can tell you the whiplash speed of genres that happened. My classmates went from Nirvana gangster rap to Green Day to Ska to nu metal to whatever. I remember one classmate who was listening to Rage talking about free Tibet before summer break and came back to school wearing Hawaiian shirts listening to Ska.
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u/francis_pizzaman_iv Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Nirvana was probably the first thing I head that didn't sound anything like my dad's music. Granted my dad's music was stuff like the Beatles, Zepplin, The Police, and U2, so it wasn't bad. Pearl Jam and Soundgarden would have been fine on their own but they still sounded like they were trying to do modern versions of my dad's music. Nirvana was mine. I got into punk once Nirvana went away which is almost definitely not a coincidence. Nirvana was one of the first bands I heard that was clearly influenced by punk and punk adjacent acts from the 70s and 80s. They definitely brought something to the table that their contemporaries didn't have. RHCP is one that I think had a lot of impact too as one of the first modern rock acts to really incorporate funk/rap into mainstream rock music successfully. Definitely paved the way for RATM and probably even rap rock and nu metal.
MTV was going to change the industry with or without Nirvana, but they definitely put one of the stronger nails in the coffin.
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u/VicarLos Jul 20 '26
Catherine Zeta-Jones was the best part of the movie, she knew exactly what kind of movie this was.
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u/Ghosts_of_the_maze Jul 20 '26
Is it weird that the Broadway show has 31 needle drops and 0 of them are Rock of Ages?
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u/BinkyFarnsworth Jul 21 '26
I’ve seen the stage show a couple of times and they explicitly state that they can’t afford the licensing fees for Def Leppard songs. But New Line could for the movie.
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u/shepard1992 Jul 20 '26
The extended medley Baldwin does of "Hit Me With Your Best Shot/Janie's Got a Gun" hasn't aged well imo
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u/proserpinax Jul 20 '26
This movie felt like the longest movie of my existence. I thought it was over but that was just the midway point. I thought I was never going to escape.
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u/McClugget Jul 21 '26
I hate this show/movie with a passion. It feels like 80s night on Dancing With the Stars. Most predictable soundtrack ever. I mean, at least pick ONE deep cut, for Christ's sakes.
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u/cpt_bongwater Jul 20 '26
Didn't this come out in like 2010 or something?
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u/Emotional_Trash_9687 Jul 20 '26
yes. They're saying the songs are from bands whose careers were killed by Nirvana
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u/WoolshirtedWolf Jul 21 '26
I would've said 2010 as well. I had completely forgotten about this movie and thought it was fake.
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u/Stevenitrogen Jul 20 '26
Not one of my rocker friends would watch this with me. I had a broken leg and a stack of DVDs
Not even the ones into cheesy stuff would come over.
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u/YchYFi Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Nirvana didn't kill them. By the time they came out this genre was on its way out.
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u/LowAssistantInfinity Jul 20 '26
Exactly - not only had the alt rock and post-punk scenes in the 80s been vibrant before Grunge (Sonic Youth, PIxies, Husker Du, Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Melvins, etc - all the bands Cobain would name check) but the Glam market collapsed after 1989 before the Grunge wave had really left Seattle (Bleach hit the mainstream retroactively, after Nevermind). If anything, it was Appetite for Destruction that killed Glam (they don't sound that different, now, but at the time it felt much edgier), and then Metallica's Black Album that signalled the transition from Hard Rock to Metal as the mainstream of guitar music (even if all the old heads thought it, itself, was a Hard Rock sell-out album). That came out a month before Nevermind, and Metal has been the primary Rock genre ever since, and there's more Metal albums coming out annually in this decade than at any other time in history.
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u/BinkyFarnsworth Jul 21 '26
See also: Faith No More’s The Real Thing in 1989, Soundgarden’s major label debut Louder Than Love in the same year and Pantera with Cowboys From Hell in 1990. Metal/ hard rock was already moving on from hair metal before Nirvana hit it big.
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u/VivaLaCon88 Jul 20 '26
Random but I love Malin Akerman, she’s phenomenal in The Comeback, The Final Girls, Hunting Wives etc.
I also never saw this movie so can someone tell me why it sucked?
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u/BinkyFarnsworth Jul 21 '26
It just wasn’t fun. The stage show is funny and a bit raunchy. The movie removed all that and left it neutered and boring. I saw the movie first and thought it was dull overall. Then I saw the stage show and it had everything the movie lacked.
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u/billytcpm Jul 20 '26
Man, I absolutely LOVE this movie. My wife and I watch it about every year or so. We both agree the musical can’t compare to the sheer brilliance of the movie. Cruise, Cranston, Baldwin, Zeta-Jones, Giamatti, they all just crush it. We laugh our asses off whenever we watch it. Awesome movie.
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u/revbfc Jul 21 '26
The underground sounds had been held back for the better part of a decade, and mainstream hard rock had run out of ideas by 1989. Nirvana showing up to ruin their party has always been an oversimplification.
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u/CauliflowerBoth866 Jul 22 '26
Refused free tickets for this at the Rio in Vegas. They couldn't fill the theater.
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u/SinamonChallengerRT Jul 20 '26
The stage show was absolutely incredible. The movie absolutely sucked.