The bolded part leaves a lot of room for discretion I think.
IIRC Kim Thayil played the solo in the same alternate tuning as the rest of the song, which maybe accounts for both observations.
i like the second solo here:
A staple of classic rock radio. Top 10 hit.
2 Likes
That leave almost too much!
A lot of these charting songs slip in a short but solid metal guitar solo into an otherwise mainstream pop song. That’s impressive. The best example for me is likely Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam, that solo was appropriate and tasteful but clearly pushing the limit for an R&B smash hit!
2 Likes
Reminds me of a couple rap songs with surprising solos. Since rap has basically been the defacto format of pop music since the late 90s is this thread is more about pop music with solos shred or otherswise here’s some. Rap isn’t really a “here’s an instrumental solo” since it’s more about lyrics (well at least the good stuff is). I can think of a couple with great guitar hooks but mostly it’s all synths, keys, drums, and bass.
Good hooks here all samples but still great in their musical contexts.
Solos
Yeah fire away on me for this one, hahahaha
3 Likes
MF DOOM forever.
(characters characters characters)
1 Like
Dokken - Into the Fire
- Peaked at #21 on Rock chart.
- Featured in the movie Nightmare on Elm Street 3 Dream Warriors.
Started at solo - nice screaming bends.
In the Rap genre, I don’t think there is a solo here but I put it anyway:
Raise Hell - Mash Out Posse
1 Like
59 on the Hot 100, White Lion’s Radar Love.
I really enjoyed that, they picked a great sample, too!
1 Like
Omg how could I forget them. One of my favorite solos in all rock (radio or niche) is White Lion’s “Wait”. It was a radio hit. Every single note in that solo is just perfect.
1 Like
It’s such a shame Vito Bratta just disappeared. Same with Chris DeGarmo from Queensryche just quit music after grunge happened.
1 Like
I’m not sure that’s all it was with either of them.
I remember Eddie Trunk I think talking about Vito suffering from some kind of strain injury that made playing difficult. Chris just seems to have weighed his style of music being past its time in the spotlight vs spending time with his family.
He played on a song with his daughter a couple years back.
And Alice In Chains got him to play on one of their newer tracks.
It must have been rough being the style band Queensryche is and being from Seattle in the mid 90s. But that run from the EP through Promised Land is one of the best catalogs of any metal band ever. Similar kinda thing that killed also from Seattle band Sanctuary when their label wanted them to go grunge after Into the Mirror Black.
I understand that guitar sales surge during the grunge era because everybody realized that it was much easier to play than hair metal.
1 Like
Also not unrelated to the 1990s booming economy. Guitar music was king, grunge/alt rock, the 90s country boom.
It wasn’t so much that, as much as you started to have more interest in the vintage gear market and older styled guitars. They started to dominate the market. Part of that is because that’s what poor grunge musicians could afford. An old Marshall wasn’t sought after, and you could sometimes get them for $250. I bought my first 2203 in 1999 for $500.
At the same time you started to have a lot of crunchy boomer hippy nostalgia which correlated and fit with the grunge counter culture pretty well (and just a lot of gritty culture as well) - which by all accounts the Grunge era was fabricated heavily by the music industry. It’s a good study in social engineering. It didn’t last long only legitimately a few years… and things got worse for a while!
I remember being a pre teen in in the grunge era in the Pacific Northwest no less, and it was a weird time in music because the 80’s metal stuff was still being heavily played along side the grunge stuff on rock radio stations.
The funny thing is that 30 plus years later, nearly the exact same songs are being played to this day on classic rock stations.
You would be surprised. Both Empire and Operation Mindcrime were still being played heavily on radio at that time along side grunge acts. Silent Lucidity, (and I believe anybody listening) was also still being cycled heavily on MTV until like ‘94 or even ‘95
1 Like
The last major rock original hit is this. The internet going into histrionics about their monopolization of rock radio pretty much killed off rock. The last rock Billboard No. 1.
1 Like
I see whose mug that is in the thumbnail and don’t want to press play.
1 Like
That song was a massive hit, but it’s not rock, IMHO, but grunge. They’re obviously capable musicians, and they said, “OK, let’s cut out the guitar solo, whine, stand there like dummies, and see if we can hit #1…” and they did. Well played, Nickelback!
1 Like
I haven’t listened to that song in ages (and never really got into it when it was new, though I can admit to liking some of Nickelback’s other songs). My gut reaction was “I don’t think of Nickelback as grunge”. But I went back and listened, and on How You Remind Me, they are 100% trying to sound like “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Kroeger has been candid in the past about intentionally deconstructing other hit songs and trying to strategically borrow from them to create new hit songs (almost a Sabermetrics of songwriting), but I never really went down that rabbithole, and was kind of stunned at how hard they were trying to sound like Nirvana in that particular song.
1 Like
It’s not grunge. It’s late 90’s - 2000’s “man pain” top 100 pop and alt rock, and just barely skates into Alt rock at that. Grunge is very specific, the rest is just top 100 radio orientated Alt rock the same as Creed, Hinder, Fuel (maybe) - all that nonsense. That stuff kept on going until almost 2010, and if we are talking about Nickelback it still is. Grunge probably died in ‘94.
There I coined it. That style of music is called “Z100 Man Pain”.
2 Likes