Music, conventionally, is a marriage of melody and lyric. A song can be a good song with bad lyrics, right? And a song with awesome lyrics can still be a bad song? Cannot songs be good without lyrics, though, as in classical music? What I meant to say about the Foo Fighters is that you could remove the lyrics from the song and have an incredible listening experience, you wouldn't really lose too much. With Nirvana, you need to keep the lyrics in there, otherwise the pleasure/appreciation from listening would disappear to a large extent. Musically, I would argue, the Foo Fighters are superior. Lyrically, Nirvana. When I say musically, I mean the music of their songs exclusively and not the song as a music+lyric whole. I find the interplay of tones and silence incredibly interesting, and I often rank lyrics as secondary to music in my listening experience. So, what I meant was, with the Foo Fighters, you can seperate the music from the lyrics and still have a good song, and still have a good listening experience. With Nirvana, you couldn't do that, as you say, it'd be a dull experience because so much of Nirvana's music owes to its lyrics and vocals.
What 'picture painting' Nirvana did, never changed... the song always remained the same, fundementally. The words used to express it, those changed, and the music used to express it, while it changed, it didn't change in any substantial way for me. It was all rehashing of the same message, with the same means. If the picture painting is disenfranchaised youth angst in assaultive composition, then yes, they paint it and they paint it well. That was the extent of their range, though. The Foos, while maybe they lack the lyrics to acomplish the same things as Nirvana, still write good music - what pictures they paint, musically, if you ignore their mediocre lyrics, differ greatly from one same over-arching message. The foos have diversity - and if this is dull, then sobeit; but it's less dull than listening to 4 albums with fundementally the same content... So maybe Nirvana had passion... I'm not sure that their expression and definition of emotional state is on an elite level; as I already said, I don't even consider Nirvana the best grunge band. With Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, the Mevlins, Mudhoney, and arguably Pearl Jam in direct competition with them in the early 90s... its only because Nirvana was made the grunge flagship and pushed by the music industry that they were the biggest and had the most record sales... And while you can always make the argument, 'well, they sold more records and are therefore better, because record sales are the only quantitative measure of music quality', the Backstreet Boys and Brittney Spears and Hootie & the Blowfish would therefore be better than Metallica, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Bob Marley and the Wailers, and U2.
On the subject: Freddie Mercury and Queen, to me, blow every other contemporary musician out of the water. Their composition is amongst the greatest, if not standing alone as the greatest, of all modern Western music - and, they might suffer if they're lyrics were garbage, but they arent, their lyrics are well constructed as well. Song and silence mix together beautifully, voices and instruments are arranged to create complex harmonies, each song a masterpeice in its own right. Nobody seems to talk about Freddie anymore, but people like Cobain and Grohl could only dream of being such a great songwriter.
Thats just my opinion, though.
to Dave Grohl and the boys.
