FF

Foo!

Foo!!
By the way, don’t forget his guest appearances with Tenacious D and Queens of the Stone Age

if i’d have to choose, i’d say foo fighters, because that’s his own project, instead of being a drummer for worlds most overrated artist…

Foo Fighters are awesome. Queens of the stone age are pretty awesome as well. Nirvana as iwamoto said are ridiculously overrated.

Foo Fighters are one of my top five favorite bands!

I am so sick of Nirvana. I was a fan when they were together, but as far as I am concerned, any song that is not on Bleach should be locked away for, at least, 10 years.

I only like a few Foo Fighters songs. Maybe this wasn’t the question for me.

Another vote for FF

Don’t forget Probot!

Foo.

Wow, I cannot believe everyone here prefers Foo Fighters so far. Nirvana by far for me! Cannot stand Foo. Cannot figure out what people see in them. Probot and QOTSA both blow away Foo. IMO.

None of them, but i’d say Nirvana. Foo Fighters is ok.

Foo Fighters

Nirvana for me but I saw foo fighters live and they put on a really good show.

Pearl Jam! ^__^ lol

Soundgarden!

It’s sort of hard to compare a group that currently exists to one that doesn’t. Nirvana, in its time, was out of this world.

Since Nirvana never evolved, we can’t fairly compare them to a current, dynamic band.

Also, we’re talking about two totally different styles, like adding apples and oranges. I love Foo Fighters but I also loved Nirvana for different reasons.

Also, how many responders to this Q are under 40?

Neither

Nirvana is so freaking played out for me. I have listened to every released Nirvana song several times.

As for the Foo Fighters, I just never really dug their sound.

(My Dave Grohl preference is Queens of the Stone Age)

I’m stunned at the responses. Nirvana is the second greatest band in the history of rock and roll (if you have to ask who’s first, it’s the Beatles). Foo Fighters are a great band and Dave Grohl is hella talented, but Foo don’t even make my top 50 of all time. Now, if all you know of Nirvana is what they play on the radio, I can see how it can get played out…even Kurt Cobain would have rather blown his brains out than play Teen Spirit one more time if Courtney hadn’t beaten him to it…j/k…or am I?

Of course, I may be a bit more familiar with their body of work than some of you Foo fans, I am a huge collector of their bootlegs, I have most of their early demos and unreleased stuff (quite a bit of which didn’t even make the box set), along with several live shows. In fact, I think some of their best stuff wasn’t even on proper albums, like most of the stuff from Incesticide. Aneurysm and Sliver are two of my favorite tracks which the Foo could never match.

The brilliance of Nirvana was in their ability to mix together old school blues, underground rock, abstraction and repetition, all mixed up with a Pixie’s veneer and a slugdy Melvins underbelly. Listen to some of their Leadbelly covers from the box set, or the work Kurt did with Mark Lanegan. Or take the 3 songs they did with the Meat Puppets on their MTV show…rarely can a band make a cover that sounds a million times better than the original. And Bleach…the fact that this came out in the 80s…perhaps having grown up in the 80s and knowing what passed for music in 1989 gives me a greater appreciation for exactly how revolutionary Nirvana was.

Nirvana to me was a perfection all the things that had been tried in the last 100 years of music steeped in the blues. And for those of you who remember the years in music 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998. EVERYTHING popular sounded like Nirvana…many imitators, but no genuine heir apparent until about 1999 when the White Stripes hit the music scene.

So I guess, I’ll have to respectfully agree to disagree, but I’ll hail Nirvana forever, and the Foo, sure I’ll turn it up when it comes on the radio, I’ll keep buying their CDs, but despite it being one of the better offshoots of a legendary band, well, let’s just say Wings was popular, but they were no Beatles….and Foo Fighters are popular, but they’re no Nirvana, not in my humble opinion.

a perfection of a 100 years of music…i really hope you’re not serious about that statement or you have been missing out…oh and by the way, 1995 saw the release of ron thal’s “the adventures of bumblefoot”, and, to be honest, that album blows all nirvana’s albums out of the water.

the problem i always have with bands like nirvana is that it’s guy’s who can’t play an instrument who want to make music, no, grohl isn’t a bad drummer, but cobain was just the worst guitar player, and sure, if i would care for lyrics maybe i would say, with a bit of a smokey voice “yeah man, he’s soooo deep, man, i can totally relate to his pain” but we all know that’s just total bs and that the cries of a seattle kid with issues does not contribute to good music.

then again, i don’t expect you to agree with me, but i hope i can share my vision with you

iwamoto,

I wholly disagree that Kurt couldn’t play guitar. And my inclusion of Nirvana as the second greatest band in history, which I do not feel the need to further explain or justify, does not mean I’ve excluded a lot of other music. I am not admittedly familiar with Ron Thal, but you can trust that my musical repertoir is quite expansive and I am always looking to expand it further. But I do think that yes, I can claim that the music which has been based on the blues, most notably rock and roll, has gone through many tweaks over a century, and Nirvana and Cobain basically yes, did create what in my opinion is a perfect distillation of what these immitators have been trying to do for a century.

To dismiss this legendary songwriter as a mopey Seattle kid with a smokey voice is a tremendous disservice to the fabric of rock and roll in my not so humble opinion. Nirvana was not all aobut “feel my pain”, even Cobain knew that this was a media creation…after the success of Nevermind, on their very next album the very first words were “teenaged angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old.” Nirvana’s lyrics were about a HELL of a lot more than trying to relate to someone’s inner turmoil, and you’re suggestion that they were not proves that you completely missed the point of what I would refer to as the ultimate in musical abstract art. There was so much more to Nirvana than exists in the little box into which you have stuffed them, and I doubt you will ever understand it, for I feel you are the one who is missing out.

Simply making a statement tha includes “bands like Nirvana” is proof positive that you just don’t get it, there are no bands like Nirvana, never have been and never will be…there are a ton of immitators…Puddle of Mudd and Seether are good examples of how you can replicate the sound, but you can’t reproduce the quality. I like to use the Beatles as an example. It’s not as if everything they created was done out of whole cloth, much was taken from previous forms of music, and it was finely honed and distilled and presented in ways that had never been imagined before, and as a result, their influence can be heard in at least some small way in just about everything that has been done since. I think Nirvana is another of those touchpoint bands, which borrowed from divergent sources and pulled together something that will outlive them for centuries by being heard within the fabric of most of the music that has come after it in some form or another.

I’ll give Ron Thal a listen, seriously. I won’t expect you to give Nirvana another listen as I’m sure you’ve heard enough, and there’s no accounting for taste. But I can tell you that I pick up on a lot more in this music than I think you will ever be capable of hearing, whether that just be a subjective matter such as taste, or some miguided guilt by association thing that allows you to lump them in with lesser acts and see it as the same thing, I don’t know and I don’t care. I just humbly submit that you don’t seem to know what you’re talking about in regards to Nirvana, and I wouldn’t expect you to, because you’ve clearly dismissed them and it’s pretty hard to be an expert on a topic you don’t study.

I saw Nirvana in 1991, and boy did they suck. It didn’t help that they were followed by Pearl Jam and the RHCP. Nirvana sounded like the bands that played in the back yards of my friends when I was in high school.

@Megan64:
I’m 42 (and a half!) ^_^

How many people here listened to Scream? My guess is not many. Dave Grohl went from Scream, to Nirvana, to Foo Fighters, and they are all incomparable. He was a hardcore punk kid who’s tastes probably evolved…what they evolved into, I don’t personally like. My guess is that most Foo Fighter fans do not appreciate, nor even like what he used to do in Scream.

Nirvana was not his band at all. I saw them in 1989 playing with hardcore punk bands, and they were great. I don’t think Dave Grohl did anything for them, good or bad.

I agree with @Megan64, I don’t think you can compare them at all. You’re trying to compare sloppy raw punk to poppy mainstream stuff. Maybe you can compare his drumming, but not the music as a whole.

I missed Megan’s Q altogether, I’m 37. I think the real break though is probably more like under 30, rather than under 40, I’d suspect most people who were in high school or higher when Nirvana became popular (I was in my 3rd year of college) would, if they liked Nirvana, have the perspective of knowing what music was like BN (before Nirvana), and wouldn’t be as quick to discount their influence as someone who grew up with their music.

I would look back 40 years for a parallel. From 1968 to 1971 you had Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin who had the same meteoric rise as Nirvana did between 1991 and 1994. The people who didn’t get into high school until say 1973, by which time all 3 had been dead for a couple years, that was the music their older siblings or even their parents and aunts and uncles may have listened to. They were listening to Zeppelin, Queen, Aerosmith, Sabbath. Jim, Jimi and Janis probably seemed old hat to them by the time they were exploring their musical tastes, because they had been innundated with that music before they’d really formed their own musical palates. And so they discounted it in favor of what was still of very high quality, still worthy of legendary status at some point, but which was nonetheless to the exclusion of the stuff that had come before recently. Now, this generation may have been far enough removed from the Beatles and Elvis and what not to have developed an appreciation, while not receiving an overdose, so that they could accept the legendary status of those contributors. But I’m wiling to be that circa 1978, few of the contemporary music afficianados of the day would have put those performers in the proper context.

That is what I think I see happening here. We have a lot of people who are in their 20s on Fluther, and they did not get into listening to music until shortly after Nirvana was really history, but not history in the way Zeppelin was, where their Godlike status had been firmly enshrined and was simply a fact to be accepted, but recent history where a slightly older generation was still stuck in the (albeit recent) past in regards to their treatment of Nirvana. And they have their own widely divergent, ridiculously talented pickings in the music scene, todays stars…some of whom will become legendary in their own right. So you get something like Foo Fighters, admittedly an insanely great band (one which I don’t think will stand the test of time as well as Nirvana, but which is still better than the majority of what’s out there), seeming to this just slightly newer generation to be somehow more fresh, more talented, more influential.

As such, it’s not as though these same people who slag off on Nirvana (or who maybe don’t diss them, but who still don’t regard them as highly as history will come to) don’t have an appreciation for musical history and those who broke ground, it’s that they take for granted some of the ground that has been broken, in part because Nirvana was in their musical upbringing seen not as a forefather of the other music out there but as a contemporary, and one does not think of a contemporary as an influence.

And there are those to whom Foo Fighter’s style would just be more appealing…there are those for whom influence isn’t as important as other characteristics. Indeed, I’d suggest from iwamoto’s endorsement of Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal and the comment that Cobain was not a good guitar player, that iwamoto is a fan of guitar virtuosos, which is somewhat of a niche. There are those who think Satriani, Vai and Malmsteen are the true masters of the craft and deserve far more recognition than history will ever give them, whereas most of the world looks for something more than just mastery of a particular instrument (though I’m not saying this is all Bumblefoot has to offer). Some of it’s just what you’re into.

I’m all for the Foo.

@Dale knows his stuff and I’m quite pleased and impressed with his thoughtful responses and musical knowledge.

I’m 40 and was coming into my own (early 20s) when Nirvana, L7, Dinosaur Jr., Mudhoney, etc. where making the scene. Today these are still some of my fondest memories of live shows.

Beatles—-> Nirvana—-> ?—->

Let’s make a compromise: Nirvana is much more influential through the course of music history, and whoever is better (Nirvana or Foo) is your own choice.

Ha! But the question begs to be asked; does dalepetrie like Nirvana or not? joking, joking

He’s obviously a hardcore foo fan.

hehehe, yeah, pretty big fan.

The only band who has truly affected me in the same way as say the Beatles and Nirvana since then is the White Stripes, but they haven’t had quite the same cultural influence. I’d have to insert one band between those two…Sabbath. I tend to think that whereas the Beatles influence can be heard in just about everything that has come since in pop and rock, and Nirvana can be heard in just about everything that has come since in alternative/garage rock, pretty much everything that has happened in heavy metal can be traced to Ozzy era Black Sabbath.

You could argue for inclusion of Zeppelin on that list, but I think their sphere of influence is more limited than the other three, which is the same reason I’d keep White Stripes off the list (for now anyway)...limited sphere of future influence. Arguably there are a number of bands in the tier with Zep who were highly influential and who were of the highest premium quality, but I take a look at basically 4 times music has fundamentally changed…Elvis, the Beatles, Black Sabbath and Nirvana. I believe you could wipe the record clean of any other act in the history of rock and roll, just make it as if they never existed, and rock and roll today would be by and large what it has become anyway. But take away any of these 4 and rock music would be fundamentally different.

So I have to agree also with the comment that who is “better” is subjective. Clearly there are tons people who have mastered their craft who have created enduring art, but whose sphere of influence didn’t really alter the fundamental fabric of music history. Therein I think lies the ultimate reason I answer the question the way I do, Nirvana was one of only 4 bands in all of rock and roll histroy whom I think were positively indespensible in the evolution of rock and roll, the Foo Fighters are just a damn great rock and roll band.

Ahhh, Sabbath!

this thread has soo much text
I’m getting some Nirvana now, and then i’m gonna get som Foo Fighters and compare them.

@wilhel1812 – Play them at the same time!

Play them backwards while watching the Wizard of Oz!

@forestGeek why on earth would i do that, that would just make me confused and it would sound terrible.
@dalepetrie great idea, i think i’ll do just that.

:)

Anyone remember the Cheech and Chong bit “Let’s Make a Dope Deal”?

Cheech (as Bob Bitchin’) – “Why did you drop out?”
Chong (as game show contestant) – “Well a lot of people think it was them 500 acid trips I did.”
Cheech – “But what was it really”
Chong – “Well one day I played Black Sabbath at 78 speed…”
Cheech – “And what happened then?”
Chong – “I saw God!”

Ok, so i’ve got Nevermind obviously, but what Foo Fighters album should i get?

The Colour and the Shape, All My Life (specifically the title track), and Dave Grohl’s sollo first album, Foo Fighters.

One by One it is :)

nirvana GO 90’S!

i’m with eambos, SOUNDGARDEN!!!!

Nirvana by far!! Nirvana kicks ass in every way imaginable foo fighters are okay but getting worse the more albums they release (like most bands) and IM 15 but im into all the 90’s bands like AIC, audioslave, soundgarden, bush, drowning pool (ealy stuff), down, STP, etc… right now im all about nine inch nails tho (just in time to miss the fucking wave goodbye tour lol) but w/e

and i agree 100% with everything dale said

@travis___ – Thanks, and welcome to Fluther.

@travis___ let me show you what you did wrong there:

“all the 90’s bands like AIC, audioslave ”

“Audioslave was an American hard rock supergroup that was formed in Los Angeles, California in 2001”

see where i’m going with this ? it’s a good thing you’re still young and get to develop a taste for music.

Nirvana
NIRVANA
NIRVANA!
NIRVANA!!!!

(when I die, I’ll go talk to Kurt <3)