I had a twelve hour day today and I’m exhausted, so this is gonna be a quick hit, but I just saw an article that called REM “arguably the biggest band in the world” for “about five years” in the nineties.
I call bullshit. They were big, certainly, and those years were definitely the band’s biggest years, but the biggest band in the world? Not in any version of the nineties where U2 existed, and I’m pretty sure I could come up with a few other examples if I spent some time thinking about it.
Somebody here’s dumb. Who is it?
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Surely there were bands in the 90s with more than four members … and therefore bigger bands.
(I am tired, too, so that’s the best I’ve got.)
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I don’t know how “big” these bands were, but I remember some bands that were having a “golden era” in terms of popularity: Nine Inch Nails, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Cure, and…Nirvana? Beck? Ha! I mostly went to smaller shows though back than, rather than stadium concerts. I did see the Cure, and U2’s Achtung Baby! tour, but that was about it.
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*then, even.
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Biggest indie band on college radio in the 90s perhaps. For certain definitions of “indie” and/or “college radio”.
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That I definitely won’t dispute. 🙂
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REM was pretty big back in the day with Out of Time, Automatic for the People and Monster giving them some mega hits. I feel that although U2 was massive they had kind of peaked by late 80s. In the 90s I felt that only Achtung Baby was really a huge hit album for them selling 18M copies (peak) and then hit albums Zooropa (7M) Pop (5M) and All That you Can’t Leave Behind (4.4M) started their slide in the 1990s although still headliners. I remember them with their massive 360 Tour that my brother and niece went to in the mid 2000s being kind of a return to greatness as far as popularity.
I say this but of course looking at my REM playlist I see almost 50 tracks so maybe they were all that. Lol. I loved them back in the mid 80s when I first went to college and discovered them and they kind of have always been that mod 80s jangly up and coming band to me.
I would definitely have to include Nirvana as exploding in the early part of the 90s ushering in all of the grunge (Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots etc)
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