The Butt Rock Megathread - Or that genre everyone loves to hate

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Do you like Butt Rock?

  • Some of it's okay

    Votes: 17 41.5%

  • Not really

    Votes: 6 14.6%

  • This ruined Rock music

    Votes: 10 24.4%

  • IT'S BEEN AWHILE...

    Votes: 17 41.5%
  • Total voters
    41
Pargon said:
There is no more quintessential Butt Rock band than Theory of a Deadman:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jcryyvQAqc8
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I dunno if this track is representative of all of Theory of a Deadman's work, but they come across as a poor man's Powderfinger. Not sure if Powderfinger is so much butt rock as dad rock.

As for butt rock ... Evanescence would have to be right up there.
 
Islamic Creampie said:
I always thought butt rock meant 80's hair metal. Those bands at least had talent, the stuff getting posted here is the kind of rock listened to by people that "listen to everything".
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That was what the term originally referred to back in the 80s and 90s, as a reference to the spandex and tight jeans the bands wore and their penchant for showing their butts a lot.

70s macho hard rock like Deep Purple and AC/DC was called Cock Rock because of the almost self-parody level of masculine posturing and juvenile sexual innuendos in a lot of the songs.
 
Let's get some one hit wonder butt rock in here.

 
Jack Awful said:
I think the biggest criticism of bands like Nickleback is there's no discernable melody to their riffs.

The thing about hits from beloved classic rock acts like Led Zeppelin, Queen, Aerosmith, and even more modern acts like The Black Keys or Jack White's solo project is that you can hum the instrumental parts. You remember the guitar riff from Black Dog or the bassline from Another One Bites the Dust.

Buttrock songs on the other hand often have very simple instrumentals that only exist to fill out the waveform. It's almost like stock music with a vocal track.
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Funny thing is that you can notice that even while playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band. Butt rock always has the same note charts: block chords accompanied with the bass one octave bellow with the same boring rhythm without syncopation or anything interesting, during the whole song.

A snooze-fest. I always hated those songs.
 
I'm assuming Evanescence would probably be the more feminine DeviantArt-tier answer to "butt rock" since they're not really in the proper Emo or Pop Punk millieu

If you could put "butt rock" into specific defined genres, then it'd mostly be Nu-Metal, Post-Grunge, and some of the more mainstream-friendly Metalcore acts too
 
I always saw buttrock as bad attempts to imitate 1990s grunge, so post grunge essentially. Nickelback was the main representative but various other bands have been posted here too. It more or less represented the end of rock as a mainstream music genre before it faded away in the 2010s.

Nu-metal I considered something a bit different. Slipknot are still weirdly huge and their last album went to number 1, though obviously new bands in that genre don't go anywhere anymore.
 
Pointless Pedant said:
Nu-metal I considered something a bit different. Slipknot are still weirdly huge and their last album went to number 1, though obviously new bands in that genre don't go anywhere anymore.
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Nu-Metal (Nü-Metal?) has always been a fascinating case study in the evolution of heavy music, especially once it becomes commercially viable. The genre stood at the vertex of Rap Rock, Hard Alternative/Grunge, Industrial Rock/Metal, Funk Metal, Groove Metal and even Hardcore Punk (to a much lesser extent), all popular on MTV from the late '80s up until '94. By the time Korn dropped their first album, all those genres fell by the wayside into the background and Nu-Metal rose to the top.

While bands seldom differentiated in lyrics covering pain, angst, destruction and misanthropy, most of them sounded worlds apart from one another. Bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Soulfly or Static-X reveled in bravado, impulsive and tribalistic aggression while Slipknot or Marilyn Manson hearkened to Shock Rock. Korn took cues from Faith No More and Helmet while Slipknot looked up to Mr. Bungle. Deftones initially had a more Post-Hardcore meets Hip-Hop undertone to their Nu-Metal sound. Towards the twilight of the genre's life, Linkin Park was introspective in their lyrics and focused more on Electronic, Trip-Hop and even Ambient atmospheres with their sound.

Twas an eclectic genre, but separating those bands from their influences was their willingness to conform and return to machismo thanks to the Hip-Hop and Hardcore influences. Alternative bands were often quirky, elegant and socially progressive, thus politically correct. Nu-Metal took the opposite approach with more bands conforming to a tough-as-nails working class style. With minor exception, those guys were looking to throw down if you so much as gave them an awkward look.

Bands directly responsible for its genesis or influential-but-not-necessarily-Nu-Metal: Pantera, Helmet, Prong, 24-7 Spyz, Living Colour, Fishbone, Deftones, Mordred, RATM, Tool, Infectious Grooves, Mr. Bungle, Faith No More, '90s Sepultura, Alice in Chains, Godsmack, Body Count, White Zombie, L.A.P.D., Korn, Biohazard, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Skinlab, Slipknot, Soulfly, Mushroomhead, One Minute Silence, Powerman 5000, P.O.D. and countless others.
 
Pointless Pedant said:
I always saw buttrock as bad attempts to imitate 1990s grunge, so post grunge essentially. Nickelback was the main representative but various other bands have been posted here too. It more or less represented the end of rock as a mainstream music genre before it faded away in the 2010s.

Nu-metal I considered something a bit different. Slipknot are still weirdly huge and their last album went to number 1, though obviously new bands in that genre don't go anywhere anymore.
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Shame that buttrock more or less was the last gasp of rock music in the mainstream, and I honestly think that its brief popularity in the 2000's played a role in the demise of rock alongside the mainstream rise of alternative rock in the 90's.

Nu-Metal may not be quite the same as "butt rock" but it's definitely a very close cousin to it, and I'd also add Metalcore, Emo and the Pop Punk craze of the 2000's as part of the wider "butt rock" umbrella alongside Post-Grunge.

Honestly, I think the main reason why Slipknot's newest album did so well is all due to the fact that early 2000's nostalgia is now quickly becoming a thing and I think Nu-Metal might end up being to the 2020's what hair metal was for the 2000's, a genre once reviled but now cherished out of nostalgia

Call me optimistic, but maybe there could be a revival of rock in the mainstream? I don't think it will be a permanent full-time thing but I do think it could make a comeback as a trend, especially if it's intertwined with an edgy Late Zoomer/Alpha Generation backlash against the Millennials and Early Zoomers, and by extension, the dominance of Electronic, Indie, and Hip-Hop among Millennials and Early Zoomers in the 2010's.

If something like that did somehow actually happen, it'd likely be a retread of 2000's buttrock, but it could also be in the form of a "neo-classic rock" fad too...

Classic rock, traditional heavy metal, and the first wave of alternative rock and grunge are the kind of things that still have not fully faded away and will still get mainstream airplay and featured in mainstream media as long as the Boomers and Generation X are still around.

The Boomers may be nearing the end zone, but Gen X still has a few decades left in them so I think we'll still see classic rock as a thing in the 2020's and early 2030's.
 
Pointless Pedant said:
I doubt it. I still hear rock in public fairly often but nothing much newer than Arctic Monkeys, who are from the 2000s. Older bands are still being played but the genre's time in the mainstream is over and it will just be retro by 2030.
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I can think of one band from the 2010's that would probably fit into "butt rock" that you hear all over the place:


Granted, I don't know that Imagine Dragons is the best endorsement for bringing back mainstream rock, but it does show that there is room for mainstream rock bands outside of just a niche.
 
I can't imagine said:
I can think of one band from the 2010's that would probably fit into "butt rock" that you hear all over the place:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=0I647GU3Jsc
Granted, I don't know that Imagine Dragons is the best endorsement for bringing back mainstream rock, but it does show that there is room for mainstream rock bands outside of just a niche.
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Frankly bands like ID are part of the reason rock isn't mainstream anymore. Almost no one creative would be inspired by that.
 
Like, if I were to group actual specific genres and sub-genres as "butt rock", I think it's obvious that it would consist of Post-Grunge, Nu-Metal, Pop Punk, Emo, Metalcore, 2000's Alternative Rock, and whatever the fuck Imagine Dragons is supposed to be.
 
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