Rate My Music Taste

Millennial born in '88 here. It's kind of funny to see younger folks listening to Limp Bizkit and Staind. By the time I was 18, I could have sworn those bands would be forgotten forever.

To be extra clear, that's not a criticism of your music taste at all. I just find it interesting that those bands probably sound different to younger ears than they sound to mine.

Limp Bizkit and Staind were kind of like the Vanilla Ice of my generation. We all liked them in middle school, but most of us were later embarrassed to admit we bought their albums. Nowadays I can appreciate those bands for what they were, but unless you were actually a rock fan in the late 90s/early 2000s, it's hard to illustrate just how oversaturated nu-metal became in a short time, and how enormously irritating that was.

Between 1998 and 2001, you had to have a cool older cousin to find heavy music that wasn't nu-metal. (We didn't have Spotify or YouTube, and internet speeds were really slow.)

Bands like Staind and Limp Bizkit were on constant rotation on MTV and FM radio, at the expense of literally all other heavy music. Nu-metal was marketed aggressively to angsty young kids like me, and the only way to get away from it was switch to the pop radio station, which wasn't an option for kids like me. That's a big part of why so many millennial nu-metal fans grew to hate the genre after a while.

Helmet is a bit out an outlier on your list. They're really more of a Gen X band, and the only millennials who know about them tend to be metalheads.

You might also be curious to read about the "New Wave of American Heavy Metal," which effectively replaced nu-metal around 2003-2005. The bands only got a small amount of attention on radio and MTV, but by that time internet speeds were a bit faster, so it was easier to find new music without relying on mainstream media.

This is a great article on NWOAHM. I still listen to some of those bands today, but I almost never listen to nu-metal.

/r/GenZ Thread Link - i.redd.it