You can't kill the metal The metal will live on,Grunge tried to kill the metal Ha, hahahahaha!They failed, as they were thrown to the ground, Aargh! Yaow!

- Tenacious D, 'The Metal'.The myth went like this: in the early '90s, with one fell, flannel-clad swoop, grungedid away with metal. Specifically, the glam, spandex-loving pop-metal of LA's SunsetStrip, which had dominated the rock and pop charts through most of the late 1980s,when hair metal kings Mötley Crüe, Guns N' Roses, Poison, Whitesnake, and Warrantreigned supreme on radio and MTV. The exact symbolic juncture at which this genre-quashing occurred is often attributed to the night in 1991 when Nirvana's Kurt Cobainwore a dress on MTV's wildly popular

Headbangers Ball

, in a direct affront to whathe perceived to be the slack-jawed misogyny of

Headbangers

' metal-head audience.

Headbangers Ball

was a supremely popular hard rock clip show with live performances mixed in. It peaked in popularity right around the time MTV had toinstate the Crüe Rule: named in honour of the band's over-requested 'Home SweetHome' video, it meant no song could dominate the airwaves for more than threemonths.But by 1991 Nirvana's album

Nevermind

had kicked a hole in the dam. Out cametumbling Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and raft of other Seattle bands,who'd been plying their trade to varying degrees of success for years before beingswept up in the tide of opportunistic label signings by A&R reps keen to coin a newgenre.Metal suddenly found itself on shaky commercial ground. It had been on shakycritical ground for decades, but as a genre had proved to be almost completely

impervious to trends. These had done little to dent its popularly, much to theconsternation of self-serious music critics.The new Seattle guard represented what equated to rock and roll's most sought-after currency: authenticity. Or, at least, the appearance of authenticity. Grunge, with its punk leanings and gritty tales of heroin addiction and childhood dysfunction, alldripping with self-loathing apathy, held itself in sharp contrast to popular metal'sincitement to party, do fun drugs and have as much string-free sex as possible. In theface of something like Pearl Jam's 'Jeremy', a song about a kid who killed himself infront of his classmates with a handgun, something like Poison's 'Unskinny Bop'looked particularly ludicrous. Critics feted grunge with a vengeance. With swift brutality it appeared that the good times were no longer set to roll.But woe, the fickle tides of pop-music history! As we stand here in 2011, it's clear that grunge was the cultural blip - though not, of course, an insignificant one. Itstenure at the top of the grunge/metal stoush was brief, and by 1994 - even before KurtCobain's death - it was pretty much over. Pearl Jam, who were yoked with theSaviours of Grunge mantle in the wake of Cobain's suicide, were essentially aglorified bar blues band whose noodling guitar solos wouldn't have been out of placeon a Grand Funk Railroad album. And though they fought valiantly against the'system' - refusing, for example, to make videos for their singles in the '90s -somehow Pearl Jam too would end up down the line filling stadiums on mega-toursand licensing their early grunge anthems to the

Guitar Hero

game franchise. It wasevolution, baby.As Tenacious D - a comedic rock band featuring actor Jack Black - so astutelyobserved, "You can't kill the metal, the metal will live on!" One of the funnier upshotsof the fabled 'Grunge Wars' - at the time so serious the battlelines could have beendrawn in blood - was a cameo by one-time Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl in the

The Pick of Destiny

, a Tenacious D spoof film in which Grohl campily played the Devilwith whom Jack Black's protagonist must make a deal. Grohl's post-Nirvana band,Foo Fighters - which he fronts, bestriding the world's stages in a KISS t-shirt - owesmuch to the flamboyant, riff-heavy hard rock bands of the 1970s that Nirvana were sovehemently against, and is now a staple not only of football-stadium shows, but alsoclassic FM radio stations everywhere.

In fact, Nirvana's sound always owed a debt to the doom-laden down tunings of Black Sabbath (formed in 1968), and Cobain often cited Aerosmith's 1976 album

Rocks

as aformative influence that inspired him to pick up a guitar. And there were no finer purveyors of the cocksure, chauvinist good-time-dumb-rock-song than Aerosmith'sSteven Tyler and Joe Perry.These are no small ironies, considering the lengths Cobain went to cultivate a media- baiting feud with Axl Rose, frontman for LA's pop-metal punks Guns N' Roses. Nirvana turned down Rose's offer to join the Guns N' Roses/Metallica headlinestadium tour of 1992, such was Cobain's distaste for the world of corporate rock thetwo metal giants signified. When US retail outlets demanded that Nirvana censor thefamous cover of

Nevermind

by protecting the naked pool baby's modesty, however,Cobain complied. Record sales could not suffer for the sake of art, after all, no matter how seemingly authentic its creator's intent.All of which illustrates just how fabricated the metal/grunge rivalry was in the first place. The apparently great creative and commercial gulfs that seemed to open between the hair metal bands (unabashedly money-grubbing/free of artistic merit) andthe punk-leaning grunge bands (not in it for the money/authenticity writ large) werenot so big in reality. The musical roots of both these strains of hard rock were sharedand, despite appearances, grunge was very much wedded to the commercialmainstream. Sure, Kurt Cobain posed on the cover of

Rolling Stone

wearing a t-shirtthat read "Corporate Magazines Still Suck", but he was still posing on the cover of

Rolling Stone.

Trying to cleave commercial interests from mainstream rock music islike trying to get a tradesman to give up his tools.****Several metal giants - reputedly slain in the Grunge Wars - have risen like Lazarus, buoyed particularly by the unanticipated career-boosting powers of video games inthe last decade. Interactive titles like

Rock Band

and

Guitar Hero

put millions of people in touch with their inner Slash, lead guitarist for Guns N' Roses, and proved - perhaps improbably - that smashing the little keys of a plastic guitar in time to thelikes of rock anthems 'Livin' On A Prayer' (Bon Jovi) and 'Raining Blood' (Slayer) is,in fact, super, super fun.