The band Shinedown signaled the genre’s break from pop when they released their most successful album in 2008, titled The Sound of Madness. It soundtracks WWE pay-per-views it’s what plays over the loudspeakers in Six Flags food courts. Even today, as its pop appeal has vanished, it remains viable in the realm of mainstream rock, selling out amphitheaters and filling up the playlists on “Alt Nation”-type stations. If you took an eighties power ballad’s major key and turned it minor, you’d have a post-grunge song more or less. Obscuring the stylistic boundaries between neighboring genres-country, grunge, and the genre which grunge supposedly killed, hair metal-post-grunge is characterized by its dragging tempos, down-tuned chord progressions, sporadic twanginess, and overly passionate vocals. Godsmack is part of an aggressive, no-cowards-allowed milieu of hard rock known as “post-grunge” (or pejoratively “butt rock”), which was at its most lucrative during the late 1990s and throughout the aughts, when it dominated both the rock and pop charts. Erna isn’t posturing for just any listener but a select audience he knows will cheer on his every roided tantrum. Step out of line / And you get bitch-slapped back.” Too distracted by his own machismo, singer Sully Erna never specifies why he has such harsh words for whomever “you” is supposed to be, and he doesn’t have to. Through astoundingly dim-witted lyrics, Godsmack’s “Cryin Like a Bitch” rehashes the tired conceit that showing emotional vulnerability isn’t manly: “ I’m tougher than nails.
One of the dumbest, most lantern-jawed songs of all time was a major rock radio hit back in 2010.
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