Some days one must miss Grunge

My brother has the same 5 Mettellica tracks on repeat for the past three days and today I actually broached the subject with him as to why the fuck he has decided to listen to some Metallica 'best of' tracks here and now in his lifetime.
I forget the reason, but various things did crop up, like how Metallica generaly produce their worst music when they go back to their thrash-esque garage days roots. Which is a shame because in my mind Metallica should be remembered for ever for adding metals more listenable styles like the use of harmonies, hitting notes and the acoustic guitars, even showing restraint on how often they employ ye-olde-double-kick. My brother remarked that at the time Metallica were welcome competition to the then dominant Guns'n'Roses.
Is guns'n'roses a metaphor for 'Stupid and faggy' because then it all makes more sense. But anyway I then commented on what I found most disturbing were those pitiful people that nodded along to the alternative rock and grunge movements of the early ninetees, until rebelliously, a bunch of generation x's said 'We should have an 80's revival' and threw away all the hard won liberation from 'the man' that artists such as Tool, Faith No More, Rage Against the Machine, Metallica, Jane's Addiction, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Sound Garden, Pearl Jam etc. had won.
Yes saddest of all were those people who simply pretended to like all the hard edged alternative scenes of the early 90's secretely yearning for a return to nice safe Aerosmith, Bon Jovi and of course Guns'n'Roses.
Then my brother remarked 'oh yeah, there are people that hated the 90's, hated grunge. particularly the fashion industry because fashion went out the window'
Which is an isn't true. I am sure people looked to Kurt Cobain and co as fashion icons like rockstars of any other period. The problem with it was that it cut out so much fat from the process.
There were for examples no designers, no fashion parades. There were brands yes/no/maybe like wearing Doc Martins and such, but other brands were flannel shirts. And not just that but flannel shirts from an op-shop. That's right used flannel shirts. In a day where paying $3 for a shirt was getting ripped off, compared to simply stealing one from a box in the attic.
Yes as I have said before grunge had to die. Nu metal saw Iggy pop branded Vans. And infact with the array of 'punk' band brand array of sneakers one can purchase to blatently affiliate oneself with punk, ironically punk is one of the most commercial forms of music these days, as demonstrated by the titular character of Juno's love of Iggy and the Stooges vs clapped out Michael from arrested developments clear obsession with the lost Seattle music scene.
But going back to the Sex Pistols (Johnny Rotten also becoming another MTV serf) the whole safety pin look was cool for them because it was cheap. Surely hairgel was an uneccessary expense but if you saw the conditions the Sex pistols lived in when compared to the conditions Blink 182 and Greenday lived in there is no comparison.
So does this raise the greater question? Can we only listen to music if it makes money not just for itself but also the parasite industries of fashion and television. I mean sure I can accept that music as an artform at some point has to make money if they want the dollars necessary to sink into its production (which by the way has shrunk rather than grown with the advent of apple and the internet) but the scrotum the industry still has a firm grip on is the attention filter.
Radio and television can provide a useful function of preselecting a limited amount of new music to digest, vs any individual going out and trawling myspace pages for something they like, because lets face it I've almost never seen a band on myspace with a track I've liked and I'm guessing neither have you.
So to some extent big industry still retains the ability to decide what we listen to and watch.
But the thing about grunge and alternate rock was that I dressed like a dork in those years because absent from the music was instructions on what I should buy, except for the music itself. And even then that message only came through when I actually liked the song itself.
Quick comparison - count the product placements in this clip:

vs this grunge era


maybe not the most scientific test yes, but the answer is that the first clip arguably has 1: vasoline. The second clip takes the opportunity to promote a new consumer product to children, another artist ludakris, grills, mobile phones maybe that hoodie, she mentions nike shoes as well in the lyrics and after that I lost interest.
But do your own comparison it may be I'm barking up the wrong bush and the true disparity is between black and white socioeconomic backgrounds in the United States market and the relative susceptability of one to be marketed shite vs the other just needing Vasoline to help lubricate their old boy club business networking circle jerks.