I agree with everything except this - grunge was lame, and unfortunately popular rock music had already died.

A few years before grunge, there had been a new push to really gnarly, difficult rock music, with hardcore on one side and industrial on the other.

Both of these fields having been sanitized by now, it's hard to realize how truly weird this material was at the time.

In the late 70s, songs like Chrome's "Chromosome Damage" (1978)(*), or Throbbing Gristle's 1979 "What A Day" seemed like inexplicable alien artefacts.

The field had commercialized a bit with more conventional acts like Black Flag but it was still very promising.

And then grunge appeared, which to us at the time seemed to be hardcore music with all the edges filed off to make it into something commercially viable.

Such a disappointment. My favorite band at the time was playing songs like this and this and we heard so much about Nirvana and then it was all a bland letdown.

My bandmate at the time said in an interview(**), "Nirvana's big innovation was getting rid of the B section", a musical joke implying that instead of developing their theme or coming up with a new one, they just played it again louder.

It was too late - "rap music" was already eating rock music's lunch.

I had high hopes but hip hop fell off a cliff really fast when it became about crassness, violence and self-aggrandizement and lost the political and humanist edge. (Also, I like live bands, and most hip hop concerts are mostly pre-recorded.)

I only follow a few artists in that field days, Saul Williams being my long-time fave there.

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Ringo was the perfect drummer for the Beatles, who were the perfect rock band, or as good as we will ever get anyway.

After it all goes down, the humans who are left will still be strumming instruments and singing songs like Yesterday, Norwegian Wood and even I Saw Her Standing There. I don't think they'll be performing Kanye West songs in 2100, or if they did, that anyone would have the faintest idea of what they meant, or care.

(* - the song doesn't really go off the rails until it comes almost to a stop two minutes in and then...)

(** - which perhaps dozens of people heard)