Brandon Flowers: Americans don't care about new rock bands

The Killers' Brandon Flowers: Americans don't care about new rock bands

Apr 30, 2009, 02:17 PM | by Leah Greenblatt

A few weeks after his comments to England's Daily Star bemoaning Kurt Cobain's downer effect on rock 'n roll, the ever-loquacious Killers frontman is back, this time telling U.K. music weekly NME that he wants to "knock Led Zeppelin and Nirvana off their pedestals."

"We’ve been embraced in Britain in a way that I’ll never understand, and it’s such a wonderful thing," he says. "But over here [in America], people are still so obsessed with Led Zeppelin and Nirvana, those sorts of bands, that nobody else is allowed [to grow]."

He added: "It’s not just us; there are a lot of great bands that have been held down or confined by the influence of these people that we’ve put up on pedestals. I’m tired of it, you know? I just want to knock them all off! And people don’t like that attitude. It’s almost like they don’t believe that it’s possible that anybody else can be the real deal."

Granted, non-rock acts like Lil Wayne, Alicia Keys and Taylor Swift do tend to dominate sales in recent years, but bands such as Coldplay, the Eagles, Nickelback and Daughtry -- whatever your opinion of their artistic merit -- aren't exactly begging for alms on streetcorners (all have made the top-10 in year-end albums recently).

Do you think it's the American public's fault for ignoring rock artists in favor of other genres, or golden oldies like Zep and Nirvana? Are listeners just too splintered now? Or are younger bands failing to produce the kind of music that reaches the masses?

Source: Entertainment Weekly