His soaring ballads, like "Learn to Fly" and "Times Like These", are not nearly as cool, but his punk influences shine through in his total commitment to a sentimental tone without allowing for mawkishness or surrendering to cheesiness. Grohl doesn't appropriate in order to seem hip, and his reference points are not particularly relevant to getting across the appeal of his music- he simply has good taste and borrows ideas that work.
"Everlong", perhaps Grohl's most enduring and beloved composition, bridges the gap between the midwestern post-hardcore emo of Hum and Braid and the more commercial iterations of emo that would follow. "All My Life", a smash from 2002's One By One, owes a significant debt to the slashing chord progressions of math rock titans Chavez, and "Big Me" is one of the few songs to come out of twee to enjoy major commercial success in the United States. Part of what makes Foo Fighters thrilling, at least from an indie/alt-rock perspective, is that Grohl manages to smuggle bits of underground sounds into his arena-filling hits. Foo Fighters are excellent at being mainstream, and, over the course of six albums, Dave Grohl has gone through the unlikely transformation of being known only as the powerhouse drummer of Nirvana to becoming his generation's answer to Tom Petty- a consistent hit machine pumping out working-class rock. Indeed, you barely need to be mediocre to outshine the likes of Nickelback, Creed, and Hoobastank, but Foo Fighters are not merely a tolerable band floating along in a sea of crap, or a decent band that somehow remains mainstream against the odds. Grohl and his band may have been grandfathered into the radio format mainly for his connection to Nirvana, but he earned his keep and turned out a reliable string of enjoyable hits.
The playlists got tighter, and if you're reading this site, we probably don't need to tell you just how bad the music on these stations got, and how to this day it only seems to get worse. In the years after Cobain's death, corporate consolidation of rock radio took hold and quickly snuffed out nearly every bit of underground weirdness that made its way into the mainstream after the record industry went through its phase of signing every cult band they could get in the hopes of finding another Nirvana.
Grohl's task may not be anywhere near as glamorous or as era-defining as that of his former band, but in a way, it's much more difficult and thankless. Foo Fighters have something of a hero myth going on too, but it's a lot less dramatic: Following the death of his comrade, Dave Grohl rocked on as the leader of his own band, and spent the next 15 years making mainstream rock radio, uh, slightly more listenable. This story has been repeated so many times that it's rare to find Cobain's music framed in any other context, especially since his suicide served only to make him a rock'n'roll martyr. We all know the hero myth of Nirvana: Kurt Cobain stormed MTV and radio with punk anthems of genuine rage, and saved us all from the vapidity of hair metal.