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FU2
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Some of you might be asking what have I done to prepare for the final word on such a list, and I will have you all know that I have as of late re-watched all the seasons of Seinfeld to get myself in the right frame of mind; I am wearing a t-shirt and boxers as outwear, and on Sunday, I re-watched Point Break (it holds up).
Read Part 1: I Was There: ’90s Music
Highlights: Neutral Milk Hotel, Yo La Tengo, Elliott Smith, and Tool. Bonus: More Remembering Headbangers Ball
Okay, this next segment is quite a doozy, and I don’t have a lot of good things to say about it. It features one of my most-loathed bands of all time, and a host of other sub-par picks, so let’s dive in.
6. One – U2 (Achtung Baby, 1991, Island)
U2 has absolutely no business being on this list. By 1990, they had like 4 hit records, played at Live Aid, a movie and a double album based on the movie. Their inclusion on any list regarding “alternative” anything is astonishingly oxymoronic.
Also, I do not like them, but it doesn’t matter because again they do not belong here.
Final Verdict: No. Every song I have ever heard by U2 sounds like a song you are kind of supposed to like, maybe even want to like, but just winds up annoying you.
Replace With: Initially, I was going to try to limit to only songs from the 1990s that I knew in the 1990s, and not later but I broke that rule with the very first song. So, let’s bump Bono the f off of here with one of my favorite bands Neutral Milk Hotel – Everything Is from The Hype City Soundtrack (1993, The Egg as a Whole Music). I have never found an actual copy of this soundtrack, but it is really good and on YouTube.
7. Basket Case – Green Day (Dookie, 1994, Reprise)
This one is a tough call because I really loved this album at the time, but I don’t like them anymore. Before this album came out, I had probably heard a few of their songs and knew that they had toured with Bad Religion. They had skateboard park approval as far as I know (I do not skateboard, but as I told you in yesterday’s post, I had reason to be interested in their opinions and spent a stupid amount of time at skateparks, but I suppose anything was better than being home). Anyway, before this album, they seemed like a palatable enough band.
In the summer of 1994, I listened to this album a lot with my friend Amanda. A lot, a lot. I can barely recall listening to anything else, except maybe also a NOFX dubbed cassette tape that someone must have made for me. Possibly my friend Maryann.
They were on MTV and obviously very popular, and then they were huge and no self-respecting alterna-teen would be caught dead listening to them by October. And so it remained. I think Billy Joe Armstrong’s voice is pretty annoying now, but I do remember digging it.
P.S. I rediscovered the song She. Oh my god, this song spoke to me in 10th grade. I loved this song, I must give it its proper due. I still like it, but mostly for the nostalgia, it brings.
Final Verdict: Fine, but again, please remember that in real-time, they got way too big to be cool. This was very important to us for some reason.
Better: Yo La Tengo – Sugarcube (I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, 1997, Matador Records)
8. Under the Bridge – Red Hot Chili Peppers (Blood Sugar Sex Magik, 1991, Warner Bros.)
Another tough one. I really loved the album Blood Sugar Sex Magik, though the misspelling has always bothered me. I have never liked this song. Other than this song, I would listen to them now if I heard them on the radio, but never really otherwise. Anthony Kiedis was excellent in Point Break.
Oh, negative points for the nauseating Rolling Stone cover where they are all wearing just socks on their junk. I would confirm it was Rolling Stone, but then I would also have to see the picture again, so apologies if the reference is incorrect.
Final Verdict: No. I don’t like this song. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now. I think songs from then that I did not like make me so angry because I heard them so many times. The thing my children will never understand is that we just watched MTV, whether we liked the music video that was playing or not. We just waited them out. Kind of like how we just read shit that was there, which is also how I happened to read the autobiography of Lance Armstrong. The whole thing. I can’t explain.
Better: Elliott Smith – The Biggest Lie I hesitate to put this in here so early, because I think it is one of the most heartbreaking songs ever written, and I could not tell you how many likely thousands of times I have listened to it. It probably deserved a better setup, but I search randomly through a group of albums I have written down for this, so here you are and you’re welcome.
9. Been Caught Stealing – Jane’s Addiction (Ritual de lo Habitual, 1990, Warner Bros.)
Jane’s Addiction is kick-ass. You may have noticed yesterday that I mentioned watching Headbangers Ball? My relationship with music had some weird phases. I definitely remember listening to 45s in between Disney Storytime Records and being young enough to not understand why my parents laughed at us when we sang along with The Horny Toad, the B-side of Prince’s single Delirious.
I was absolutely too young to see Flashdance, but somehow I did and loved it (doesn’t every 6-year-old kind of want to become a pseudo-stripper dancer?)
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Where Were My Parents?
dedicated to votaries
miserable, and suspicious
of the absurd, beautiful,
On Watching Headbangers Ball
as a Fifth Grader, and Other Topics
This list needs help. A lot of help.
This list. Christ, this list. It’s bad. It’s really, really bad. I mean, the eyeballs of my sixteen-year-old self would not be recoverable, they would have rolled back so hard. It’s not alllll bad but collectively, it sucks. It’s also really long, so I guess I am going to have to screenshot it. I am too lazy to type out all of these shitty songs and give them even that much more legitimacy. We can deal with them in chunks, shall we?
1. Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana (Nevermind, 1991, DCG Records)
Okay, so I know I am probably literally quoting Jack Black’s character from High Fidelity here (a character I very much identified with btw), but come on. It’s a little obvious no? It’s a good song sure, but there are better ones. I like Nirvana. I liked them then, and I still like them (not so much on Foo Fighters though, my apologies. Dave Grohl seems like a truly wonderful human). I bought Nevermind on cassette tape in the 7th grade sometime after this video came out. I watched Headbangers Ball, and I remember them being on it, and that Kurt Cobain wore a ballgown in a joke that seemed kind of lost on the host, and probably most of the at-home audience. That seemed as good a reason as any to spend what little money I had on their album. Music was the only thing I ever spent money on. I guess I used to babysit because I can’t think of any other way I had any at all. There is no way my parents would have given me money to buy records. I don’t know.Anyway, I liked Nirvana, and for a couple of years, I loved them because the boy I loved from 8th grade, all of my high school years, and probably a few years after that even, loved them. Incidentally, one of the only letters I have ever received that would approximate a love letter even quotes a Nirvana song. I still have it. I was always writing him these long, intense letters asking why he would not give me the attention I so craved the answer, as painfully obvious then as it is now, was that I was fourth on a list of priorities that ranked as follows: drugs, skateboarding, other girls). When In Utero came out in 1993, I spent a lot of time listening to it on CD in his garage bedroom in Belgrade, Maine. Listening to this CD, smoking cigarettes, losing my virginity, and getting high. Oh, wasted youth. Anyway, in the letter he wrote out the lyrics Swap Meet, which after all is said and done, I still think was absolutely perfectly ninth grade, and rather sweet.
Final Verdict: Yes, good song but there are better, less played ones.Better: You Know You’re Right*
*I know this is cheating a bit, but obviously it was recorded in the 1990s, 1994 specifically.
2. Loser – Beck (Mellow Gold, 1994, DCG Records)
Okay, also a good song. I always preferred the shit kickin’, speed takin’ Truck Drivin’ Neighbors Downstairs, and if I had complete power of this iTunes list, I would pick someone else all together. With this in mind:
Final Verdict: Pretty good song
Better: Daniel Johnston – Mind Contorted (Fun, 1994, Atlantic Records)
Spotify iTunes
3. Spiderwebs – No Doubt (Tragic Kingdom, 1995, Trauma Records and Interscope Records)
No.
Final Verdict: Absolutely not.
Replace with: Almost anything else. I didn’t care for the ska craze but try Blue Angel – Squirrel Nut Zippers (Hot, 1996, Mammoth)
Spotify iTunes
4. Creep – Radiohead (Pablo Honey, 1993, Capitol Records)
Ugh, I am already bored by this project. There are so, so, so many Radiohead albums and this song is okay, but there are better ones. To be fair, now that I am looking, most of them came out after 2000.
Final Verdict: Good song but there are so many better ones.
Better: Palace Brothers – You Will Miss Me When I Burn (Days in the Wake, 1994, Drag City)
Spotify iTunes
5. Say It Ain’t So – Weezer (Blue, 1994, DCG Records)
No.
Final Verdict: They just aren’t that good.
Replace: Guided by Voices – Drinker’s Peace (Same Place the Fly Got Smashed, 1990, Rocket #9)
Spotify iTunes -
I Was There: ’90s Music
I Was There: ’90s Music
This picture was taken in October of my freshman year in high school. This bummed and kinda bored expression lasted for at least the next four years. When the tweens in my house start showing a preference for Nirvana t-shirts and platform boots, begging for septum piercings, and saying things like “the ‘90s were awesome,” I know I have come full circle.
My first reaction is to find this both delightful and woefully misguided. I mean, good god, does anyone else remember Ugly Kid Joe?
But when my older sister points out that she can absolutely understand why someone who did not live in that decade would be drawn to it because there was an innocence about it that was not possible after the turn of the century, I must agree.
We were born in the mid-to-late 1970s and entered high school in rural Central Maine in the early ‘90s. From my perspective, if ever there is a time period frozen in a crystalline composite of nostalgia and teenage angst, it is this one. I didn’t own a cell phone until I was 25 and didn’t own a computer until I was 29. There was nothing else to do in my young adulthood but ponder memories. Of course, it was different after we were all online, had cellphones, and collectively lost our parents as we knew them to the post 9/11, twenty-four-hour news cycle.
And there was a lot of truly great music.
This conversation is in the back of my mind when Itunes keeps suggesting and I keep ignoring a ’90s Alternative Essentials playlist. I opened it today out of curiosity, and finally, I find I must weigh in. For the children.
The artist Agnes Martin spent her life making these beautifully sparse, abstract paintings. She wanted us to respond to viewing them with pure emotion, the way that most of us easily respond to music, with just emotion, without asking for explanations. She conceded that music is the purest form of art, and the rest of what we do is at best an approximation. Nothing can touch us the way that sound can.
I am not a musician. Though I can sing – well even, I am not a performer. I have spent my entire life loving music more than almost anything else. I have never been able to precisely describe the breathless ache that coincides with loving a song any more than something living can be truly be examined, and so I can only ever chase it.
It is equally baffling to me that certain songs can so profoundly move one person and drive another to fury, and thus I will remind readers to take the following with a grain of salt. My opinion is only that, and though at times I am going to sound like a punchable little snot, I promise I do not really judge anyone anymore for something that brings them joy (unless it is John Mayer, and if that is what truly brings you joy in life, well, someone had to break it to you).
I could say it is because frankly, no one seems all that interested in my opinions now, but no one did then either. I would have judged you when I was 16 (and for the record, most of the time, I absolutely deserved to be punched for something bitchy I had done, was going to do, or was thinking). Anyway, I sing along to It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me on the car radio too.
It is that 16-year-old self, however, that I will be required to channel in order to write the following. You have been warned.
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