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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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