The unlikely pop stars of my childhood
I'd feel strange about having a sort of nostalgia for the 90s if it didn't happen to everyone at some point. We all eventually develop an affection for the decade in which we came into our own.
And, as Chris Rock says, the music that was playing when you first got laid -- you're going to love that music for the rest of your life.
What's odd about the music of the 90s, I think, is how many post-grunge bands showed up, burned brightly for a moment and then disappeared or dissipated. That happens every decade, really -- but they left some really good music, if only a track or two off of one or two albums.
So much of of the best music of the 90s was dark without really being depressing. I think specifically of bands like The Gin Blossoms and, to a lesser extent, Third Eye Blind.
I'll always love that first Gin Blossoms album. They've released a number of expanded versions of it in the ensuing years, but the original is lean and miserable and damned fun. Listening to "Hey Jealousy" and "Found Out About You" rips your heart out even as you're tapping your feet, bobbing your head and fighting the urge to play air guitar.
I remember a lot of girls at my high school being really nuts about Third Eye Blind because the lead singer was easy on the eyes. One of them insisted that I take the debut album home and listen to it -- and I did. And what was weird was that a lot of the stuff that didn't hit was good -- if a little dark and occasionally melodramatic.
Let's not kid ourselves about this band -- they could write a good pop song. And frankly, where depth and heart are concerned they ended up looking like three Bob Dylans and a Neil Young next to the post-grunge flood of bands like The Goo Goo Dolls and Matchbox Twenty.
I think my favorite of their songs that did anything chart-wise is probably "How's It Gonna Be?," for which they also made a sort of clever video.
"Semi-Charmed Life" was huge -- but I think "How's It Gonna Be" is actually a better song. Still, it's a little strange to me that this weird, conflicted breakup song was ever #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. What are the odds of getting a line like "the soft dive of oblivion" into a hit pop song?
Well, I guess it wasn't that odd in the 90s, actually...
Even better really is "In The Background" -- a sad little song about grieving a dead girl even though it didn't work out between you, even though it couldn't have worked, realizing you even miss the crazy, awful bits of it.
There's this soul crushing line from the chorus: "The plans I made still have you in them..."
Punches you in the gut.
I was still pretty young when Nirvana and Pearl Jam were at the top of the charts -- but I do remember the period, and those albums, affectionately.
But more than that -- more than Seattle and Grunge Rock (whatever the hell that means) I think there were a lot of bands that would in earlier decades have been underground darlings or college radio favorites at best that came out into light, blinking and rubbing their eyes.
I mean -- The Gin Blossoms could have been The Replacements, right?
And Blind Melon? They were like the Grateful dead meets the Talking Heads.
Counting Crows and Blues Traveller -- as mainstream pop stars?
Sure - Pavement and Sleater-Kinney and Sonic Youth were putting out great records. But that's not strange. You've got a little patch of weird and wonderful just beneath the pop surface going as far back as recorded music -- and every now and then they break through for a minute.
What was strange and fascinating about the 90s was that these people became our pop stars.
What a great time to be a kid.
Comments (5)
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I still love Third Eye Blind :-) Semi-Charmed Life was the song overplayed on the radio the first summer I had a car, so I have wonderful memories driving around with friends singing along. Nirvana is always going to own a spot in my heart -- they were big when I was in middle school and starting to buy my own CDs with allowance money. Nevermind was one of the first I bought, along with the soundtrack of The Bodyguard and Green Day's Dookie :-)
And the little dancing bee girl still makes me smile!
Posted on December 11, 2007 9:00 AM
The first album I ever bought with my own cash?
Definitely Maybe.
Sigh.
Posted on December 11, 2007 2:31 PM
The first album I bought with my own money? Something by Weird Al Yankovich. The first CD? The Star Wars soundtrack. Oh god....
Posted on December 11, 2007 3:49 PM
Last week, I went out for a drink with this older (about my dad's age, probably) singer-songwriter guy I know, and we got to talking about what the late '60s, the late '70s and the early '90s had in common: Those were points when record executives failed to predict what was going to be popular and reacted by snatching up bands left and right. In the '90s, that period of confusion on the industry's part was remarkably short -- my older friend and I concurred it was probably about 18 months, and that it occurred slightly later than a lot of people seem to remember it (closer to '93 than to the supposed watershed year of '91). That was, indeed, a very strange time to be a kid (but a great time to enter adolescence); all of that ennui, people singing about very hard drugs on the radio, established heroes of the poverty-prone indie underground suddenly on MTV, punk rock in the mainstream... But I'd encourage you to remember how things got really, really lame, really, really fast. Years later, when I was old enough to know better, I recognized that as the sound of record executives figuring how to separate the style from the substance of this stuff and marketing the style (which is how the mainstream music industry has always worked). And, occasionally catchy and occasionally poignant as their music was, Third Eye Blind was one of those things that happened when the industry re-learned how to play its own game. Surely 3EB had some craft, some smarts -- but that's most striking, as you said, when placed against most of what was on mainstream radio at the time. Place them against the bands by which they were likely influenced and 3EB's songs fall flat. Just like with a lot of alt-rock of that time: sounds kinda like some really good stuff of the not-too-distant past, only scrubbed up and slightly recontextualized, but there's something tape-dubbers of yore would call a "generational loss."
You asked:
"Counting Crows and Blues Traveller -- as mainstream pop stars?"
Dude. Those are two bands that play in a recognizably classic rock inspired mode. There's always a place in the mainstream for stuff like this.
The '90s. We were all so miserable, and we didn't know how good we had it.
Posted on December 13, 2007 12:17 AM
All good points.
But I'm not sure I agree that there's always a place in the mainstream for something like at least the first two albums each by Counting Crows and Blues Traveller.
They're both bands with strange, wordy, complicated songs fronted by chubby, weird looking guys who write a lot about being miserable and confused.
I think they're certainly easier on the ears than, say, Mudhoney. Or even Nirvana's first album. But if you'd told anybody in 1989 that in a few years John Popper was going to be a huge pop star playing blues-based, harmonica heavy songs about...yeah...what the hell are some of those songs about...? -- I think they'd have called you crazy.
Or that Adam Duritz was going to bring off a hit album full of long, angsty college poetry full of Saul Bellow references that would go seven times platinum, allowing him to sleep with that girl from the "Dancing In The Dark" video.
I think both bands played blues based pop rock -- but I think both were much more unlike than like things that were successful before them.
Now -- The Black Crowes. There's a band whose success shouldn't really come as a surprise. They were essentially doing what Aerosmith had done, which is what the Stones had done. But the Black Crowes, Aerosmith and even The Stones at their weirdest were less strange and more commercial than Blues Traveller or Counting Crows.
I think Jet plays in a recognizably classic rock inspired mode. The White Stripes, even. Take away the costumes and shtick and you've essentially got a good two piece electric blues band with some creepy lyrics. Blues Traveller and Counting Crows are much harder to quantify, I think.
I agree with you about Third Eye Blind, more or less. They were sort of a singer-songwriter-y rock band dressed up as alt-rock or "post-grunge." But that may have become its own subgenre. I strain to think of what music, specifically, I think they were most influenced by. Which is weird. What they did wasn't unique, necessarily -- it was just an unusual amalgam of existing things that did give you a vague sense that it was connected to something that came before...but what? Come to think of it, they sort of sounded like three or four different bands over the course of that first album (which I haven't heard in a long time) -- like the Billy Joel dilemma we discussed here a few weeks ago.
Posted on December 14, 2007 2:58 AM