96 posts tagged “90s music monday”
Fine, I'll stick with Brit Pop if that's what you really want. What's that you say? You couldn't give two shits either way? Well, fine. I'll do it just to spite you instead then.
So, last week I did Oasis which, as part of the natural order of things, basically forces me to do Blur this week.
Circa 1994 a magazine called Loaded ushered in a whole new era in British culture known, for want of a better word, as New Laddism.
Subtitled "For men who should know better" Loaded represented the antithesis of the Sensitive New Age Guy stereotype that was a dominant social attitude in the media at the time - it celebrated infamous rogues such as Oliver Reed, football, drinking and a general "having fun with your mates" air - a sort of GQ-esque lifestyle magazine for those without a 6 figure salary.
The first issue featured Gary Oldman on the cover
and in the first few issues featured genuinely excellent articles and interviews with the likes of Hunter S Thompson and a pre-megafame Tiger Woods although soon the covers began to almost exclusively feature under dressed starlets and low level female celebrities (when I last looked a few years back it had descended even further into a barely concealed soft-core porn mag but you'll have to trust me on the earlier years).
It was into this environment - and the post Cobain-suicide declining grunge musical landscape of the same time - that Oasis released "Definitely Maybe" - a swaggering, under-polished, unapologetic anthemic balls out rock album. They sounded like the best pub band you'd ever heard. Hell they looked like it too - I mean, sure Liam had a undeniable charisma but his brother sported a unibrow, badly fitting shirts and looked, to be honest, like he was holding a guitar he didn't know how to play.
For me, the video for "Supersonic" contains all the elements - starting with Liam's madchester swagger at the start with its distinctive outward turned toes, taking in the sheep skin coats, Noel's untucked Ben Sherman, Bonehead's receding hairline and the general sense that the entire band picked up their instruments about 3 weeks back and still find them slightly awkward to hold.
But despite the fact, or maybe because of it, that its only got 3 chords, the simplest of progressions and nonsensical lyrics it's the kind of song you want to drink to and shout along with your mates. There's no pretensions, no side - it's all honesty and attitude.
Written, by all accounts, to fill a gap in a recording schedule:
"It was written and recorded in one night in Liverpool. We went into do a demo on "Bring It On Down" for McGee and a we couldn´t get it right.. and we had to have something, and i went into that room and wrote "Supersonic" in about half hour. It was never re-mixed either."
the alka-seltzer loving Elsa is not about a girl fond of the old Bolivian Marching Powder, as one would suspect from the lyric "she sniffs it through a cane" but instead about a 9 stone flatulent Rottweiler in the studio at the time. And, if you believe Popbitch (and let's face it, who doesn't?) then the line "Can I ride with you in your BMW" refers to Smith's guitarist Johnny Marr giving Noel a lift in his car.
...
Oh dear, I think I may have just scraped the bottom of my pop trivia barrel.
But yes, the whole album was good and lo, scenes like this did happen all over middle-class surburban homes the land over
The "Help! Album" released in 1995 for The War Child foundation was a particularly stunning album. Not only was it recorded in one day (Monday 4th of September), mixed the next day and was in shops by the Saturday but it helped raise more than £1.25 million for the charity which, at the time, was dealing with 2 million families displaced by the fighting in Sarajevo.
Produced by Brian Eno, the track listing was a veritable who's who of prominent British (-ish, technically Neneh Cherry is Swedish) artists including the first recording by the Manic Street Preachers since the disappearance of Richey Edwards, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty - better known as the KLF - recording as One World Orchestra and a hauntingly spare version of "Ode To Billy Joe" by Sinead O'Connor.
Many of the tracks actually benefited from the short turn around time. As Eno put it
"You know what sounds so great about these tracks? They're all so fresh. I really hope it sets a precedent - that people will stop messing about in the studio for months on end, emerging with the sort of over-processed nonsense often presided over by the likes of me."
Not least of these was Suede's cover of Elvis Costello's "Shipbuilding"
which was itself originally written during the Falklands War in 1982 in response to the seeming contradiction that whilst the war bought prosperity back to the traditional shipbuilding areas like Merseyside, Tyneside and Belfast it was also these areas that traditionally provided many young men to join the military.
Anyway, great album if you can get hold of it and the official account of how it happened is also well worth a read.
This is going to sound weird but one of the punk as fuck, raucous, straight up balls out entertaining gigs I ever went to was Ben Folds Five back in 1996. It sort of embarrasses me to say that actually but it doesn't change the fact that it's true.
It may seem hard to imagine - the titular Ben Folds is the epitome of nerd chic and his two band mates at the time, Darren Jesse and Robert Sledge - aren't obvious candidates for the rock'n'roll hair raiser hall of fame. Plus the fact that it's a dude with a grand piano plus two other dudes on drums and bass.
But seriously, the gig was wild. For a start there was a huge amount of energy - Folds plays the piano like he's having hate sex with it and since the band was relatively unknown at the time the smallish venue was completely packed with nothing but hardcore fans. And me - I'd gone on a whim and was probably the only one in the joint who didn't know all the lyrics to all the songs.
And for a guy tied to a piano he was surprisingly mobile - I mean the dude climbed on top of the thing, stamped the keys with his feet, pounded them with his fists and elbows and smacked it with his stool. The encore ended with him hurling the stool across the stage at the keys to play the final crescendo.
The interaction with the audience was continuous - since then Folds has regular segments at the end of shows where he encourages different sections of the audience to do the trumpet and saxophone parts during "Army" and a 3 part harmony during "Not The Same". If you're lucky then during the latter he'll start conducting the audience like a demented puppet master - one gig I went to he manipulated us like an instrument until we were doing, if I remember correctly, the them from Jaws.
At this gig however it was much more intimate - lots of requests shouted out (and often fulfilled, if only for a few seconds) for odd cover versions. I stumbled out later without any idea what time it was, my legs sore from jumping, my (probably flannelet) shirt drenched in sweat. I think I stage dived (dove?) a few times - to be honest it's all a bit of a blur.
At the time the whole thing was a refreshing palate cleanser in the post grunge era - I was just starting college doing a CS degree, started reading Wired and the web was taking off. It kind of felt ok to be nerd who rocked out and Ben Folds Five felt like a soundtrack to that - well that and the Prodigy. But that's another story.
It was clever, witty lyrics, distorted pianos and self deprecation and I lapped up the two first albums.
After that, not so much though - there are still some gems but either I got older, or he did. I went to a gig last night and maybe it was the fact that a weekend of camping in 100°F or the fact that it was a Sunday night in Oakland or the fact that the sound quality was pretty awful but I just didn't get the same buzz as I had at previous gigs.
It's like the saying goes - you can never go home again. But you can shop there. Or listen to tracks from the first two albums all day.
A short one today since I'm running achingly later in the day which means it's time to delve deep into the box of techno and pull out the only song to my knowledge which contains samples from both Arnie starring dystopia-fest "The Running Man" and perennially controversial but emminently quotable Python vehicle "The Life of Brian"
As a particularly obnoxious child, I was always desperate to show off how much more I knew about music than everyone else*. Knowing that extra song gives you the edge on your peers: a throwaway playground remark along the lines of “have you heard Messiah’s version of I Feel Love?” can be instantly trumped with a retort of “actually Temple Of Dreams is far superior”, stunning your classmate into awestruck silence for the rest of double Maths. Technically this could also be achieved by referencing an obscure song by a different artist, but then you run the risk of your opponent thinking you haven’t actually heard of Messiah at all and are BLUFFING.
* Amazingly enough, knowing obscure music trivia is actually more useful in my current job than my degree. Suck on that, academia!
In fact you should go read the whole of Blog'92, right from the very start, since it's awesome. I mean how can you not love something which starts:
On my eleventh birthday I received a copy of a tape called “Rave ‘92” through the post from my sister Grace, who was away at university. It was the second tape she had made for me whilst she was away, (the first being a random mix of grebo, soul, indie and ‘Love Shack’ by the B52s) and the 4th tape I owned in total - tapes 2 and 3 being the Best Of The Seekers and Roxette’s Joyride.
The inlay sleeve for my new tape had the tracklisting neatly written out in capital letters: black biro for the track title and red for the artist name all the way up until track 2, when the track titles were black and the artist names were red. On the inside of the inlay was written:
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY KATHERINE!!
p.s. Mum & Dad will really hate this! So PLAY IT LOUD“
... and which then goes on to review all 24 tracks with a mix of enviable enthusiams, well tempered nostalgia, solid music geekery and more than a sprinkle of humour. In fact it's everything I basically aspire to, but fall short of, in these here Music Monday posts.
During the mid 90s Sony were pushing the MiniDisc format pretty hard and cross-utilising their vertical paradigm using synergistic intracorporate mind thinks.
By which I mean they used artists signed to Sony Records to shill other Sony products.
Case in point - last week's 90s Music Monday with the Bomfunk MCs.
It's much more common these days - after teen programs like "The OC" and "One Tree Hill" managed to showcase up and coming bands its starting to become the done thing to add the name of the band and song discretely on your advert for spandex support hose or gas powered lawn mulchers or whatever.
Glastonbury rockers Reef, fronted by "long haired slab of man candy" (or so I was told at the time) Gary Stringer - who, incidentally, has name more suited to being a brickie in Chelmsford than an international rock artiste about town - rose to prominince in a British MiniDisc advert in which a callous record exec throws their demo MD out the window wherein, despite bouncing from 20 storeys up (thus showing durability, doncha see), it is picked up by an achingly cool skateboarding type dude who promptly slips it into his MD player and proceeds to rock out to it whilst skating off into the distance, presumably to indulge in a spot of impromptu viral marketing thus ensuring our heroes' get catapulted to fame, fortune and a life of artistic credibility away from grabbing and vision-lacking corporate music overlords e.g Sony Music.
Of course the Reefsters benefit from not one but two startling pieces of outrageous good fortune, viz.-
- The offending disc was picked up by their
exhaustively focus group determined target demographica young skater dude - He was one of the other 4 people in the UK with a MD player
I'd show you the video but it is inexplicably not available on the internets - a fact that has shaken my self believe to the very core of my being and left me confused and disorientated. Instead you'll just have to get the song itself
For those of you blundering into the middle of this post in some manner to which I'm not accustomed - no, that isn't infact the Black Crowes you're hearing.
All joking aside I did actually like "Naked" quite a lot - not surprising given my penchant for Die Schwartze Rabenkrahe. And, whilst I though their next single veered somewhat close to Poppy Rocksville it was amusingly catchy in a toe tapping way
I think I even bought a copy of the album "Glow" somewhere along the way although I'm buggered if I can find it anywhere and I have no recollection of ever actually listening to it.
Which actually I suppose sort of somes Reef up - they weren't in any way bad. Hell they were actually pretty good and by all accounts a damn fine live act and "Glow" came in at number 26 in Kerrang!'s "100 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die " list.
But they just sort of faded away without any one noticing. Which would make me sad if it wasn't for the fact that both Charlie Brooker and Ben Goldacre who, between them act as a some sort of combination of arch-debunkers, anchors of sanity and satrically skewering arbiters of reassuringly hilarious fact that keep me moralling and emotionally grounded and whom I thoroughly expected to calmly explain this week in their respective columns why we shouldn't be worried about H1N1 aka Swine Flu. Instead they've both sort of collectively shrugged and said "Actually, you should maybe be a little worried".
It's enough to turn a boy to drink.
Due a combination of travelling, work and simple, good ol' fashioned incompetence I've basically be a complete failure at 90mm recently. I apologise to all 3 people who even vaguely care and offer you Finlands "robot hip hop" toe tapping chart topper "Freestyler" by way of apologies
That said I kind of like the visual style - I'm actually wondering if the slightly ropey, flat compositing characteristic of the era (see also the Rolling Stone's "Love is Strong" video) will start getting used as a deliberate style at some point. I also dig the fact that it's largely monochrome except for the flashes of orange (the official colour of the Helsinki metro) but then I'm a simple man with simple tastes and an unsophisticated aesthetic pallette.
It's funny - this song is nearly 10 years old but still doesn't feel that outdated. That said, apart from small pockets of fashionable resistance the "futuristic" look of the late 90s - all androgynous ingenues, suspiciously clean crusties and "technical" sports wear - doesn't really seem to have taken root in quite the way it was supposed to. Damn those 80s revivals and floaty gypsy skirt trends.
It's that lovely time of year in San Francisco when the sky is blue and clear, the sun is warm but the air still crispy, the game developers are in town and a young man's fancy starts turning back towards Zeitgeist. And love. But mostly Zeitgeist.
That said, lead singer Nina Miranda is half English, half Brazillian, born in Brazil and sang the song in English but with a French accent, occasionally breaking into Brazilian Portuguese so I don't feel too bad about the mistake.
I'd also completely forgotten it featured in one of Michel Gondry's Levi's adverts which just goes to show that despite a sometimes freakish memory for the most minutest of details from over a decade ago there are also just huge chunks of my memory that seem to have been quietly erased.
Now, I wonder if there's a company out there that will let me hire a couple of nubile young girls to fan me with palm fronds ....
You know, I dug out my old copy of Rage Against The Machine's eponymous album this weekend and it still sounds good. Admittedly the lyrics and sentiments seem a little more sophomoric then they did when I was 17, back when I felt that I could easily identify with, say, the Civil Rights movement of the 60s and other horrific global injustices by drawing on my vast life experience. As I got older I began to realise that my outrage at getting a 6 page essay to do over the weekend for homework didn't actually give me the kind of perspective that I needed to grasp, say, several hundred years of inequality and a legacy of slavery however I also began to realise that most situations have nuances and that possibly lyrics like ...
The teacher stands in front of the class
But the lesson plan he can't recall
The student's eyes don't perceive the lies
Bouncing off every fucking wall
... whilst admirable in their exhortation for people to consider multiple sources when learning about a topic, are also somewhat disingenuous in their condemnation of the entire education establishment.
On the other, other hand - damn that album is still good to listen to. And oddly it works as both a mental soother, used to pacify the unquietened mind in times of stress but also as a damn good tool for getting one's self psyched up when, for example, about to play a Rugby match against Gresham 1st XV. Hypothetically.
