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Post by Deleted on Jul 27, 2021 0:54:25 GMT
For me, the 1990s is perhaps the third or fourth best decade for rock music. (1960s is #1, 1980s #2, I'm somewhat tied with 70s and 90s).
The 70s are pretty easy for me to sum up: early 70s was really good, late 70s generally sucked. (*with exceptions).
The 90s were a little more complex--hit and miss on just about every year. The earliest 90s saw us putting the hair band thing behind us, although bands like Def Leppard were losing their hard edge and drifting into pop territory. Yeesh! But then grunge set in, thanks in big part to Mr. Cobain. Personally I didn't care for the grunge movement, except that it paved the way for some fairly innovative garage band-y type music. Black Crowes, Chilli Peppers, Everclear, Green Day, STP, Pearl Jam, just to name a few.
But from what I saw, something went sour from....oh about 96-98. I look back at my mix CD-Rs and there's not much from those years. A few entries from 98, but that's about it. When I get to 1999, though, there's quite a bit to write home about. Of course, that was the year after my divorce, I moved out of rural life and back to a larger city (where I had grown up), and I was going out to clubs regularly. I'm sure that was a factor.
'99 may have been a weird year with Y2K paranoia, the earlier-mentioned Woodstock fiasco, and "La Vida Loca"....but hey, there was some strong output by Collective Soul, Incubus, Foo Fighters, Santana, (and I know a lot of Macca fans hated it, but I actually liked "Try Not to Cry").
So that's where I was at in the 90s. I'd like to hear everyone else's take.
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Post by B.E. on Jul 27, 2021 1:06:59 GMT
(and I know a lot of Macca fans hated it, but I actually liked "Try Not to Cry"). I love that whole album.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 27, 2021 1:11:59 GMT
The '90s are the decade where I was something like 15-25, so they should be my decade! But this might be the decade I have always related to least of all. I don't mean the music was all bad, I just mean I didn't tend to connect, especially in the moment. I charged into the decade full speed ahead, a young teen already in love with rock music. I had a guitar by now, not to mention five or so years' worth of music fandom, curiosity inspired by siblings and cousins.
As we hit that decade, I was a wannabe shredder absorbing the Vais and Satrianis of the world, but also the mainstream GnRs, Motley Crues, and Whitesnakes of the world. Believe it or not, I was also a big fan of rap in those years, loving Run DMC, the Beastie Boys, Kool Moe Dee, Young MC, Public Enemy and others of that era.
I've got friends who talk about hearing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and feeling their lives were upended. I thought it was terrible, to be honest. In those years, I was really digging into classic rock and virtuosic players. The last thing in the world I wanted to hear about was how the best weren't the best, the canon wasn't good, perfection and skill weren't really anything to aspire to. I could not square Steve Vai or David Lee Roth to Kurt Cobain. I realize Cobain's fans would laugh, agree, and laugh again. That shows the depth of the disconnect: we have the exact same reaction to the other, even knowing the other. Oh well.
As for rock specifically, I don't know. I actually appreciate the fact that bands like the Black Crowes were able to sneak in, playing rock that wasn't rawk, much less the late 80s metal thing that dominated. That "alternative rock" finally broke through so that there were bands that just sort of sem-rocked was great.
But I do think most of what happened in the popular world in the latter half of the 90s especially was pretty bad. I didn't connect at all with nu-metal or ska metal or industrial metal or jam bands or frankly even many of the post-Replacements normie rock bands. In hindsight, yes, I see things I like. The E6 collective, Radiohead, Tom Waits, Dylan's resurgence, to name a few.
But mostly? Mostly I spent the 90s listening to every decade other than the 90s.
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Post by Sheriff John Stone on Jul 27, 2021 12:17:56 GMT
By the time the 1990's rolled around, I was pretty much done listening to new music and discovering new groups. With the popularity of CDs and later the advent of the internet, I was "playing catch up" with older bands from the 60's and 70's that slipped through the cracks or I ignored. THAT was a lot of fun.
There are a few groups from the 1990's who I have come to respect and somewhat enjoy. Pearl Jam and Nirvana are two of them. I also like some of R.E.M.'s 90's stuff. But, overall, the new music lost me and actually depressed me, specifically the state of music. I did a lot of DJing in the 1990's, and many of the gigs were dances, proms, and youth parties. I was a lot older than the people I was playing music for, and I remember thinking/asking myself, "What songs are these kids gonna carry with them as they get older. What will be the big ones which define their high school years?" I think it's much more questionable in the 2000's.
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Post by kds on Jul 27, 2021 12:56:02 GMT
Ah, the 1990s. My least favorite decade in terms of rock music. Granted, the 00s and 10s have turned out some absolute shit. And the 20s aren't off to a great start.
(What I'm about to write is just my personal take on the decade).
The 1990s actually got off to a pretty good start. The years of 1990-92 saw very good releases from Extreme, Damn Yankees, Skid Row, Metallica, Motley Crue, Guns N Roses, Queensryche, Kix, Ugly Kid Joe, Ozzy Osbourne, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, and Queen.
But then.......a song called Smells Like Teen Spirit hit big. From jump, I never got the appeal. OK, it's a nice riff (which Cobain admitted was copped from Boston's More Than a Feeling, which was itself a take on Louie Louie), but the vocals were definitely not my cup of tea.
I've often read that grunge came in and instantly ended the hard rock party, and maybe it's a regional thing, but I found that wasn't really the case in the Baltimore area. Well through 1993, our active rock station mixed the grunge bands with the more "proper" rock bands of the time. New music from Extreme, Cry of Love, and GNR were still getting a lot of play. Although, the grunge bands on the playlists did lead me to listening to more classic rock radio.
I feel like things really started to change around 1994, when more and more alternative bands came into the mainstream - STP, Bush, Smashing Pumpkins, etc. I feel like 1994 was the year where alternative became mainstream, and suddenly traditional guitar driven rock became "uncool." For the most part, I really don't think proper guitar rock ever recovered. Although, that year saw big time releases from The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd as well as The Eagles reunion and the Jimmy Page / Robert Plant reformation on MTV.
By 1995 & 1996, things were starting to get a tad odd. Ska was starting to really take off with groups like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and No Doubt.
In 1997 & 1998, you saw bands like Sugar Ray, Third Eye Blind, and Smashmouth hit big with somewhat sunny rock / pop with some rap influences thrown in. Each year, I became more disillusioned with what was considered rock music. This was why I retreated more and more into the older stuff.
Then, we started to see grunge's answer to "hair metal." Grunge lite began with a band called......ugh....Creed. Nickleback gets all the hate, but Creed was there first.
But, as I said in my aside about this decade, one of my big problems is that even bands I liked were not putting out quality music. In Spring 1998, and high school graduation approached, I couldn't wait for a new Van Halen album to cut through the shit that was coming out. The new Van Halen album only added to the shit. These late 90s years saw albums from U2, Aerosmith, Priest, Iron Maiden, Scorpions, Queensryche, etc that just were not good.
Then, rock, it me anyway, hit bottom in the year 1999. The rise of nu metal, possibly the worst movement in all of rock history, was a major factor to me. That, mixed with pop rock, grunge lite, whatever the hell Sublime & 311 are, and fucking Santana with Rob Thomas, just made for a lethal cocktail of awful that came to a head at the disaster called Woodstock 1999.
Mercifully, the calendar changed to 2000, and it seemed like many legacy acts hit a reset button and stopped chasing 90s trends, and we got a lot of "return to form" albums.
However, for my money, active rock never really recovered. The 1990s came in like a steamroller. The 1990s made musicianship "uncool." There seemed to be a cultural shift, and I feel like the 1990s started the homogenization of mainstream music, where rock, country, rap, etc all just became a big mish mash of pop. By the late 10s, bands like Imagine Dragons were hailed as kings of active rock. Oh, and we also have the 1990s to blame for The Foo Fighters, a Wal Mart brand version of hard rock music if there ever was one.
So, for the last quarter century, rock's been pushed into the background. And, in the early 10s, I decided that it was no longer worth the effort to hunt and peck and try to seek out new bands. Hell, by then, I was in my early 30s, and I was finally at that age where new music wasn't supposed to appeal to me any longer, even if that actually began in the early 90s.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 27, 2021 13:21:39 GMT
I feel like the 1990s started the homogenization of mainstream music, where rock, country, rap, etc all just became a big mish mash of pop. By the late 10s, bands like Imagine Dragons were hailed as kicks of active rock. I think this is very accurate. Artists always influenced one another across genres, but especially from the mid-90s onward, it seemed like music was designed in corporate board rooms to incorporate every trend all at once: country will have big, booming bass and drums and distorted guitars; metal will have DJs scratching and rappers; rock will have sampled drum loops; and so on. It all seemed so cheesy and fake, but not in a way that made a person feel it was the artists making those (cheesy, fake) choices, but rather the suits.
My impression, anyway.
There is a part of my that says, "Why don't we have a massive music industry with really universal stars and great music anymore? Because we don't deserve it."
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Post by kds on Jul 27, 2021 13:30:18 GMT
I feel like the 1990s started the homogenization of mainstream music, where rock, country, rap, etc all just became a big mish mash of pop. By the late 10s, bands like Imagine Dragons were hailed as kicks of active rock. I think this is very accurate. Artists always influenced one another across genres, but especially from the mid-90s onward, it seemed like music was designed in corporate board rooms to incorporate every trend all at once: country will have big, booming bass and drums and distorted guitars; metal will have DJs scratching and rappers; rock will have sampled drum loops; and so on. It all seemed so cheesy and fake, but not in a way that made a person feel it was the artists making those (cheesy, fake) choices, but rather the suits.
My impression, anyway.
There is a part of my that says, "Why don't we have a massive music industry with really universal stars and great music anymore? Because we don't deserve it."
Yep, that's pretty much how I see it too now. And, I feel like the lowering of the bar really began in the mid to late 1990s. I've said before, I'm not just some guy in his 40s bitching about modern music. That's the natural order of things. This started when I was in high school.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 27, 2021 13:37:04 GMT
What we really saw in the '90s is the behemoth of the industry step in and very quickly streamroll (or at least co-opt) the grunge/alternative movement that was intended to contradict or counteract it. It was as if in 1980 punk music were used in Coca-Cola commercials.
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Post by kds on Jul 27, 2021 13:49:22 GMT
What we really saw in the '90s is the behemoth of the industry step in and very quickly streamroll (or at least co-opt) the grunge/alternative movement that was intended to contradict or counteract it. It was as if in 1980 punk music were used in Coca-Cola commercials. I'd say that's pretty accurate. I also can't kept but wonder if rock was just going through a natural ebb and flow where it peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, with an eventually decline that was accelerated by the industry. I also didn't mention that the 1990s marked the beginning of digital music. While I've recently come to appreciate the convenience of Spotify, I really feel like fans don't connect as much to an album or song that you pull up on a streaming service. And, I think that lack of connection to songs, albums, and artists is partly responsible for the stuff that passes for music today. It's almost like music has became background noise rather than something to cherish.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 27, 2021 13:52:35 GMT
One thing I do wonder about in hindsight is, what would the '90s have looked like to me if there were a more robust and high-speed internet?
My reality was that as the mid-90s sunk in, the music I saw on MTV--my main way of hearing new music in those days, never having had much of a good radio station around--didn't appeal to me. So what I did was dug into the historical music I'd come to love: Beatles, Zeppelin, Queen, and Zappa especially, then Beefheart, Beach Boys, and Velvet Underground toward the end of the decade.
If the internet then had been like it is now, would I have done the same thing but more so? Or might I have kept finding and hearing new music that instead I only found in hindsight? Might I have experienced Tom Waits's great 90s music in real time, for example? I didn't have the resources to do so at the time. I didn't know where to look. I didn't know what I didn't know.
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Post by kds on Jul 27, 2021 13:57:41 GMT
One thing I do wonder about in hindsight is, what would the '90s have looked like to me if there were a more robust and high-speed internet?
My reality was that as the mid-90s sunk in, the music I saw on MTV--my main way of hearing new music in those days, never having had much of a good radio station around--didn't appeal to me. So what I did was dug into the historical music I'd come to love: Beatles, Zeppelin, Queen, and Zappa especially, then Beefheart, Beach Boys, and Velvet Underground toward the end of the decade.
If the internet then had been like it is now, would I have done the same thing but more so? Or might I have kept finding and hearing new music that instead I only found in hindsight? Might I have experienced Tom Waits's great 90s music in real time, for example? I didn't have the resources to do so at the time. I didn't know where to look. I didn't know what I didn't know.
I've thought about that too. I think I might not have quite immersed myself in music like I did then. Example, when I really got into Pink Floyd in the late 90s, I didn't have immediate access to their catalog, nor did I have a ton of disposable income. It took me a couple years to collect their discography. So, since I didn't have it all in front of me, I would listen to albums far more repeatedly than I probably would have if I could've just listened to all of their albums over the course of a week or two. I honestly don't know if I'd have the same feelings for that music if I had the instant access I have now.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 27, 2021 14:20:44 GMT
Frank Zappa might be my first, best example of that. Through the latter half of the 90s (see? keeping it on topic!) I really got into him, and he was as good an obsession as a person could have, considering he had something like 50+ albums already by that time. This is also pre-Napster, and even when file sharing could happen, it was slow and bad quality.
So mostly I was going to music stores and, because I was a college kid or poor, just-graduated kid, digging through used CD bins. At first it was easy enough, but after a while, some albums you've read about just never seem to turn up! It becomes a treasure hunt, and those albums (when you find them) are treasures. I remember the thrill of poring over liner notes while I'd listen to those discs again and again. It might be weeks, might be months, before I'd buy my next album. My listening was restricted mostly to the CDs I owned, so I knew that music inside and out.
That is very different now.
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Post by kds on Jul 27, 2021 14:53:42 GMT
Frank Zappa might be my first, best example of that. Through the latter half of the 90s (see? keeping it on topic!) I really got into him, and he was as good an obsession as a person could have, considering he had something like 50+ albums already by that time. This is also pre-Napster, and even when file sharing could happen, it was slow and bad quality.
So mostly I was going to music stores and, because I was a college kid or poor, just-graduated kid, digging through used CD bins. At first it was easy enough, but after a while, some albums you've read about just never seem to turn up! It becomes a treasure hunt, and those albums (when you find them) are treasures. I remember the thrill of poring over liner notes while I'd listen to those discs again and again. It might be weeks, might be months, before I'd buy my next album. My listening was restricted mostly to the CDs I owned, so I knew that music inside and out.
That is very different now.
I used to rely on my father's extensive CD collection to listen to something I didn't have - that's how I initially got into the Queen catalog in the early 90s. But, he wasn't really a Floyd fan, so I had to rely on my own collection for them. So, like you, I'd look in the used section at my record store, hoping to find a Floyd CD for $7.99 instead of the $13.99 going rate for a new CD. I feel like that kind of treasure hunting leads to a greater appreciation of the music because that CD is yours, you own it. It's not just floating in cyber space, and there's no worry of it disappearing at the whim of a record label or streaming service.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 28, 2021 3:03:40 GMT
Ok, this is what I was after. This is some great reading! In the 90's music seemed to get into a more stripped down mode, after the synth-drenched Euro-rock 80s (not a bad thing for a teen-aged me). This worked for me because I was relatively settled down at that time, married and raising a family. There was a certain rawness to much of the music, and there was something inviting about that. It seemed a little more intimate, and appeared more soulful. At least that's what I got out of it.
Lenny Kravitz put out a few tunes that caught my attention (although he butchered Guess Who's "American Woman"). And what about the one-offs? Fastball with "The Way". Toad the Wet Sprocket, anyone?
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Post by lonelysummer on Jul 28, 2021 5:28:21 GMT
I could say I hated 90's music, but that's not true. My taste has always leaned towards softer music; never been a metalhead, always preferred melody and clearly sung vocals. All I remember about the 90's is my brother trying to turn me on to all the new bands, and it was all loud, thrashing guitars, pounding drums, and somebody yelling or screaming. There was stuff I liked, but it wasn't the stuff everybody was raving about. The older acts I liked were breaking up or putting out garbage. Last Kinks album was 1993; I loved it, bought it the day it was released, in fact I listened to it at the record store with the clerk who loved the Kinks as much as I did. That was probably the last time I was that excited about a new release. That year sucked, too - the Kinks were supposed to play Seattle Labor Day weekend, but they cancelled. Terrible time to be a Beach Boys fan, when all we got was garbage like Summer in Stripes and Stars and Paradise. It fell to Brian to give us some worthwhile music. There's probably more good music out in the last 30 years than I'm aware of; that era where everyone listened to mainstream radio, and heard a wide variety of good stuff is long gone. I've spent the last three decades trying to catch up on a lot of stuff from before my time, or stuff I missed the first time around.
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