Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1992
by Scott Miller

"Contact" [edit] - Stereolab
1992, the quintessential bad nineties year, was the year music listeners decided once and for all to settle for crap. Surprisingly, that was in improvement in the long run; the eighties, a decade of striving for advancement—video, dance productions, philanthropy—mostly got stupider for the attempt. Grunge was a lot better than New Romantic, and it was an aesthetic of giving up: you could look slovenly, and not have to shoot any higher musically than Master Of Reality—it was up to your audience to approach you with the right irony or stupidity. But there's an obvious level at which a culture illustratable by Dan Clowes is vastly superior to a culture illustratable by Patrick Nagel. The message of the times is almost a dilettante approximation of humility: you can't have it all, you can't in fact have very much, but you can have something adequate (remember OK Cola?), and you can snicker postmodernly at your past hubris. I was fairly gung-ho about Stereolab, because the appearance of master aestheticians is always exciting, but in their extreme form, they do ask you to give up on anything having to do with development or attention span. "Contact" is an exception: it manages a credible buildup, albeit on a somewhat tectonic scale. I edited some of the repetition.

"Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang" - Dr. Dre
Kind of like U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name," this was so much what was going on, so universally approved, that the line is blurred between accepting it as God's will and liking it, which I don't think I quite do. The production is pretty incredible, and the delivery is entertaining, but as a recording artist doing—as professional rock critics like to call it—"braggadocio," all I can say is that my collection of braggadocio art already felt complete going in.

"Lilly" - Shiny Wet Parts
This was some people I know, Shelley LaFreniere, Gil Ray, and Robert Toren, doing a little barely-distributed cassette project, but I think they got a phenomenal result. It has something very similar to that Bee Thousand sound two years in advance, in other words, working cassette tape saturation to get a big, crunching result. I think it was just drum machine and some kind of modest but inspired guitar—and Shelley's excellent vocals.

"Nearly Lost You" - Screaming Trees
My first exposure to grunge was in 1988; the opening bands for Christmas in Berkeley were Mudhoney and Soundgarden. I thought they were okay; Soundgarden finally won me over by encoring with Cheech and Chong's "Earache My Eye." The Screaming Trees were the Sub Pop act that was typically recommended to me by insiders. It was some Geffen Records people who I was first aware of going nuts over Nirvana, not Northwest natives.

"Photograph of Mary" - Trey Lorenz
Here's a nice, slick, hooky little cassette single (YEAH) from a guy who was apparently famous mostly for doing backing vocals for Mariah Carey.

"Joking" - Indigo Girls
The earnest, truck-stop-ready strumming of the Indigo Girls is at a keen emotional pitch on this retelling of an encounter with someone who apparently turned out not to share the same emotional pitch in retrospect. "I could have been your sister/I would have been your brother/You kissed me like I was a soldier headed for a war... And you were only joking." That's a lot of nuanced impact to absorb if you weren't there, so to speak, but they make you feel it.

"Mary" - Tori Amos
There's something naively show-biz about early Tori Amos, kind of the way a high school girl would do Janis Joplin, or Cher: glory is "glow-ray." I find that appealing, in her case; it seems to say that refining signifiers of earnestness is categorically less important than earnestness itself. The subject of the lyrics is wanting to get a girl away from an exploitative situation; there could be a hint of a cry for freedom in the language of the oppressors.

"Perfume-V" - Pavement
The broad appeal of Pavement is certainly a nineties thing. Pavement's bag of themes—cover-up, sluttiness, bleeding, erosion, all barely over the edge of intolerability if that—are touched on in the reluctantly tuneful "Perfume-V." In my opinion Pavement eventually got a lot better than Slanted and Enchanted, but it's a good sign that a whole lot of people would give a rather Dadaist album a chance.

"Popular Creeps" - Chris Mars
The song's so good one can ignore the fact that Chris Mars is one of those music people who really shouldn't write lyrics—although "better leave us loners alone" is almost a good line. But he can really sing, in a sort of Popeye way. And I guess he did the cover art, which is very impressive in an Oingo Boingo album cover sort of way.

"Young Splendor" - Pond
Darkly harmonized, with a feel of hollow fourths and fifths, suspended, a little dissomant: grooving; I think they're saying something about gun violence. Against?

"Better Than Nothing" - Jennifer Trynin
There's a pioneering use of midrange grind, achieved here by Leslie speaker I think, but something you hear a lot more in slightly altered form 15 years later. This was a stand-out mini hit on KITS.

"Rosemary Girl" - Mike Keneally
Possibly Mike Keneally's poppiest tune, it of course contains some champion guitar work, and also some uncharacterically straight-ahead, major-chord rock.

"Anne" - Flop
Flop will take a verse and just repeat it several times, and that's the song. Usually works great. Why do I knock myself out with varied second and third verses? It's a great little melody, and Anne is watering her mother's dahlias, which rhymes with starting to feel the valium. That's all you need.

"Hoover Dam" - Sugar
Here is Bob Mould just getting better and better. Sugar is capable of less idiosyncratic but still serviceable sound compared with that of Husker Du. The vivid image of walking along the edge of the Hoover Dam at the risk of being blown off by the wind is a nice metaphor, but also compelling as-is. The guitar work is very pro, worthy of Husker efforts despite the synth indulgence.

"The Statue Got Me High" - They Might Be Giants
"The truth is where the sculptor's chisel chipped away the lie" is just one of many clever, hummable lines from the still-hanging-right-in-there Giants. The bari sax charts and the intricate response vocals are highlights. Oh, and there's, "My coat contains a furnace where there used to be a guy."

"Hair" - P.J. Harvey
I think this is in 5/4—not bad—a swingy, bluesy groove with a slight art rock edge. Credit Steve Albini with a nice big sound, for a mix that gives the impression of being bone dry. Those toms are nice, and good call keeping the overall CD volume off steroids. Ms. Harvey puts just exactly the right amount of soul and histrionics into "Hair" to menace, with the classic Samson and Delilah story as a threat of female usurpation of power.

"S'Il Vous Plait" - Sneakers
Here I am, at it again with the Chris Stamey. Can I help it? Here's a track resurrected with Mitch Easter to flesh out a reissue of the 1976 and 1978 Car Records classic E.P.s. Am I crazy to think this is and undeniably superb, taciturn piece of songwriting?

"Try Not To Breathe" - R.E.M.
Automatic For the People is one of the most justly celebrated records of the nineties—the surprise second pillar of R.E.M.'s monumental reputation. There's a great solemnity to it, accounting the weight of death and experiences gone forever in "Man On the Moon," "Nightswimming," and the devastating "Try Not To Breathe," which literally details the reasoning of someone facing death—ostensibly from old age. Stipe really takes control of the best-lyricist position here, just in time to fend off Liz Phair's flippant 1993 offensive. Almost every line is a gem; "Baby don't shiver now/Why do you shiver?" is an example of making the conveyance of astonishing depths of humanity look easy.

"Up-wards at 45 Degrees" - Julian Cope
You know those swirly digital animation engines driven by music, like Visualizer? Here is the song that is the absolute best fit for those I've ever come across. You know a dream of blasting out of regimented, Christian terrestrial life is very near and dear to Julian's heart, and he is marshaling the "dutiful people" to blast off to the "mothership." I really don't know if he means all that at a metaphorical level, or if he's plotting literal coordinates, but it's a rush. The way he varies the chords under "upwards at forty-five degrees" makes for a precision-engineered sustained climax.