Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1993
by Scott Miller

"Cherub Rock" - Smashing Pumpkins
The nineties were better than the eighties, and one key reason was that there was less originality. Originality is unmusical. The urge to do music is an admiring emulation of music one loves; the urge toward originality happens under threat that the music that sounds good to you somehow isn't good enough. In the nineties, bands pretty much all had a single thought: we want to be the next Nirvana. Bands had the least fear in years that following their hearts and doing straight fuzz-guitar pop-rock was somehow old-fashioned. There were a lot of good songs. Life was simple. It's not as obvious listening today why something like "Cherub Rock," which might have been the third best song on a Black Sabbath record in 1971, was particularly exciting music in 1993; it was the impossibility of getting away with it in the middle that makes it so.

"Jump They Say" - David Bowie
The dance club touches sound just a bit rinky-dink, don't they? But the sax is fantastic. At least I think it's a sax, and if so, I think it's Bowie, whose sax I always love. "Sweet Thing/Candidate": olympian. This is apparently about Bowie's brother who is or was in some sense mentally challenged; I forget the exact story. The "they say..." lines followed by "I'd say he should watch his ass/Don't listen to the crowd" are typical of Bowie's state-of-the-art social commentary.

"Slow Dog" - Belly
A tough alt-country rocker, this tells a story I can't quite follow about Maria carrying a rifle and taking care of a dog with see-through skin, spicing things up with just enough off-kilter interval choices and atonal elements.

"Mistress" - Red House Painters
The Red House Painters were the San Francisco manifestation of a subculture of soft, ethereal music that thrived amid the generally loud-fast aesthetic of alternative and grunge. The diatribe of the lyric is rather uncategorizable, but pretty engaging; I'll let a few lines speak for themselves: "The attention I need is much more serious/A kind of weight you couldn't lift/Even if your cheap career depended on it/I need someone much more mysterious/To be my miss/To be my mistress."

"Jimmy's Fantasy" - Redd Kross
The McDonald brothers were an endless source of entertainment based on various forms of pop culture either parodied or amplified into absurdity (any other Tater Totz fans out there?); "Jimmy's Fantasy" was their best actual song of the ones I've heard.

"Lights Go Down" - Madder Rose
The name of the oil paint screams art school just like the album art and the occasional trippy sections and Exploding Plastic Inevitable nervous guitar bursts. They were a standout NYC band of this era, never going too long between really catchy passages (see "Car Song"). Singer Mary Lorson had a winningly off-hand delivery that suggested native chops enough to be a big star.

"Cannonball" - Breeders
Hard to put one's finger on what makes this so compelling; certainly the guitar/bass up-and-down groove pattern is a terrific creation. It has dub appeal—lots of holes and mix breakdowns. It's hardly ever not fun to hear the word "bong."

"The World Is Turning On" - The Pooh Sticks
This was a wildly capable pure pop combo who used to amuse me quite a bit by having every other song title be some apparently untransplantable name of an already somewhat high-profile song, like "The Wild One, Forever," or "Sweet Baby James." I know, "Let It Be," but it was still a great hack.

"Everybody's Best Friend" - Hazel
Hazel ordinarily did noisy, by-the-numbers alt rock; this minimalist meditation is an out-of-character triumph. While some of this dejection monologue is rather overdone, there's an undeniably appealing element of truth-telling in what seem like the between-dramatics breather lines: "I am not what is wrong here"; "Somewhere, I forget where/Supposedly I am somebody's best friend"; "So I wait at home/Gauging the backlash." And, in context, the kicker: "I want to wake up in my own bed again."

"I Heard Ramona Sing" - Frank Black
The Pixies had less trouble with the eighties than just about anyone, but it's still great to hear Mr. Black with a big, fat production and all the arrangement textures he's capable of. Sometimes high profile, sometimes not, he's remained a consistently fascinating artist and given us more material than we've had time to get through conscientiously.

"Angels In the Trees" - Murray Attaway
This is a continuation of Murray Attaway's stunning work in Guadalcanal Diary, expanded to a complex, piquant, chordally hollow string and vocal arrangement with an off-count feel that is just challenging enough. Lyrically, this might be a boring anti-religious thing; we'll pretend it's shatteringly iconoclastic. It's the committed atheists who just can't shut up about angels and heaven.

"The Great Valediction" - Flop
Rusty Willoughby always seemed like one of the more interesting Seattle guys—besides being a formidable band front person, he has always had a good sense of visual design integrity. The artwork of the high-profile, Martin Rushent produced Whenever You're Ready is an imaginative Warhol-the-illustrator-years pastiche, and the big power pop inside delivers on the promise.

"Metal Mickey" - Suede
In 1993, Sue Trowbridge's influence on my tastes was in full swing; thanks to her, I was well informed about developments like this Britpop monster that didn't get much play stateside. Killer verse, killerer chorus, and the secret weapon is the hyper-trebly fuzz guitar that sits out most of the song only to hit a few slashing chords every once in a while.

"Radio" - Teenage Fanclub
Thirteen didn't quite fulfill the considerable expectations created by 1991's lordly Bandwagonesque, but this Gerard Love uptempo rocker is an extremely worthy high point. "Baby, justify the reason behind your style/Find a craze that fits and stay there for a while" besides being solid gold catchy is an arrestingly clear moment of challenge to consensus reality.

"All Apologies" - Nirvana
From the reproductive medical imagery to the closing death-mantra of "All in all is all we are," Kurt went out more real, vulnerable and terrifying than ever. This is a fantastic production; I want to credit remixer Scott Litt with little touches like throwing the reverb just on certain words—if only because I don't think Steve Albini abides responsibility for that kind of flourish. Kurt didn't usually strive for much beyond good, honest self-pity in his lyrics, but on this one he started flirting with genius. To me, artistic genius has to do with the tendency to gravitate toward important issues, not the ability to come down on the right side of them. See Nietzsche. Kurt seems to home in on the failing of the sacraments ("married, buried... all in all is all we are"), the remaining all-burdened sacrament being marriage. His own marriage and fatherhood haven't relieved his own turmoil, and he somehow knows this is connected to blame: "Everything is my fault/I'll take all the blame/Aqua seafoam shame." Is that the cliche of seafoam being a tacky color worn by bridesmaids? I think he's saying: I'll admit it—I'm the outsider, the tacky bridesmaid, the gay person, that we all are. So destroy me. But our blame-relieving efforts really only backfire ("choking on the ashes of her enemy").

"Sanity In the Asylum" - Matt Keating
This little firecracker was on my '90s label, Alias, or I might have missed it. Punchy is an understatement; there's a relentless wordplay onslaught in the manner of Elvis Costello, guided by a keen octave guitar countermelody and an alert, ear-catching arrangement from start to finish. And talk about hot mastering—you blow Nirvana and Urge Overkill out of the grooves and one has to salute.

"Sister Havana" - Urge Overkill
The last four are from albums I refer to as the Big Four from 1993, all albums that came almost from out of nowhere and ended up being pillars of my conceptualization of the '90s. Saturation is one of the best turn-it-up hard rock records ever: top flight singing, unusually strong composition through the whole CD. "Sister Havana" best matches the whole feel of the design look, which is outstanding—a sort of Charlie's Angels chic that it struck me was much imitated later, never as well.

"Definite Door" - The Posies
I wasn't familiar with Dear 23 when it came out, and when I first heard Frosting On the Beater, it sounded murky to me; it took me a while to mentally disentangle the tonal cluster the Ps sometimes traffic in. The mildly psych hard riff rock of "Definite Door" is Jon Auer's Posies high-point. This is what '90s rock did best: it's what you think you want from Deep Purple, only this is better.

"I Should've Known" - Aimee Mann
About the time this came out, I got a call at work from Aimee (she apparently knew someone with my number and just wanted to say she liked a record of mine); I didn't know who she was, but we established that I recalled enough about Til Tuesday to place the face. We ended the call agreeing she was going to send me this, her first solo album. I sort of expected to like but not love it; it positively floored me. I'm very tempted to put the sublime "Fourth Of July" here, but it somehow seems more honest to include the one that first assured me she was a force, and I'd just had incredible luck and honor to have received that contact.

"Stratford-On-Guy" - Liz Phair
Exile In Guyville was certainly the album of the decade. The first moment of thrill is when "And all the bridges blown away keep floating up" just as the vocals and the band go up—yeah!—and no song is any kind of letdown—until maybe, truth be told, the very last one. Liz's gift for believable invective is astonishing, and though there are some scattershot attempts, enough wit hits its mark to keep one thinking this is a person one would really like to get to shoot the breeze with. "Stratford-On-Guy"—I guess I take the title to be an amusing parallel between Shakespeare's home Stratford-On-Avon lying outside London and the vistas flying into Chicago, containing an area she nicknames "Guyville." The wordsmithing is as sharp here as anywhere ("the earth looked like it was lit from within/Like a poorly assembled electrical ball"), and the chord sequence walks right on the brink of disaster at all times making its way to the payoff "It took an hour/Maybe a day/But once I really listened, the noise just went away." It is only too bad that Liz's lyrical prudishness has kept her from reaching a hipper audience. Maybe one day she will just loosen up.