Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1994
by Scott Miller

"Are You Gonna Go My Way" - Lenny Kravitz
By 1993, a lot of bands had figured out that it was OK to be a guitar band again, and in 1994, some were deciding it was OK to be a heavy guitar band again. You still couldn't be outright hair metal, no doubt to much secret chagrin, but ironic postmodern nostalgia made for a leash long enough to sneak in some Hendrix. This, when you did the math, was another way of stating the curious fact that new bands could only be alternative bands; there was no longer any such thing as being whatever this was the alternative to. Classic rock radio was of course really big, and non-ironic, but whereas in 1984, the average loud guitar band was actually prepared for Foreigner covers to figure into their early career path, ten years later anything like that was gone from the world. I auditioned Mr. Kravitz and Soundgarden's "My Wave" as the the new just-ironic-enough '94 way heavy rock had to sound; Lenny sounds energized today, whereas Soundgarden sound a little grumpy, like a sad excess of brain cells stands in the way of just getting on with it and producing "Hot Blooded."

"Number One Blind" - Veruca Salt
The giant hit "Seether"—a fine song—doesn't quite showcase the specialness of the talents of Nina Gordon and Jim Shapiro as I've had the good fortune to get to know them. The chordal lyings-in-wait of this interestingly post-Pixies ode to shade make the case I have in mind.

"Run-Around" - Blues Traveler
The Beatles brought to rock and roll—from classical and Broadway—the idea that you had to write your own chord progressions. Before the Beatles, if it wasn't a I-IV-V or doo-wop progression, it was pretty adventurous. Dylan is the major artist who didn't always buy in; even at its most Daliesque, Blonde On Blonde is pretty close to simple folk blues, chordwise. The Dylan of today is way over writing an original chord sequence. Sometimes I sit myself down and wonder what's with my fetishizing of original progressions. What is my problem with "Margaritaville"? There is no problem, I tell myself. Today's beneficiary of that perspective is John Popper's ragingly adept, enthusiastic harmonica playing and vocal stylings on "Run-Around." He is just so happy with a line like "Hollywood's calling for the movie rights/Saying baby let's keep in touch" that I'm happy, too.

"This Is a Low" - Blur
Slapping my cap and whistling as I walked away from 1991's diverting "There's No Other Way" single, I just assumed I'd hear nothing more of them. Along the way to everyone hearing of "Song 2" (that "woo hoo" song you thought was Pavement for a second, then started hearing at major sports events), there was Parklife. It's much different, very British—the nineties equivalent of one of those mid-sixties Kinks albums where an American listener is lost among the local references, wondering why a mention of that section of the Thames Embankment wall near the third tree is bringing a tear to these people's eyes.

"My Blank Pages" - Velvet Crush
This has to be the best song about not being able to think of anything to write about (blank pages instead of "back pages"). Situated on the album Teenage Symphonies to God, we realize these guys care about the Byrds and Brian Wilson (famous "symphonies" quote), and not much about grunge aesthetics, at which their old school garage guitar thumbed its nose. Good call, lads.

"Loser" - Beck
Tom Rothrock's breakthrough project, this slurred rap over a drum loop helped translate the "slacker" principle of the Richard Linklater film to pop music. The apparent point of the casual sixties references—the sitar and Blonde on Blondesque nonsense lyrics—was their achievement with a conspicuously tiny fraction of the effort expended by George Harrison or Bob Dylan. To me the value of the slacker principle is related to that painting principle where all other things being equal, a few confident brushstrokes look better than a lot of fussed-over ones. Not that all other things are equal in the case of this versus Harrison or Dylan.

"Live Forever" - Oasis
I was excited about Oasis's second album What's the Story Morning Glory, but not yet really that excited about this, the 1994 debut Definitely Maybe. Yet, excited the world was. Liam Gallagher is unquestionably in the top tier of rock singers. They're in the Stone Roses category: English groups doing music that's a bit more Jagger/Richards than, oh, Depeche Mode or Run D.M.C., but familiar enough "modern rock" territory—yet a lot of English people heard these groups, and life had new meaning. The sun shone new colors and every relationship needed to be re-evaluated. So I feel underqualified to include a song like this for just being professional radio fare with modest historical resonance.

"Headache" - Frank Black
Frank Black continues to apply hyperrealistic focus to odd little details of human experience, like the beauty pageant parody of success on the cover, or being so down before meeting "you" that he had him a headache: "My heart was crammed in my cranium/And it still knew how to pound."

"X-Ray Man" - Liz Phair
After Exile In Guyville, plausibly the best debut album in pop music history, Liz gets bonus points for coming out with the follow-up the very next year—three years seems about normal in the post-Floyd era. The tunes and the rhetoric are still mostly there; you have to love "cheap unpleasant desires."

"Puppet" - Lisa Germano
I've only heard the 4AD Inconsiderate Bitch (great title) version of this song, which I guess was also on an earlier Capitol album I haven't heard. I focus a lot on the sonics, which I find to be a particularly effective use of mid-frequency violin drone, accompanied by some Indian instrumentation that might go well enough with tambura. Strong melodically, the lyrics are such a case of, "Oh fine, I'll just be your lobotomized eye candy" that you have to react with, "Wow, minor social accommodation—that must have been rough."

"Give Her a Gun" - Echobelly
Sonya Madan's amazing vibrato and revolutionary spirit make a remarkable first impression. I mean, she wants to shoot people.

"Connection" - Elastica
I hope they worked the plagiarism suit out with Wire; Wire are such a great band but it saddens me that they actually felt they had a claim on the quality of this recording, which earns a place in the large audience booty-shaking realm Wire should know not to hurt themselves trying to broach.

"Cornflake Girl" - Tori Amos
This is one of the more talked-about lyric sets; confining my reaction to what seems verifiably contained in the song, it's certainly a penetrating exploration of unendurable psychological stress, but a little anthropologically strained in its championing of "raisin girls" (the multiculturalists) over "cornflake girls" (Parochials? Monotheists?). Intolerance is bad, but there's something wrong with Western intellectuals deciding they, not their monotheistic forebears, invented tolerance, and their contribution will now be to average in the values of other cultures they privately regard as too primitive to have invented tolerance on their own. Anyway, I'm essentially here for the piano riff.

"Creation" - The Creation
Not many people remember the Creation and of those, only a handful realize they released a reunion CD. Damn! This fuzzed-out slab of old-school head banging is extremely catchy, and sounds a lot more like AC/DC than the Who-nuanced mid-sixties material. A very fun find.

"What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" - R.E.M.
Another lyrical rabbit-hole, there's that Dan Rather assault incident reference, and some further connections to Donald Barthelme and Kierkegaard I'll have to get back to you on. Happily, it's once again mostly the memorable riffs and vocal hooks that brought us here. The little six-note guitar solo is a marvel.

"Kinder Murder" - Elvis Costello
E.C. seems never to have lost his ability to produce a fine standard riff-based rock song with a theme about how a young lady threw the whole game by lusting after a lout. Give him that equivalent of baling wire and chewing gum, and he will build a working short wave radio every time. Some fraction of the strung-together figures of speech I used to understand are over time getting replaced by subculture-specific details I don't: here, details having to do with, uh, some sort of unsavory armed services hook-up? Hey, I know what knickers are!

"My Name Is Jonas" - Weezer
Statistically speaking, almost no one identified the first Weezer record as any sort of classic at the time, and too many of those who did were mostly fans of the not particularly worthy "Undone (the Sweater Song)." "My Name Is Jonas" shows their strengths off: musicality everywhere, theatrical dynamics, little golden lyric details where the subplot reveals the whole mood. That would be where the letter contains "words of deep concern from my little brother," where the "little brother" is part of or possibly in charge of a major-sounding construction project interrupted by injury, leading to a heroic chorus of, "The workers are going home." The ambiguity of whether the interruption is a bad setback or a good holiday clarifies the bittersweet cusp of adulthood, and the incongruity of "toys," "plans," and a "little" brother. Did freaking Ric Ocasek positively nail this production or what?

"Buzzards and Dreadful Crows" - Guided By Voices
Bee Thousand did what no other record release had ever been able to do: put a home recording across as a major industry event. Delivered to the label Matador on Realistic cassette tape according to legend, Bee Thousand made the philosophical case concealed within a grunge aesthetic befogged in layers of irony: that pop rock music hadn't become a matter of resources and capitalization at an unalterable level.

"Last Poems" - Cardinal
That late afternoon shot of Richard Davies and Eric Matthews strolling by the junipers is somehow perfect. An obscure release at the time, it's an oddly isolated pool of still water; the two carry out their baroque duties with an interesting admixture of anachronistic proficiencies and adolescent gangliness. "Last Poems" is the understated highlight; any moment with Matthews at the mic is a richly textured revelation, but this somber tonal haiku of vaguely institutional regret contains a lifetime's worth of strange resonance.

"Cut Your Hair" - Pavement
The slacker principle achieves its truly perfect embodiment here. The performances are no more polished than they need to be (consider the one-take sound of the ooh-oohs), but every brushstroke is purposeful. "Loser's" lyrics are pretty close to just plain nonsense, whereas "Cut Your Hair" is both winningly playful, e.g. with the dramatic voice of "I'm just a boy with a new hair cut" popping in to set up "And that's a pretty nice hair cut," and incisive in its deconstruction of music biz careering. Pavement really show how masterful their plot development can be. The instrumental break section is, when you pay attention, a tour de force of ensemble playing—especially drums and guitar—that never sounds, well, forced. I for one love Malkmus's singing, but to some ears it could plausibly pass as merely the second-rate delivery that college radio ignorantly demands—for some of the song; yet the full-throttle pitch accuracy of the song's climax puts the whole thing in perspective. The sudden yelling at "no big hair" is humorous, but also points out that physical stipulations could be truly hurtful, making the mawkishness risk of "songs mean a lot when songs are bought, and so are you" pay off in context, and finally infusing "career, career" with emotion that could pass as somewhat agonized resignation as easily as light humor. At that point, the return to that "ooh-ooh" hook reads as positively triumphant.