20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 6: 1990s

And now, we come to a decade of music that I actually remember personally.

Every decade has an event which can be seen to begin or end an era, like the Disco Demolition, and the Day the Music Died. If I had to pick an event that ushered in the 90s, it would be the release of Nirvana's Nevermind in 1991, which soon unseated Michael Jackson's Dangerous on the charts and ushered in the grunge era. But before we get there...


Teenpop Continues

This is the era of Britney Spears, the Spice Girls, and boy bands like the Backstreet Boys. Do I really need to link videos? Fine, I'll just do one, to make an example.

As pop acts go, the Spice Girls are not actually that egregiously bad. There, I said it. I mean, they weren't good, but they weren't unlistenable, and I find them somewhat less vapid than most of the pop acts going on today, which, admittedly, is not saying that much.

The Spice Girls - Say You'll Be There. From the Spice World movie. The lip-syncing is hilariously off on this track, but making fun of that would be like kicking a dead horse in the head, so....



Hip Hop/Rap/R&B

Hip hop and rap are also gaining in popularity during this decade. This is the decade of Usher and R Kelly. We can thank this era for giving us the ridiculous baggy pants and oversized shirt look. And for guys in white middle class suburbia trying to be all gangsta. Like that was ever attractive. But you're in high school, and you don't know any better -- and neither do the girls you're trying to impress. So I guess it worked out all right.

Usher - My Way (1997)



Hip hop in particular becomes really takes off during the 90s. As a movement, it first developed in the Bronx as a "response to oppressive social conditions." According to Wikipedia: When hip hop music began to emerge, it was based around disc jockeys who created rhythmic beats by looping breaks (small portions of songs emphasizing a percussive pattern) on two turntables, which is now more commonly referred to as sampling. This was later accompanied by "rapping" (a rhythmic style of chanting or poetry more formally in 16 bar measures or time frames) and beatboxing, a vocal technique mainly used to imitate percussive elements of the music and various technical effects of hip hop DJs.

It became increasingly commercialized as the decade wore on and rappers gained a huge level of superstardom and success.

In 1993, Puff Daddy formed Bad Boy Records with the Notorious BIG as his headlining act. They quickly became adversarial with Death Row Records, which was founded in 1991 by Dr. Dre and Suge Knight and featured a lot of big West Coast rap names like Tupac and Snoop Dogg. The Notorious BIG and Tupac would both be shot later on in the decade. Puff Daddy would have a hit song commemorating Biggy that sampled a Police/Sting song from the 80s. It would become one of the most played and most overplayed songs of the decade, even though it is neither a particularly good rap song (Puff Daddy has had much better songs) nor even very representative of the genre as a whole. It is also ridiculous to try to dance to at clubs, and I do not know why DJs insist on trying to play it as part of a dance mix. Time and place, man...

Pandora helpfully explains the difference between East Coast and West Coast rap:

"East Coast rap roots" refers to music that references East Coast style rap. East Coast rap may be characterized by the heavy use of samples (often R&B), occasional use of swung 16th notes, light or sparse bass lines, and a vocal aesthetic originating from New England and the Middle Atlantic USA. The lyrical delivery of East Coast rap is exemplified by a varied vocal delivery, highly developed rhyme structure, an East Coast urban accent, etc.

"West Coast rap roots" refers to music that references West Coast rap. West Coast rap may be exemplified by use of funk samples, heavy funk influence, prominent bass lines, beats made for dancing, and heavy backbeats. The lyrical delivery of West Coast rap is exemplified by traditional rhyme structures, simpler rhythms, prominent use of hype men [a performer responsible for backup rapping to emphasize certain parts of the rhyme] and backing vocalists, and a West Coast (L.A./Bay Area/Latino) accent.

Tupac - Me Against the World


I love the sampling technique but sometimes I think rap music is a bit of a tease because of it. I mean, I turn on the radio, and I hear something that sounds like the opening bars of "White Rabbit" and I think, "All right, they're playing some Jefferson Airplane!" But then the breakbeat kicks in and I realize it's actually a rap song featuring a 9-second sample from Jefferson Airplane song. Goddammit. And then there's all the classical music samples (hey, no copyright infringement to worry about!), and really, the whole experience confuses me a bit. It's the same way I feel about people trying to make techno remixes of "Carmina Burana." Speaking of which...

Electronic Music

Elsewhere in the world, trance had developed as a genre out of house and techno music. From Wikipedia: Trance music is generally characterized by a tempo of between 130 and 155 BPM, short melodic synthesizer phrases, and a musical form that builds up and down throughout a track. Trance is basically a more melodic and less chaotic form of techno and house.

DJ Tiesto - some party mix



Trip hop, otherwise known as the Bristol sound, arose as an experimental genre in the first part of the 1990s from artists such as Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead. Massive Attack's Blue Lines (1991) is seen as the blueprint of the genre. It is basically a brand of downtempo electronic music that is a fusion of hip hop and house until neither influence is recognizable. It also features a reliance on breakbeats and a moody, sample heavy sound. I could write a lot more about it because I happen to like it a lot, but that would probably be very disporportionate for this article and so we'll leave it at that.

Massive Attack - Angel (from Mezzanine, 1997. Mezzanine is probably their most commercial album. "Angel" was used in the movie Snatch, "Teardrop" is now the theme song for the show House and "Dissolved Girl" was used in the Matrix movie in the scene at the beginning where Neo is asleep at his computer and music is playing on his headphones. The album itself is less hip hop and has more of a goth/post-punk, largely a result of Del Naja's influence).




Singer/Songwriter

There is a bit of a fem singer-songwriter revival in this period, mostly attributed to the Lilith Fair. This produced artists like Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos.



Alternative

Alternative music continues to enjoy success. I'm using this section to talk about bands that were concurrent with the grunge movement but that aren't really part of the Seattle grunge movement per se.

In 1997 Our Lady Peace releases Clumsy. They had a good deal of success in the States during the 90s, but they were huge, really huge, in Canada.

Our Lady Peace - Superman's Dead (Clumsy, featuring Raine Maida's insane vocal acrobatics)



In the same year, Smashing Pumpkins releases Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Being Canadian, Our Lady Peace escaped being lumped in with the grunge movement, but Smashing Pumpkins were associated with it for a long time, which is something that Billy Corgan probably didn't like that much. This particular song became somewhat iconic for the 90s.

Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet with Butterfly Wings




Grunge

Grunge is a loose subcategory of alternative music that sprung up around the Seattle music scene in the early years of the decade and that had its roots in heavy metal, punk, and indie/hard rock. It usually features angsty lyrics and a simplistic aesthetic tone that repudiates theatrics and flashiness. Kurt Cobain was famously too lazy to wash his hair and a sort of unkempt appearance became the hallmark of this genre. Like "alternative" in general, it is not so much a style of music as a general attitude of disillusionment and fuck-the-establishmentarianism.

Also, grunge gives us the t-shirt and shorts look of the 90s. And both should ideally be unwashed.

With the release of Nevermind in 1991, it exploded into popularity and brought groups such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains to the attention of the world. It is a short-lived movement, more or less ending in 1994 with Cobain's death, but it had a lasting impact on the music that was to follow. Soundgarden has since disbanded, but Pearl Jam is still around and making music today, and Alice in Chains recently reformed with a different singer after Layne Staley OD-ed in 2002.

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nevermind, 1991)



Pearl Jam - Jeremy (Ten, 1991)




Post Grunge and Pop Punk

In the later half of the decade, grunge becomes post-grunge with bands like Bush and Silverchair. Post-Grunge is essentially a more commercial form of grunge and is still popular today.

Pop Punk also emerged during this time with bands like Greenday and Third Eye Blind. Pop punk is basically exactly what it sounds like.

Greenday - Long View


Britpop

Britpop emerges as a reaction to America's grunge influence, with British bands drawing upon themes common to British youth and drawing upon the cultural history of British sounds. Blur and Oasis are two of the more commercially successful of the genre.

Oasis - Wonderwall (1995)



Indie Rock

Indie rock has a bajillion offshoots and doesn't describe any unified sound. It basically just means groups that are not signed to major record labels, even though some indie bands join major labels eventually. With the rise of the internet and the MP3, indie bands find it easier to distribute music themselves through their own channels, and indie music begins to find mainstream success in this decade.

The Pixies' Surfer Rosa was released in 1988. The song "Where Is My Mind" was featured in Fight Club, which helped the Pixies' rise to fame.

The Pixies - Where Is My Mind?



The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin came out in 1999 and was a big underground success.
Three years later they would release Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

In 2000 Modest Mouse would release The Moon and Antarctica.

Modest Mouse - 3rd Planet




Industrial and Shock Rock

In 1994 Nine Inch Nails released The Downward Spiral from Trent Reznor's vanity label, Nothing Records. A combination of metal and futuristic, synthetic influences balanced by surprisingly accessible hooks, melodic lines, and pop sensibility, it was a major success despite its dark and controversial themes and thrust industrial music into the spotlight. It was also one of the first multi-platinum records from what is essentially an indie label.

Nine Inch Nails - Reptile
In many ways, this song is not a particularly good example of the album as a whole, even though it's still a great song, but the other hit single from TDS is even less representative. "Closer" has the line "I want to fuck you like an animal," but despite its B&D/S&M overtones, features a basic disco beat with a distorted disco bassline. Maybe that's why it really gets under your blood -- it sounds familiar, but you don't really know why unless you think about it a little.



Reznor's label also spawned Marilyn Manson, whose 1996 album Antichrist Superstar caused a lot of controversy because of its openly anti-religious themes and the shock appeal of much of its subject matter. The band's sound changed quite a bit over the years, but back then it was more or less a heavy metal/hard rock band that drew quite a bit on a sort of decayed glam rock sensibility. I remember disliking the music but thinking the lyrics were pretty good at the time it came out. After a few years and some maturing, I've really come to like this album. It's funny because a lot of people assume Marilyn Manson is automatically "slash your wrists" music, even today (in the era of Dashboard Confessional and the like), but there's an element of dark humor about the message that maybe isn't so obvious at first blush.

Marilyn Manson - The Beautiful People



This kind of shock appeal might have been controversial for the 90s, but the entire nation underwent a huge crisis of conservativity when 9/11 happened and suddenly this sort of thing wasn't really cool anymore. I think 9/11 is a good event with which to close out the 90s and launch into the 2000s.