2000 was the beginning of the next big revolution in music distribution, when the internet started taking over from CD’s, when the passing of the Y2K scare made people believe computers weren’t actually something to be feared. From the lens of 2025, it’s hard to believe we actually convinced ourselves that the entire world needed to be connected, and that such a networked world would lead to a spread of knowledge the world had never seen. Here’s hoping that the current technology scares are just as insubstantial as Y2K.

Erykah Badu - Mama’s Gun

Erykah Badu’s swaggering neo-soul is instantly recognizable. The sophistication of Baduizm was enlightening for me, and it took a couple of listens to really recognize the greatness. I’m glad I had that foundation as I approached Mama’s Gun - Badu is widely considered one of the founders of the Neo-Soul movement, and I’ll admit that’s not a genre I’ve ever been overly familiar with.

Erykah Badu’s version of Neo-Soul is an effortless sounding thing, as if the music is beamed at you straight from her brain, and the band isn’t so much a group of musicians as one entity pulsing with the same beat.

Outkast - Stankonia

The bouncy beats are addicting, and the sheer output of designer hook-laden bangers is ridiculous. It’s dirty south hip-hop with a wide array of instrumentation and styles piled on top, named for the studio Big Boi and Andre 3000 bought in Atlanta. The pace of this album is much faster than their previous Aquemini, and it’s hard not to let it get you wound up. This will increase your pace if you’re on a treadmill, or your blood pressure if you’re sitting on the couch.

Primal Scream - XTRMNTR

I was drawn in to this album early on - the sinusoidal bass line of “Kill All Hippies,” the hyper-fuzz guitar of “Accelerator.” None of it is lyrically deep, but the sound takes you in, all single-syllable hooks like something that just barely got cut from the shortlist for an Apple commercial. Parts of the album go industrial, a sound that always gets my thumbs up.

But then it goes off the rails (“Pills”? Wtf?), and after some hyper-repetitive trance floor type songs you start to realize the conceptual depth of the lyrics is something like a stoner who heard a one liner that changed their life so much it must be repeated into infinity to get the point across. Or maybe it’s more like a tweaker talking to themselves on the street. As a result, this album’s instrumentals hold the most value for me.

I can’t say why, but I find Primal Scream kind of funny. Are they being ironic? Are they being serious? Is there a deeper meaning to the cyclical shroom-head lyrics? Are they trying to give us a stroke or is that just a side effect? I have no idea, and that’s part of the fun.

D’Angelo - Voodoo

Another major voice in the development of neo-soul, D’Angelo’s second studio album is undeniably impressive. It was recorded at the same studio as Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, and a lot of the guest appearances on both albums came about because of this cross-pollination. The sounds are different beasts entirely, though - and I’ll admit D’Angelo’s music struck me more like late-career Michael Jackson, with most of the title artist’s contributions coming in the form of little interjections and counter-lines and falsettos. At some points you just want him to cut out that nonsense and just freaking sing. I know the restrained style is an art in itself, it just feels like D’Angelo’s singing is so far back in the mix it could be almost anyone. But in the end the alternating hip-hoppish and R&B beats are great, and of course I’m a sucker for a 3/4 or 6/8 time song, a staple of the R&B genre found on “Send It On” and “Untitled (How Does It Feel)”, two of the album’s highlights.

The Avalanches - Since I Left You

I went back and forth about including this album, which is a patchwork of samples knit together from hundreds of songs (estimates range from 900 to over 3000 samples used in all the album’s various versions).

The reason for my hesitation is honestly my current appreciation for “real” music, played on real instruments, which is an idea that 1) requires some more unpacking than I have room for here and 2) is pretty much driven by the AI ripoff-heavy atmosphere of 2025. Unpacking what “real” music is will require a thinkpiece, and I don’t have enough think energy at the moment. But I think this album will figure heavily in whatever conclusions I might draw at that future moment of brilliance.

This album is built around a cohesive concept, it’s tight, and it’s beautiful in many ways. Dance music is an arena I’m still learning about, but this effort sounds like it should have taken a million DJ’s mixing and sampling to achieve; in fact it was 2 guys in Australia working in different studios, sending mixes and records and samples back and forth, who made it happen. I’m no expert, but that sounds like an achievement most producers could only dream of; I haven’t heard of a music production effort that impressive since I discovered J Dilla’s deathbed masterpiece Donuts.

It’s a musical quilt that I might not use every day, but it’s worth pulling out of the chest at the foot of the bed on cold winter nights. Despite the stroke-inducing repetitiveness at times, the kind I refuse to believe anybody actually enjoys outside a mind-addled dance floor, it’s an album I’m glad to know about.

Note: this album was released in Australia in 2000, and internationally in 2001. But I already wrote it up so it stays in the 2000 issue!

Radiohead - Kid A

Aaghhg… Nnghhhnhnhhh… Gahhhmmmmbbbmmbbmmmm… Sorry. I was trying to describe this album with the same abstract disregard for the English language as Radiohead has for the basic concepts of music in Kid A.

It sucks when people don’t “get” stuff. My biggest pet peeve is when people just don’t even try to get it, or to open themselves to new ideas and experiences, or to be humble enough to admit that their world isn’t the extent of the world. On the other hand, I totally vibe with people who want to get it, who try and go out of their way and use the lost art of empathy to understand new things. Even if they fail, the effort shows a good mentality, and I respect it. And I certainly try to fall into the latter group.

Take this example: if you grew up middle class or below in the US in the 2000’s, there’s a good chance you considered Olive Garden a great place for a fancy Italian date night. For the people who would turn their noses up at such things, there are two ways of looking at this; first, you could sneer at the non-worldly cretins pretending that unlimited soup, salad, and breadsticks is just as cool as a visit to Italy. Or, on the other hand, you could appreciate that for people without the means or experience to care about authentic Italian food, and whose white-bread American diets have been programmed into their brains by a combination of unrestrained capitalism and limited budget, the act of going to an OG might actually be an adventurous step outside their comfort zones, and that’s always something to be applauded.

Radiohead internet stans can make nonbelievers feel like shamed Olive Garden lovers, clowning them for not hanging onto every strained, reedy utterance of “Kid A” like it’s a poem of deep meaning. This is like the 10th time I’ve tried to get this album, spaced over about a decade, and there’s just nothing of value here for me. A couple of places on the album make my ears perk up with interest, only to fail to deliver each time as Thom Yorke shakily screeches out what can only be described as a vocal vision quest, a vision quest whose artistic merits seem to be limited to whatever the living heck was going on in Thom’s head at the time. I can’t imagine the band listening back to this album and going “Yup, this is it. This album is finished.”

I’ve listened to Kid A again and again over the past year in the spirit of education, but I think I’ve got to conclude once and for all that I’ll never get it.

Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory

How could I leave out Linkin Park? Admittedly, this album takes me straight back to some of the bro-iest moments of my life, mostly on a baseball field or in a weight room. Working out as a team, getting hyped up before a game - these are the kinds of memories this album brings back for me. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to it in a normal setting, only on pre-game or workout playlists. It’s kind of funny to sit here listening to it while I do my remote desk job in 2025, but I can’t say it’s not getting me hyped for my next Powerpoint.

I am normally a nonconfrontational and positive person, and this album (and the many others it spawned) were kind of my introduction into that feeling of competitiveness, bordering on angry energy, that is so highly valued in the world of team sports. I know this experience will differ, but when I listen to music like this, metal or angry music of any sort, I don’t get angry, I get the same kind of endorphins you get from running out onto a field for a game. It doesn’t make me angry - it makes me want to go run ten miles (as if). That’s obviously not Linkin Park’s intent, which is obvious if you listen to ten seconds of their lyrics, but it’s the unique relationship I’ve formed with this music, purely a result of the timing and circumstances under which I first heard it.

Stepping back today, this album is the result of some impressive musical talent and the advent of the rap-rock-metal movement, and love or hate the genre, there’s some serious musicianship going on here.

Santana - Supernatural

Santana’s 18th studio album follows a trend I’ve noticed in many superstar-level artists reaching the later parts of their careers - gratuitous guest stars galore. The guest feature phenomenon can go really well or really poorly, depending on the album. At its best, this trend is an awesome way for an established act to pass along some of their hard-won exposure to worth heirs or up and coming artists, or less excitingly, to shout-out to some of their peers who don’t need the exposure but certainly won’t turn it down. But some albums like this can turn into something like the NBA all-star game, with absolutely no competitive drive, morphing into more of a circus show than a legitimate artistic effort.

I think this album, which won a Grammy in 2000 and had great commercial success, falls somewhere in between the guest-star-rich attention grab and a true artistic output. The multiple featured artists take away from any identity or theme this album might have contained, making this sound more like a playlist than a cohesive album. But on the other hand, it’s a pretty darn fun playlist. It’s very poppy, without a doubt, but it’s not overly icky pop for the most part.

OK there was one pretty big “ick” - Dave Matthews’ weird intro on “Love of My Life”. Scat on your own time, Dave. Ugh.

Welcome back to 1999! And as always, let me know about your favorites that I missed! I’ll add them to the playlist and we can jam in the year 1999 until the inevitable rise of the machines, which in 2025 is somehow even more likely than the Y2K doom scare ever was.

Fiona Apple - When the Pawn…

An absolute powerhouse of an album that I was certainly too young to appreciate in 1999. Even now I feel a little bit under-prepared for the force of the songs, the sometimes grimy and sometimes sultry speakeasy jams. Even the album’s title, in reality a 444-character poem, is an expression of deep frustration of the attempts of the media to change people, while simultaneously introducing a work of art that is powerful enough to bring about the very change in its listeners that Fiona warned us against.

Blink-182 - Enema of the State

It’s funny how much I enjoy this album of pop-punk upbeat whininess when I seem to dismiss the same kind of complainy poor-teenage-me music coming out in 2025. Nobody gets me/romantic frustration/general hormonal anger is timeless, in theory, but in execution the music somehow only seems to translate to those going through the exact same thing at the exact same time. My resolution is not to become one of those “my generation had it worse” people and simply enjoy the entertaining fact that every group of kids has to express the same things in a different way, and the fact that I don’t get the new version is the entire point of creating a new version.

Blur - 13

I guess it was a trend in the late 90’s for alt rock bands to explore new directions, and who can blame them - electronic music was taking off, and Britpop was fading from the mainstream, so what better way to reinvent your sound? This album shows, to me, a perfect example of a band doing just that - morphing their sound to fit the times - without losing their entire identity doing so. This isn’t a Radiohead transformation, a statement I mean as a positive, this is more like changing the way you season your chicken. Whether it’s covered in salt pepper and garlic, or you go with something different like Teriyaki sauce, it’s still the same meat underneath. Blur is some of my favorite British alt rock, and this album is still “them” despite the experimentation.

Mos Def - Black On Both Sides

It seems inexplicable that I would have so little knowledge of this album until now. As I get deeper into my examination of the musical zeitgeist of the years in which I grew up, I start thinking I’ve heard of or at least tangentially absorbed most of the great albums of the time. But then something like this comes around, an album universally loved by critics, a massive commercial success, and I realize how deep the catalog of great 90’s artists actually is.

I don’t think I’m going to come up with any new genius words to capture the greatness on display here. But this album checks all my boxes for great hip-hop; smooth delivery, great beats with a perfect amount of laid-back-ness, intelligent social commentary with an undercurrent of positivity, lyrics with just the right level of density that almost require studying to fully appreciate but not quite. The songs cover everything from women to the environmental crisis to the fact that the Rolling Stones didn’t invent the blues (“Bo Diddley is rock ‘n roll” indeed). That, plus the live instrumentation in an age when even the guitar-obsessed alt rock bands were going electronic, make this an all-timer.

The Roots - Things Fall Apart

Another amazing hip-hop album focused on live instrumentation over loops. Hearing this album back to back with Black On Both Sodes reminds me of the state of most art in 2025, a time when the battle between human and non-human created art is hotter than ever. There was kind of an electronic music advent going on in the late 90’s, and the Roots’ focus on actual honest-to-goodness instruments, of all things, feels more like an act of rebellion rather than a simple return to music’s, well, roots.

Muse - Showbiz

Muse’s debut album is like a stadium-sized circus sideshow soundtrack, with the slow build vocals and crescendoing arrangements perfectly in tune with one another. For a debut they have a ton of poise, like they’ve been honing their sound in front of big crowds rather than the English club scene. I’ve seen the band compared to Radiohead, but I won’t tolerate such slander in this newsletter. Muse’s distinctive sound has always been theirs alone, pretty much from day 1. And even better, to me, Muse sounds like a band of consummate music fans - they seem to have had influences all over the place. This was a gem.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication

By the time I was 10 I could probably recite every lyric from this album. It’s one of the first albums that convinced me that just listening to Greatest Hits albums, which I’ll admit was my main strategy at that age in order to maximize how much music I could get for my allowance, wasn’t actually the best use of my listening time. And fine, not every song here is a banger, but the first 11 inarguably are, and that’s an absolutely massive number of classics for one album. This was RHCP’s peak, in my mind, when their oddball fusion and weird high-guy philosophizing mixed with John Frusciante’s chops to make this a consummate 90’s kid rite-of-passage album.

This is a new series I plan to do every few weeks or so, dedicated to working my way through my parents’ and parent-in-laws’ vinyl collections, which I recently acquired (aka stole) from their respective basements. It’s a pretty good mix - lots of albums that appear on every greatest albums list, others that are a little deeper in great artists’ catalogs, and still others I’ve never heard of in my freaking life. And of course, the occasional album that reminds me of childhood car trips that I can barely listen to without getting nauseous and can’t tell whether it’s an extremely minor childhood trauma or simply not good music (shoutout Meat Loaf).

With this unexpected vinyl windfall, along with my dad’s old record player from the 80’s that only needed a new needle and some cables to revive it, we’ve started a new tradition in my house of listening to one album from the collection every night while we’re making and/or eating dinner. It’s been fun, and there have been some duds and some hits. The albums I write about here won’t be only my favorites - rather, they’ll be the ones I feel inspired to write about, whether because I learned something, loved or hated something, or simply had an extremely delicious dinner that night.

I’m not some kind of physical media evangelist (yet), but there’s something undeniably cool about vinyl, and I’m setting out to figure out what it is for me. (Bonus read - check out Daniel Parris’ , and his breakdown of the vinyl resurgence. It makes me feel better that even he can’t fully explain this phenomenon! Must be magic.)

Stardust - Willie Nelson

This album is a soft side of Willie Nelson that I’ve never heard before. It’s his 22nd album released in 1978, comprised of covers of pop standards that Willie chose as his favorites. It shows a range that both surprises me and seems to fit perfectly at the same time. It was apparently pretty popular when it was released, including Dean Martin, Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong covers arranged for Willie’s voice and guitar and little else in the way of accompaniment.

This is probably the most dinner musicky dinner music record I’ve played so far. It’s familiar and comforting, with Willie’s voice that’s aged like fine moonshine.

As an aside, do people outside the Southeast US know what moonshine actually tastes like? I’m truly not sure, even in 2024, if anyone in less redneck parts of the world has tasted the horrific bite of the classic “white lightnin” flavor of moonshine, which is less a flavor and more a description of the chemical composition of the stuff. The best versions taste like Everclear mixed with rubbing alcohol, but less smooth. The worst versions are to be avoided at all costs - assuming they’re not the dangerous kind that can literally blind you, they normally taste like all the worst parts of the flavor of dishwasher detergent. And then there’s Apple Pie, which is usually white lightnin’ with a few old apple cores and cinnamon sticks tossed in, maybe finished with some brown sugar if you’re lucky. I knew a guy named Derek who made it in his backyard, and actually knew what he was doing - his apple pie moonshine was revolting. I can’t even describe what apple pie moonshine tastes like. Ever throw up as a kid after eating apple sauce? That might be the best descriptor of the flavor.

OK, sorry, that was a lot and this isn’t normally a gross-you-out kind of newsletter. Moonshine seems to be a triggering word for me. Moving on.

Stardust feels like Willie is using his hard-earned and well-deserved privilege as a classic musician to pay tribute to the pop classics he’s always loved. And the love comes across loud and clear - he sings like a fan as much as a musician. It’s calming, with gentle acoustic guitar and loving renditions of old standards, and has a nostalgic feeling that’s more modern as well, as it’s Willie’s nostalgia in 1978 that we’re hearing and relating with all over again.

The Gambler - Kenny Rogers

 “The Gambler” is one of the most classic opening songs ever. “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.” It’s the kind of timeless countryfolk advice that will still be repeated a thousand years from now. It doesn’t do much to guide you into the knowledge of when it is, in fact, time to hold ‘em or fold ‘em, but hey, you undoubtedly have to know and there’s no disputing that fact.

The rest of the album was fine. The only other song that caught my attention was “The Hoodooin’ Of Miss Fannie Deberry,” which might have been from the title alone. I found the album just fine for dinner music, but I don’t think I’ll be revisiting it much beyond the title track.

Freeze Frame - The J Geils Band 

In my teens I would have sworn on everything I’ve ever known that J. Geils Band was from the 90’s. “Centerfold” was a 90’s staple in my mind, right alongside all the 90’s classics like “Two Princes” and “I Want It That Way.”

But no, this is the band’s 10th studio album released in 1981. I wasn’t even close. That just shows you the perils of growing up listening to a bunch of music from your time and from before your time all at once. It’s hard to separate new music from “new to me”. That’s a ton of fun, but if you’re ever going to do something silly like, I don’t know, write a newsletter about music through the years you might just have an issue with all these anachronisms that are programmed into your brain from a young age.

So, anyways, back to the analysis of this classic 90’s album. Wait, dammit!

There’s so much more here than just the title track. J. Geils Band

Daylight Again - Crosby Stills and Nash 

One of the rare albums I heard a hundred times on family road trips that I can still listen to and enjoy today. Something about songs like “Southern Cross” just puts me in the relaxed state of mind you need when you’re cooking spaghetti and drinking a glass of wine. These guys were the masters of harmony, and the songwriting on this album is absolutely stellar. An all-timer for me.

Every Picture Tells A Story - Rod Stewart

I’ll always associate the title track of this album with Almost Famous, my favorite rock n’ roll movie of all time. Rod Stewart’s voice is one of a kind, but I will admit I didn’t always enjoy his music. That’s not his fault though - I was introduced to Rod as an 8 year old by my guitar teacher, who for some reason decided he was going to teach me to play songs from Rod Stewart’s “It Had To Be You” album of American pop standards that sounded like they were from the 1920’s to my young ears, and I decided that Rod must be 1000 years old and super uncool. It took until my adult years to realize he was a rocker in his youth, and put out a bunch of great music like this album, although sadly not as many originals as I would prefer.

And truth be told, I picked up this album at a record sale at a brewery near my house, and it was a foregone conclusion that I’d love it.

Guess Who - BB King

This album was released in 1972, and includes some new tracks and some re-recordings of King’s older music. It’s something like his 20th album, but the sound is still as powerful and surprisingly fresh as ever. You could almost fool me into thinking this album was released 20 years later than it was. The King of the Blues sounds great on this album, even more so because my stolen version is in excellent shape.

Massive Attack - Mezzanine

I got a little scared that I’d left this album off my 1997 list - turns out it was released in 1998! - but it might be my favorite “new to me” discovery of the past few years. The sounds of this album just hit me as so original, such a balance between totally digestible beats and experimental tracks that pushed entire genres forward. It’s the album that taught me what Trip Hop was, and that it’s something I want to listen to a hell of a lot more of. I would have absolutely devoured this as a music-discovering kid if I’d known about it at the time - but fortunately for me, I’ve grown up approximately zero percent since I was fourteen and so I think I’m still getting the full experience.

This album is so immersive, like jumping in a pool and hearing the rush of the bubbles past your ears, not being able to focus on anything else. I love the dreamy, floating vocals from Elizabeth Frazer of Cocteau Twins on several songs, I love the grimy feeling of the beats. As Frazer sings on “Teardrop” : “love, love is a verb / love is a doing word”. In this case, that doing means spinning this album every chance I get.

Ms. Lauryn Hill - The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

I don’t know how much more I can add to the discourse about one of the greatest albums ever made. On a personal taste note, any album displaying this level of singing and rapping talent over any measure of reggae vibes is gonna be a winner for me. The production is stellar, the songs and performance feel utterly unforced, which is a sure sign of the work that went into them. It’s one of the seemingly few albums that I love equally for it’s academic merit and personal enjoyment.

PJ Harvey - Is This Desire?

PJ Harvey’s 4th studio album is, as seems to be her way, a pretty wild departure from her previous work. There are moments that veer close to the emerging world of trip-hop or noise rock, which as you may know is the surest way to my heart. But at the same time, it’s an effort to get out of the guitar-rock rat race and into something moody and soundscape-y, which as you may know is the surest way to make me turn on a band altogether (cough cough, Radiohead). In the end, I think PJ Harvey pulls it off far better than others have, at least to my taste. It’s not an easy listen by any means, more like one long unrelenting expression of woe mixed with the occasional break in the clouds. But it’s PJ Harvey - even with the mix of ingredients that I often dislike by themselves turn into a good listen in her hands.

Pulp - This Is Hardcore

This album plays like a version of britpop that’s been left on the counter just a bit too long and it’s starting to grow some mildew, going a little green around the edges. Some reviewers called it a midlife crisis of an album - I think it sounds like more of a last breath of a genre, like the band still loves the distinctly British genre they helped popularize but realizes that the glory days just might be over. But that being said, it’s a mystery how this still manages to be such a fun listen. It’s as if this album is searching for the limits of how much gloom you can throw at the “keep calm and carry on” attitude before you break it.

Garbage - Version 2.0

Fascinating fact - part of the analog drum tracks, including some on “I Think I’m Paranoid,” my personal favorite track on the album, were recorded in an abandoned candy factory, which explains the haunted sugar-rush vibe that I was struggling to find words to describe until now. Sarcastic and saccharine might be words a more highbrow critic would use to describe this album, in an effort to tie back to the candy factory thing in a punny way, but I’ll avoid such nonsensical descriptions for your sake.

The pop hooks and electronic-ified production (referenced sardonically in the album title) make this approachable, but there’s a complex kind of nostalgia I get from the album, which is probably a result of the band’s desire to channel their favorite songs across generations. One of the artists Garbage wanted to pay tribute to was the Beach Boys - I’ve always found the Beach Boys sound to have a hard-to-define longing sound to it, like they’re reaching into the universe for a feeling they don’t really understand, and that feeling is reproduced very well on this album in the vocals of “Medication” or the backing guitars of “When I Grow Up,” and the “don’t worry baby”s of “Push It”.

This is a fantastic album that references many of my favorite artists. It gives the sense that Garbage were not only talented artists in their own right, but also massive music fans, which is the kind of attitude that should drive the creation of great music in my opinion. In 2025 it feels like most artists, no matter how derivative their music, seem to think they’re inventing the art of music for the first time. It’s great to listen to a band who can be badass in their own right while remembering that they, like every band who ever lived, at least partially stand on the shoulders of giants.

Outkast - Aquegemini

Aquemini is known as one of the best southern hip-hop albums ever for a reason. A lot of people think of Atlanta and the American southeast as the land of slow smooth drawls and fried food and sweet tea and people who walk a little slower (mostly from the heat, in my opinion), and that’s all true. But it’s also a place of stereotypes, and Atlanta hip-hop almost had no choice but to find its own way between the NYC and LA scenes to avoid being lumped into just another set of Southern stereotypes.

It’s perhaps stated best on “Slump,” when Big Boi talks about the competition “talking ‘cause they makin’ some flow / But still ain’t did nothing that ain’t been done before / You can’t be trying to showcase, just put it down for your spot / And improvise and work with that little you got”. This album feels like a result of the need to be original, and in many ways that effort was probably helped along by the unique inspiration of late 90’s Atlanta.

Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels On A Gravel Road

I went back and forth about including this album. I’ve written about it before; about a year ago I found it to be one of the, uhhh, least good-sounding examples of country singer-songwriting I’d ever heard. In my own words, “the first part of the album sounded like it were written by an AI caricature of a country artist.” In my notes I wrote that it was “like a country album made by a Rhode Island socialite who took a connecting flight through the Atlanta airport once,” which is a great line that I kind of regret not using, despite the unnecessary meanness.

So in the end I gave this album a re-listen, to see if I’m evolving or if I’m just the same old overdramatic little kid I was a year ago.

I still think “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” is the title, and type of lyric, that probably represents what someone from an entirely different country thinks represents the American South. I don’t know why that feeling is so strong, to be honest. For one, a Southerner would say “tires” instead of “wheels” and pronounce tires like “tahhurz”, and also it wouldn’t be a car it would be a truck, and also a gravel road is only for folks who can afford such luxuries. Plus the sound of tires crunching on a gravel road is the kind of surface-level stereotype imagery you associate with poor rural life when you’ve only ever seen it in movies, kind of like imagining the American West as coyotes howling and cowboys singing around a fire. It’s like painting with nothing but primary colors, like a child’s oversimplified view of what a tree looks like, all bright green with no understanding of the subtle desaturated tones that make up the reality.

There’s been a lot of critical acclaim for this album through the years. But for me, it’s just cloying. Lucinda’s singing voice sounds forced, the country-ness and folk-ness of the album sounds forced, her southern accent sounds forced, and even a few examples of really solid songwriting can’t override those feelings for me. I even played this album for my wife to see if I was just being weird, and she laughed when “Car Wheels” came on, then got a little mad at how (sorry) awful Lucinda’s voice sounds on that song, thinking I was playing a joke on her. Oh well. We tried.

Anyways. I’ve lived in and listened to awesome music in every state in the South, and I’m here to tell you there’s far more music from this region - both past and present - than what you know from the bigger cities. It’s easy to make a caricature out of the South, to lump the region together and ignore the diversity it has to offer. But not on my watch!

First state up: South Carolina

I was born and raised in the state of South Carolina - for anyone not familiar, that’s the little pie-shaped state on the U.S. east coast, about 1/3 of the way up between Florida and New York. It’s in the heart of the Southeast, part of what’s traditionally known as the American Deep South, the land of warm weather, twangy accents, and a whole lot of problematic history.

If you’re from any other region in the US, you’re probably thinking “oh yeah, South Carolina, I’ve been to Myrtle Beach before.” I just want to let you know that Myrtle Beach is basically the Florida of South Carolina - it’s technically part of the state, but it isn’t really part of the state. I won’t be explaining or defending my position further; if you know, you know :)

South Carolina is a small state, but has a surprisingly vibrant music scene. It had an impact on many genres, including beach music, bluegrass, Soul/R&B, jazz, and many others. The music history of the state is almost as fractured and contradictory and troubled as its non-music history, and will make a fascinating read another day. But for today we’re focused on the now - so let’s dive into the current music scene in South Carolina!

Awesome South Carolina Albums of 2024

Brave Baby - 3x Blood

Brave Baby released this album in 2024 after an almost 9 year break - long story short, life happened, and they came back together in Charleston, SC to find the magic was still there. Their pop-rock tunes have a little bit of indie rock tinge with a drummer who sounds like he secretly wants to be in a prog-rock band but is resisting the urge with mixed success, while vocalists Keon Masters and Wolfgang Zimmerman providing all the wistful expressiveness you could ask for. The explorative drumbeats confuse things a couple of times, but overall the band is tight and the songs are effortless and well-constructed, with some like “Cloak of Love” showcasing an almost wall-of-sound-like production that shows the band’s musical range.

The Simplicity - MONEY

The Simplicity lives up to their name in many ways; this is straightforward rock (described by the band as “Straight shootin rock and roll music from Charleston, SC”) driven mainly by the lead singer’s energetic and slightly froggy growl. It’s the kind of music that really brings out the flavors of a cold Miller Lite, unpretentious and just down for a good time. The kind of rock ‘n roll band that you hope to find playing when you walk into an old basement bar.

E.Z. Shakes - Leaves Grow Back

Hailing from Columbia, SC and founded in 2017, the E.Z. Shakes are an “ever evolving rock experiment” that has grown from its country-folk roots into an electric indie rock thing. At times lead singer Zach Seibert seems to be reaching towards good-timey Springsteen, and at other times the mood turns introspective. Although the band would undoubtedly sound fantastic on songs with cowbells and major chords, there’s a moody depth to a lot of the tracks that works really well, and I think they’ve found something much cooler in their sound.

Dog Named Squid - Manners

This EP is from Dog Named Squid, who started in the booming metropolis of Greenwood, SC before relocating to Charleston. Fun fact, I bought an old Ford Explorer in Greenwood, SC once (my first car purchase) - to this day I still get emails from the dealer looking to buy it back. Look, y’all, Explorers (aka Exploders) aren’t exactly known to last this long get off my back and move on.

Anyways. I can’t lie, I thought this was going to be death metal based on the name of the first song, but not to worry (unless you love death metal). This EP is clearly the work of a young band, but they have potential in their sound; it reminds me at times of The Dip, but with a little hint of country twang (just a hint, though).

If you’ve ever wanted to find a great artist with less than 1,000 monthly listeners on Spotify that deserves many more, maybe for your bingo card or some kind of musical challenge you’re doing, this is it. Give this EP a listen and enjoy.

Slow Funeral - Super Jesus Small Town

This EP from Greenville, SC band Slow Funeral is largely a showcase for singer Mary Norris’ hyper-talented vocals. The band’s sound fluctuates from alt rock to punkyness, with the vocals falling somewhere between Rachael Price (of Lake Street Dive, one of my favorites) and Amy Lee from Evanescence, and even a song or two that could have been Nirvana B-sides. The EP is certainly a nod to the South, but it’s a whole heck of a lot more energetic than the title would have you believe.

Shovels & Rope - Something Is Working Up Above My Head

Shovels and Rope is a South Carolina lowcountry** staple. The folk/country husband and wife duo are also the founders of High Water Festival in Charleston, which has grown since its inception in 2017 to attract some pretty solid national acts to the little city over the years.

**Side note, for those who don’t know, SC is half hills and small mountains and half extremely flat land leading to the ocean, most of which is relatively low elevation - aka the lowcountry. Pretty much the entire lowcountry is flat and hot and muggy and swampy and full of pine trees and alligators. It’s not as extreme in any of those areas as New Orleans, but it’s from the same family tree for sure.**

This album is almost spiritual at times, with a stripped back sound that’s reflective of the duo’s two-piece concert performances. And be sure to miss “Love Song From A Dog,” which is perhaps the first ever country song about a dog where (spoiler alert) the dog lives! Thrives, you might say.

Little Stranger - Sat Around Trippin

In what might seem like a total wildcard compared to the rest of my selections, this album from Charleston (by way of Philadelphia) group Little Stranger features Kevin and John Shields (no relation) rapping and reggae-ing their way through a mostly unserious set of songs.

There’s some Beck in their sound, plus some college kid hip hop goofiness that might have been inspired by Cypress Hill or the Beasties, although that’s more in spirit than in sound. They sing about Wordle and rap about Radiohead and sing over some goofy bossanova beats, and it can be a college-bro-ey experience at times, but all in all it’s a pretty good time.

I’ll leave you with my favorite lyric from “MAD DUMB” : “we stand on the shoulders of giants / so dummies like us can have phones and appliances.” Well said, my friends. Well said.

Radiohead - OK Computer

This is probably the most bittersweet Radiohead album out there for me. It’s by far my favorite (relatively speaking), marking the band’s ascension to the immense potential expressed in their first two albums. But to me, after this album, the promising sound that had been so reluctant to emerge just… up and died. The potential greatness I grew to enjoy from this album never came about again, replaced by a face-stealing computerized band of pretentious derivative imposters. Uhh, ahem, no offense.

So while I do enjoy this album in its own, it’s difficult to hear it knowing what great music might have come after if the band had continued exploring the sound they had developed by 1997. I know many will disagree. Reinvention is every artist’s right, and I don’t begrudge Radiohead for reinventing themselves in order to find artistic fulfillment. But as a selfish fan, it stinks to lose potentially good music to a reinvention I found extremely weird - especially when I know what we could have had.

Elliott Smith - Either/Or

Elliott Smith’s dreamy, longing voice sounds like it was recorded by the finest recording equipment in the middle of a mossy forest clearing. It’s got brown camper van vibes that I can neither explain nor ignore. Or maybe I can quantify it - it was recorded largely in Portland, Oregon, perhaps the campervan-iest city in the world.

The music is dainty and flowing, melancholy in a laid back way. From the lens of 2024, it plays like a precursor to the bedroom confessional pop that dominates the pop airwaves of today. I have mixed feelings about that genre/trait/musical classification myself, but there’s no denying that every generation needs some version of the “lonely person with an instrument and microphone” schtick.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - The Boatman’s Call

I didn’t know anything about Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, to be totally honest. It’s one of those acts that I’ve always been aware of and read about, but never crossed paths with for one reason or another. This album is his 10th, and critics considered it one of his best, so I thought it was time to jump in.

This album has a sunset feel, an old-school “I guess this is curtains for me, folks” kind of sound, and it’s very dated-sounding in 2024. It’s not quite old man yelling at clouds - it’s more like middle aged man gently lamenting the fact that clouds exist. What’s wild is the fact that it’s completely not true for Nick - in 2024 he’s still pumping out Grammy-worth music, so clearly he wasn’t slowing down in 1996 despite the weary sound of songs like “People Ain’t No Good,” which although true, sounds like the soundtrack of my grandpa’s favorite black and white movie.

I’d be very curious to learn about Nick Cave’s precious career. Was it more energetic than this? Did he ever sound young? I’ll find out on my own of course but I’m curious if anyone can enlighten me sooner than that. This album is so sleepy and church-pew dusty that it’s hard to imagine the earlier iterations of his music being any different.

Erykah Badu - Baduizm

Holy guacamole, was this album a fun listen. For a debut, it’s insanely mature, with an assured and soulful sound that feels as if it was developed and road-tested in smoky speakeasies for years. No notes - it’s just fantasic.

Foo Fighters - The Color and the Shape

Ahh, early Foo. I think my copy of this album was the first CD ever to be worn out from overplaying. I probably played this thing in my old red Walkman CD player so many times that the laser that read the CD left a groove in the disc. It’s got more variety than many Foo albums to me, when Dave Grohl’s voice still had a little bit of clarity left underneath the growl, although after the one-breath shouting marsthon on Everlong I don’t really know how that’s possible.

This band is hard to hate, despite recent revelations about Grohl’s personal life. Some people today might say that’s because the music is mainstream, but that’s just from the perspective of 30 years of the band’s success. This is the purest quality rock to an entire generation, distilled to perfect clarity. OK, there are a few dud songs, but the classics shine through and the songs in between are still Foo rock, aka infinitely headbangable.

Notorious B.I.G. - Life After Death

One of the most iconic voices in hip hop’s golden age, who taught my entire Millennial generation that mo money equals no problems. And we took that to heart as a generation, let me tell you - Millennials are the broke generation, y’all. Some might say it was economic collapse and irresponsible fiscal policy and insane housing markets and stagnant wages perpetuated by previous generations, but don’t be fooled; it’s more likely that the entire generation simply adopted Biggie’s mantra and refused money in order to diminish our problems.

Biggie’s delivery is always a little behind the beat, full of unhurried swagger. He was a ridiculous talent.

Third Eye Blind - Third Eye Blind

So confession time - Third Eye Blind was my first ever live concert. I was like 9, visiting Myrtle Beach with my friend and his family, and it was as the House of Blues. My friend’s older sister got the tickets and played the band’s music all the way down to the beach, while my buddy and I made faces at passing cars.

Now keep in mind, this was the same trip where I bought my dad a Harley Davidson double shot glass at souvenir shop, and when my friend’s dad asked “does your dad drink?” I was like yeah of course, thinking he meant water (my dad has never consumed alcohol). So yes, my judgment/awareness of the world might have been underdeveloped, but I still had a great time rocking out to Third Eye Blind and wondering what those weird clouds of smoke coming from the front rows of the concert were composed of.

It says something about the timelessness of a song when I can just write “doo-doo-doo, doo-do-do-doo” and you know exactly what song I’m talking about. This album does not want me to “put the past away.” Oh look, I did it again and you know exactly what song I’m referring to. Classics, y’all.

Creed - My Own Prison

Creed is having some viral success these days. It’s hard to tell sometimes if that’s ironic or legitimate - I kind of think it’s the latter, but it’s more of a guilty pleasure thing, like a vice that used to be taboo but now is socially acceptable.

Creed is melodramatic, without a doubt. (For the kids these days, they’re basically like the Hozier of the 90’s with distorted guitar and drums and a similar amount of church references/cringey moments.) They’re brooding, self-absorbed, and almost preachy. But can you really deny that it’s awesome pop rock? Their sound is just an evolution of the gloomy early 90’s alt rock and heavier pop rock and grunge, with a lead singer channeling his grunge and metal heroes, and those are all awesome things in their own right. Critics called it derivative, and I can’t argue that point too much, but I’d make the case that deriving a sound from the work of others is in itself not original. Not a positive, but also not a negative in and of itself.

The album was recorded for $6,000, released on the band’s own label, and sold over 6 million copies. It’s the embarrassing dad rock of my generation, and even if you pretend to hate it, I don’t believe you. Guess what - lying to yourself isn’t original, either.

Sleater-Kinney - Dig Me Out

This album is slightly jittery energy from start to finish. Singer Corbin Tucker sounds perpetually on the edge of losing control of her vocals, but she never quite does, with emotion dripping from every sharp, sometimes wobbly note in a way that makes my voice crack in sympathy with her vocal chords. The effect only adds to the forward drive of the album, which lets up only briefly like a car creating a hill and getting ready to hit the downslope on the other side.

First of all, apologies for the multi-week newsletter hiatus. Long story short, I got a new job assignment on short notice that required a new apartment, moving to a new city, lots of coordination, lots of overtime, and lots and LOTS of driving. On the one hand that’s a good thing for this newsletter - plenty of time for music on the road. But on the other hand there’s been literally zero time for thinking, let alone writing. But now things are getting moderately stable, and I’m back to regularly scheduled programming. Thanks for hanging with me.

I’ve been listening through the 90’s with the help of the excellent folks on Substack, and this week continues that series with a deep-ish dive into the year 1996.

As always, please leave a comment with any of your favorites that are missing! Leaving an album off of my list isn’t an indication of dislike, for the record - I simply write about the albums that inspire the most thoughts, not necessarily my votes for the best. But that doesn’t mean I won’t be listening through all of your favorites next time I make the 6 hour drive back home for the weekend.

The Albums of 1996

Beck - Odelay

When you’re a teen to pre-teen, you have a very different definition of what constitutes “deep meaning” in song lyrics. This album was one of those that young Dave thought was mind-blowingly cool and original and deep - I was probably assuming that many of the nonsensical lyrics were simply nonsensical in order to hide a deeper meaning. Did I understand what Beck meant by “Shine your shoes with your microphone blues, hirsute with your parachute fruits”? Hell no. But did I think I was privy to some level of intellect that was far beyond anything my parents or plebians everywhere could understand? You better believe it.

Beck’s music is indeed inventive and entertaining, and I’m not saying there’s not a deeper level of meaning to it. But this isn’t Shakespeare, and it’s pretty amusing to think back on that time of my life when my view of the broader music world was the size of my bookshelf full of CD’s and my dollar-store headphones. That’s what I hear when I hear Beck, and I hope that never changes.

Jay Z - Reasonable Doubt

Jay Z’s debut album sounds like nothing so much as a guy in the streets of NYC, hat down, collar up, sounds of cars and the subway screeching and people hustling for survival all around. What’s he doing in the street? Does he love the hustle and noise, or does he lament the necessity of such drastic measures to survive? In short, it’s complicated, and that complexity is reflected in the conflicted lyrics and upper/downer mix of beats from song to song. This is probably a music connoisseur’s favorite Jay Z album, with none of the radio hits of his later albums, instead focusing on elevating hip-hop to an intellectual art form, introducing the idea that the daily hustle and ranging intellect aren’t mutually exclusive.

Rage Against the Machine - Evil Empire

Every kid has that one song or event that introduces them to the problems of adults in the real world. RATM was that band for me - I wasn’t an angry kid, but I experienced early on the catharsis of listening to intense energy and anger artfully expressed. Every RATM album is a classic in my book - this one isn’t quite on the level of their self titled debut for me, but it’s pretty damn good. The combo of metal riffs and shout-rap poetry and funky drum work is unique and everlasting. They made the mold and broke it, and thank goodness for that because RATM has the kind of sound that could be imitated VERY badly without the requisite talent.

R.E.M. - New Adventures in Hi-Fi

REM’s sound takes many forms, and this form seems like it came about after extended listening sessions of the downcast early 90’s era of alt rock, the era REM only dabbled in in precious albums. It’s like they bought a bunch of Radiohead records and let the resulting gloom into their sound. It’s not my favorite REM, despite the consistent quality of the band. There’s always variety on an REM album, but this time the variety also unfortunately applies to recording and mixing quality, which was a result of some tracks being recorded in arenas or during sound checks, which adds an effect of transience but at the same time distracts from the music as you strain to hear the vocals. All that said, it’s still a great work from a band that rarely misses.

Tool - Aenema

Industrial grossness of the non-destructive variety. This album almost sounds like it’s polluting the atmosphere, a cloud of grey-green smoke emanating from a decades-old smokestack. It’s the soundtrack that will be playing in 500 years when humans return to the destroyed Earth we leave behind, diving into the smog in hazmat space suits. I’ve worked with a lot of industrial robots and trust me, this is the music they listen to when they’re off shift (Aphex Twin is what they prefer during work hours, I hear).

Fiona Apple - Tidal

Fiona Apple’s debut album sounds like something you’d hear from a far more established artists. Her hooks are buried deeply behind the freeform melodies and musing poetry of her lyrics, and for an artist with so much commercial success - and such a pop legacy - this album is surprisingly un-poppy sounding today. She’s got some blues and some angst mixed in, but overall the mood to me sounds simply introspective. Not that that’s a simple task, of course, but the focus of the album is more on Fiona’s mind than anything else.

I love Fiona Apple’s later albums, probably because the hooks start to come to the forefront later in her career, but this is the kind of album nobody can look at and say “this artist is a rookie.” It’s like when a rookie athlete has a phenomenal year their first year in the professional league - you have to appreciate them both for their potential and for the potential they’ve already realized.

Aphex Twin - Richard D. James Album

This album is confusing as hell for me, as a mortal and organic life form with normal cognitive abilities and no onboard internet connectivity, but it’s the kind of thing that makes me think humans are capable of communicating with the machines we’ve spent so many years creating. It’s rushed-feeling and chaotic, almost stressful even when you’re hearing a calm electronic piano in the background or a low key vocal sample. This is the kind of album that leaves you wondering how the hell people are capable of coming up with art like this. Maybe Aphex Twin was just born with a 5G chip in his head.

As always, good citizens of the music-loving internet, I would love any and all album suggestions you have for the year 1995. Oh, did you think Jamwise was a free newsletter? Psssh, joke’s on you. I get paid for this in comments and recommendations, and business is BOOMING. *rolls around in a pile of music recommendations I’ve collected in a swimming pool*

Also, this time around I haven’t tried to only focus on my favorites, I’ve picked some albums that simply inspired me to write about them the most, some for good reasons, others for pure interest, others for… well, you’ll see. 1995 is another fun year of music, a time when changes seemed to be in the air - grunge was sort of ending, Britpop was taking off, G-funk was nearing its peak as the hip-hop cost war escalated, and I was learning to walk or chew solid food or whatever.

Project BAE - Best Albums Ever - 1995

The Bends - Radiohead

This newsletter is about self-growth through music. In that spirit, I’m starting off this week’s post with an exercise in self-growth. I don’t know how many times I’ve mentioned this (probably a lot), but I have… issues listening to Radiohead. There are many explanations for this, most of them related to personal preferences or connotations from my life that have nothing to do with the band’s music. Here’s hoping that listening through their discography chronologically will give me the perspective that seems to drive so many people to love their music.

Normally, my face looks pretty much like the dude on the front of this album while I’m listening to Radiohead. He looks like he’s totally over it, swimming in a sea of confusion and perplexed annoyance, unable to understand or summon the will to want to understand what he’s hearing, unsure if it’s even worth it to try. The internet has told him a billion billion times how amazing Radiohead is, how even their early albums are all-time greats, how they practically invented the internet or whatever the hell happened to make them megafamous (that’s a deep dive for another year).

And yet, in the spirit of being a good and open music listener, I’ve included Radiohead once again in a list of best albums. I know many think of the band that way. So as a way of growing musically and personally, I will be searching for and identifying greatness while listening to this album. If there is a fair way to approach music one might or might not dislike, I feel like that’s it in a nutshell. 

After a deep re-listen, I think this is my favorite Radiohead album, and that kind of makes me sad. It’s an intriguing promise of another great alt rock band that never really gets delivered, only deviated from - that’s the reason OK Computer and Kid A are so lauded, is it not? Because they deviated from this album’s sound so far? Radiohead took a promising, developing sound and threw it aside in favor of meandering experimentation that I have yet to enjoy despite years of trying.

This is Radiohead when they still sounded original to me, more than a thinly veiled mouthpiece for their various influences. It’s a promise of a talented alt-rock band that never materialized because they decided to pivot instead, and despite the fact that nobody seems to agree with this sentiment, I still see that decision as a tragedy. This album drops the meaningless whinyness of Pablo Honey, adds a more nuanced songwriting style, and achieves a pretty cohesive sound that fits right into the alt rock/britpop landscape. Was it an intriguing decision to deviate from that? Sure, and I’d watch the movie about the band’s career. But - and this is subject to change, as I’m trying to learn to change my mind when compelled - that cool factoid doesn’t have a bit of impact nowhere on the band’s future music, and therefore does nothing for me.

So while I enjoy The Bends on its own merits, it’s hard to actually listen to it for fun knowing that 1) the rest of the world thinks this is not the band’s ultimate form and 2) I dislike that ultimate form so strongly. The Radiohead story ending has been spoiled for me, and it’s hard to pretend I don’t know how the movie ends.

To Bring You My Love - PJ Harvey

A little bit of industrial sound enters PJ Harvey’s ever-changing musical vocabulary, and it freaking works. The music devolves at times to the level of almost ambient clanks and bangs of a construction site at night, but then she tosses in a driving guitar song like “C’mon Billy” that shatters the mood and shows you just how much musical range she really has.

PJ Harvey is like one of those lucky people who can learn any language and sound like a local in what seems like no time. Sure, that takes a ton of work, but there’s also a savvy understanding of the nuances of languages that not everybody has, and that’s the true skill that lets them listen and communicate without letting the language get in the way. It’s an ability to both learn academically and intuitively, and then to use that knowledge in a way that seems totally unforced to the outside world. That’s how PJ Harvey sounds to me, with all her musical exploration - explorations in different genres or sounds are just new languages to her, not the end goal, and you’re still getting PJ through the sound no matter what words or instruments or sounds she might be using. It’s hard for a novelist to sound like a local, but when they succeed, it’s a mark of genius.

I loved PJ Harvey’s debut, and I love this even more. There are some experimental sounding tracks that don’t capture me individually, but they are well-used as atmospheric breaks in the narrative of the album and don’t hurt anything, even for my plebian mind that doesn’t want to comprehend abstract music. I get excited for every PJ Harvey album I hear, and you can count on her making a return in this list many more times.

Jagged Little Pill - Alanis Morissette

Alanis Morissette has one of those sounds that you can’t plan or design or engineer, it just has to come authentically from of a talented artist. There’s a specifie attitude at play, and there’s a lot of influence from the mostly ending grunge movement of 1995 and her previous poppier works, but there’s also true creation here, something that sounds totally original to me. And the best part for Alanis is that it also happens to scratch that undefinable pop itch, with endlessly singable number one bangers that will probably last forever. 

If you listened to this album in a vacuum with no awareness of the charts or Alanis’ former electropop songs, you could reasonably argue it’s part of any number of different genres - rock, grunge, pure pop, alt rock. It’s the kind of album that seemingly hundreds of disparate artists can and should credit for inspiration. It’s angry in a self-aware way, poetic in a straightforward way, as oxymoronic at times as any of the dozen contrasting examples in “Hand In My Pocket” or “Ironic”

Also, cheers to a yodel that’s not overused - that’s refreshing after listening to Chappell Roan’s album recently where she sprinkles little yodels on every other syllable like a high school student using a new favorite word fifty times in an essay. 

Different Class - Pulp

Pulp’s fifth album sounds to me like part Bowie revival and part something new, as if they were Bowie superfans who wanted to make a version of his music that doesn’t sound like it was written by astral aristocracy to be handed down to us common humans. It’s all the best parts of Britpop with a little bit of a class war feeling (not too aggressive, very British and polite) that I dig. And it’s got one of the better lines out there, from “Mis-Shapes”: “We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs, we’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of, and that’s our minds.” That one is especially relevant in 2024, 3 weeks before the most terrifying election of the century as of this writing.

Class differences are the main topic of exploration in the lead single “Common People,” and pervade the album. I’m reminded of the (in my opinion absolutely unwatchable) show Schitt’s Creek, where a bunch of formerly wealthy people are forced to live in a tiny town with no money. (If I have to hear someone say “ew, David!” one more time I’m gonna lose my mind. David is a great name, but this freaking show has relegated it to the level of Siri or Alexa that have been ruined in the popular group-mind). The show is meant to be funny, but it’s too real for me to laugh at sometimes - “Common People” explores this very same belief among the rich that they’re rich purely because of their own merits, the ridiculousness of that idea, and the fact that nobody can seem to escape it. We’re programmed to take credit for our successes, but the reality is we’re all out here working hard, man.

Anyways, Pulp is among my favorite of the Britpoppers, and was somehow a band I overlooked up to this point. But not anymore!

(What’s The Story) Morning Glory - Oasis

Oasis’ second album is another enjoyable but extremely overinflated album of bangers. It’s hard to get my feelings straight on Oasis - I love listening to their music, but it’s not a life changing experience for me like popular media in 2024 would have you think. It’s solid, if somewhat derivative-sounding, pop rock. There’s pretty much one guitar part in the band’s vocabulary that’s repurposed every song, rearranged slightly when they’re feeling extra creative. The lyrics aren’t much more varied, or at least they don’t feel that way from the delivery. My head would call this a soft 3/5, if it was in charge, but it’s not - my heart gives it a much higher rating and I can’t figure out why. 

Oasis reminds me of other bands like AC/DC (who I also love, for the record) who literally have one sound that they rearrange and play a dozen slightly varied ways on every album. Is Oasis the British AC/DC? If Bon Scott had grown up dealing with dreary weather and beans on toast rather than the scorpions and dust tornadoes and Fosters of his home country, would he have come out sounding like one of the Gallaghers? Would Angus Young have turned down his distortion and strummed his endlessly repeating power chords on an acoustic guitar instead of an overdriven SG? File that under another theory that’s just dumb enough to enrage the internet. Also I’ve never been to Australia but as a fellow former colony of Britain I feel like we both have the right to poke a little fun at our old pals/overlords. 

Sometimes simple sugars are what you’re craving, I suppose, and Oasis is the musical equivalent of a lollipop (sorry, a lolly). The enjoyment is part nostalgia, part simple head-nodding, part just letting your brain go to sleep to enjoy the gentle rush of music. It’s extremely British, and I say that as a neutral assessment, like saying my soup is salty - it’s something you might like or dislike. I like, but I also can’t say I’ve learned anything deep about life through Oasis’ music. A perplexing and enjoyable puzzle.

Wowee Zowee - Pavement

This album starts out Oasis clone and then goes pleasantly off the rails, venturing in all sorts of different directions. That strategy can go really well or really poorly, and although this album has some elements that I might normally dislike, like a lack of cohesion and a little bit of aimless wandering, I actually loved it in this setting. Maybe it’s because the sun was shining outside my open window as I listened to it, or maybe it’s just because the experimentation fits in perfectly with the rest of this week’s albums. Was experimentation just in the water in 1995? Was the music world trying to coalesce into the next big thing after the downfall of grunge and the commercialization of alt rock? I’d love to hear from someone who was there as this was all happening. OK I guess I was technically there, but my favorite songs in 1995 probably included the ABC song or “Wheels on the Bus”.

Elliott Smith - Elliott Smith

The gloomy, whispery, almost tortured sound of Elliot Smith feels unexpectedly current to me while listening in 2024. He’s got the bedroom pop sound nailed, the confession of one’s insecurities in a way that wouldn’t disturb one’s sleeping parents in the next room. His f-bombs on “Christian Brothers” sound like he’s been looking forward to each and every one of them, building up the F sound like it’s the first time he’s ever said the word, emphasizing his discontent so the adults will listen - and that might be the single best way to summarize his sound. 

I can’t say this album was the most musically inspiring for me, but Elliott Smith was an artist I was completely unfamiliar with, and that was enough reason to explore it on its own. This seems to be another album that has been reviewed more positively in memory than at the time - I need to listen to some more Smith to really get where it fits into his discography, and I intend to do so. 

The best part is the folk atmosphere in my opinion - Smith used interesting chord changes as his major ornamentation, and the music goes unexpected places as a result. Most of the surprises are small ones, but that’s enough, as his music seems to shine from simplicity rather than decoration. It’s still a little petulant for me, but I can respect it.

Me Against The World - 2pac

Digging into the genres of hip-hop that were blossoming in the mid 90’s has been a total joy. This album lies somewhere between boom-bap and G-funk, the latter being a new favorite of mine, and 2Pac was one of the best of both worlds. From his interest in poetry to his legendary death, Tupac Shakur was a force of nature, and this album is a raw insight into his life both in and out of the public eye.

My favorite parts of this album are the existential explorations, questions about life and death, that show how deeply intelligent Tupac was. There are so many layers to unpack it’s impossible to do without having the lyrics in front of you like a book. This is widely considered one of hip-hop’s greatest albums ever, and it’s easy to see why.

If you missed part 1, the link is below. It includes some of my favorite albums from 1994 - by Soundgarden, Green Day, Jeff Buckley, Nas, Portishead, Oasis, and Weezer. Also make sure to check the comments (and the list below) for an insanely great list of additional albums - I was only able to sort through a few of them this week, but it seems like a 1994 music appreciation class could last forever. Thanks to all for the recs! I’ll be sorting through them for a few weeks at least. But that’s why I’m here - to learn and listen to all the great music I missed by being born just a little bit late. As always, I love all the new recommendations. Enjoy, and here’s to 1994, a fantastic year in music!

P.S. - apologies to anyone who got last week’s email twice. My mouse got a little too frisky.

Best of 1994 Part 1:

A Note on Hurricane Helene

Before we get into the music - if you’re so inclined, please take a look at this list of resources to support victims of Hurricane Helene. The Appalachian regions in the southeastern US affected by the storm aren’t at the forefront of the national media, but this was an unprecedented disaster in many areas, including western North Carolina and upstate South Carolina where I grew up. It’s hard to overstate the destruction this hurricane caused, and much of it was in areas in the mountains totally unequipped to deal with such an intense storm, with limited financial resources to effectively recover and poor representation in the government and the national media.

The link below contains many resources for areas in need of support all across the Southeastern US and Appalachia.

Click here to learn more or support via appvoices.org

The Unofficial Substack Crowdsourced List of Best Albums From 1994 In No Particular Order

At some point during my exploration of each year going forward, I’ll get together an unofficial Substack crowdsourced list of best albums from that year in no particular order (aka the USCLOBAF94INPO, this will undoubtedly catch on as it flows off the tongue so well). Such a list feels like a necessary public service and a thank you to the great comments on last week’s post. The 1994 list is below, sourced from the awesome comments section of last week’s post - I’ll spend at least 1 more week writing about 1994, but in case I don’t get to all of these great albums, enjoy the list! Uh I mean enjoy the USCLOBAF94INPO!

Special thanks to , , , , , , and for the recommendations. I hope I didn’t miss anybody who contributed!

Albums with a *star* have been covered in Jamwise so far - this is mostly for my own sanity. Also these are in a particular order (alphabetical by artist) but we here at Jamwise are afraid the people will riot if we change the name of the USCLOBAF94INPO at this point in its existence, when the name has come to mean so much to so many.

• Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works Vol. ii

• Bad Religion - Stranger Than Fiction

• Beck - Mellow Gold

• Bedhead - WhatFunLifeWas

• *Blur - Parklife

• Elliott Smith - Roman Candle

• Frank Black - Teenager of the Year

• *Green Day - Dookie

• Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand

• *Hole - Live Through This

• Jawbox - For Your Own Special Sweetheart

• Jawbreaker - 24 Hour Revenge Therapy

• *Jeff Buckley - Grace

• Johnny Cash - American Recordings

• Liz Phair - Whip-Smart

• Luna - Bewitched

• Lush - Split

• Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible

• Morrissey - Vauxhall and I

• *Nas - Illmatic

• Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral

• *Nirvana - MTV Unplugged

• *Oasis - Definitely Maybe

• Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

• *Pearl Jam - Vitalogy

• *Portishead - Dummy

• Pulp - His 'n' Hers

• *R.E.M. - Monster

• Rancid - Let’s Go

• Seal - Seal

• Sebadoh - Bakesale

• Sick Of It All - Scratch The Surface

• *Soundgarden - Superunknown

• Stereolab - Mars Audiac Quintet

• Superchunk - Foolish

• The Cranberries - No Need to Argue

• TLC - CrazySexyCool

• Toad the Wet Sprocket - Dulcinea

• Toadies - Rubberneck

• *Tom Petty - Wildflowers

• Tori Amos - Under the Pink

• Veruca Salt - American Thighs

• *Weezer - Weezer

Whew, that’s a lot of great stuff. As always if you see anything missing, let me know in the comments!

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Project BAE - Best Albums Ever - 1994

My reactions on the most inspiring-to-me albums from 1994 - part 2 of idk, somewhere between 3 and infinity.

MTV Unplugged - Nirvana

This album is possibly the most iconic example of the MTV Unplugged series that strips everything out to display the true talent of the band with no frills, no effects, nothing but some mics and an intimate acoustic set and nowhere to hide. Some of my earliest music memories are from MTV in its glory days of the late 90’s, but I was too young to understand how awesome MTV Unplugged really was.

I don’t know why it’s easier to appreciate the “classical” musicianship of rock bands when they’re playing acoustic sets, but I’ve always found it true. In 2024 it’s even more refreshing to explore acoustic performances or arrangements of popular songs - it’s probably unfair, but sometimes with all the intense computer-aided production of modern music it’s hard to imagine some of today’s artists succeeding in an MTV Unplugged setting. I’m not saying it’s true, I’m just saying the complicated labyrinth of processing that a lot of modern digitalized music goes through makes it harder and harder to picture some artists with a simple guitar singing their songs. And that doesn’t mean artists who still can’t perform their songs acoustically are necessarily less talented, but still - something traditional is being lost, and that can be sad, depending on your age.

To me, it would be sad if society is losing its appreciation of acoustic music, although it’s not for the reason many might think (“because musicians are less talented today”, which is a bullshit take). The reason I miss acoustic sets being massively popular is simply because they have a deeper level of relatability to me. I’ve held and played an acoustic guitar, so it’s easy for me to relate to a few people on a stage doing the same thing. It’s almost like a self-insert fantasy story, where you can picture yourself as the main character. The music is broken down to a digestible level without losing its meaning and artistic core, and that’s a beautiful thing. I don’t think musicians need to prove their talent by doing an acoustic set - that’s only a subset of musical talent, and isn’t the only way to show it off despite what old heads might think - but man, would I love to see someone mega-poppy like Chappell Roan absolutely shredding an acoustic set and letting a bunch of old people see her talent in a way they can understand.

In Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged set (performed in 1993, with the album released in 1994), the most impressive part to me is how controlled Kurt Cobain’s voice is, despite the emotional nature of the music and his penchant for raucous screaming when backed by electrified instruments. Who would have thought the spearheads of rock would sound so darn good singing folksy versions of their songs? Some of these versions of Nirvana songs have become as iconic as the originals for me. “About A Girl,” “Dumb,” “Lake Of Fire”, “Oh Me” (the last 2 are Meat Puppets covers, but still) - all of these songs are represented by the acoustic versions first and foremost to me. That was probably the first way I heard them as a kid, and they’ve stuck that way in my head.

The songs kind of meander a little at the end, but this was a concert first and foremost - the energy flows differently than an album, and it’s cool to hear the crowd and band interacting as the set goes on. The album is focused on Cobain by default, but that’s not exactly a problem. It’s a fantastic snapshot of a talented band showing their range, and it’s both fascinating and tragic to think what musical directions the band might have explored if Cobain hadn’t passed.

Parklife - Blur

I don’t have enough examples to prove this, but it seems like a lot of British songwriting in the 90’s was focused on basically observing British stuff happening in British places. Lyrics like “walking down the street, there’s a man over there, he’s waiting on a bus with a hole in his umbrellarr” that sound like something you’d write in your journal when you’ve got complete writer’s block. I’m reminded of the Who song “In Tune,” which musically is great but lyrically is one of the most annoying songs ever written in my humble opinion. The song starts:

“I'm singing this note 'cause it fits in well with the chords I'm playing
I can't pretend there's any meaning hidden in the things I'm saying”

It’s nonsense, filler, fluff, and the Who at least seem ashamed enough to admit it. It’s like how every literary novelist writes characters who are also novelists and love libraries and books and cozy cups of hot coffee - another huge pet peeve of mine. I love those things too, but come on, authors could at least pretend they’re not writing just to meet a word count quota instead of having something real to say. The only good example I can think of where the songwriter is songwriting about songwriting is “25 or 6 to 4”, but that song is still carried by the incredible musical arrangement, not the lyrics, which are catchy nonsense. Anyway, rant over. On to Parklife.

Parklife has a lot of that observational, “guy meandering around the park” kind of songwriting, but for some reason I found myself enjoying it far more than other examples I’ve found in the past. Maybe it’s because there’s more of a concept to this album than other examples - sure, Blur is engaging in some observational lyric writing, but it’s not like they’re pretending there’s a deeper meaning to the music like, say, Oasis seems to do. The protagonist wandering around (and sleeping in) the park is the whole point. And it’s also upbeat, without the gray dreariness I also associate (perhaps unfairly) with British observational alt rock songs. The protagonist (is Tracy Jacks the protagonist? In my head he is) has had some bad times, sure, but he’s bopping along with a little electro-pop beat in his head and things feel on the verge of looking up. It’s more “I woke up in a Soho gaol where a policeman knew my name” than “I’m in tune”, like a jaunty rock ‘n roll slice of life story for the alt-rock-but-slightly-electropop-at-times genre.

Wildflowers - Tom Petty

This album is beautiful and extremely sad when heard in the context of Petty processing a collapsing relationship, a fact that I think only became apparent after the fact. Songs like “Wildflowers,” “It’s Good To Be King,” “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” and “Time to Move On” reflect that sad resigned feeling of a breakup so poignantly I found myself texting my wife to tell her how much I appreciate her (I do that anyway!). Petty’s songwriting is miserable but almost peaceful, like a weight of stress has been lifted, leaving scars and regret and loneliness in its place, and there’s nothing left to do but get to work healing.

Petty seems as down in the dumps on this album as the rest of the 90’s alt-rockers, but he’s got a subtlety none of them can match. He’s a master of writing only the absolutely necessary bones of whatever’s on his mind, like a painter who can flick their brush across the canvas and with a few precise strokes create a perfectly recognizable portrait. I think that takes a special kind of empathetic view of the world to achieve, to see what pieces of something are the most important and assemble them with nothing wasted.

Vitalogy - Pearl Jam

This album is an evolution in Pearl Jam’s sound in several ways. They move away from the combination of grunge/guitar anthem heroes towards something a big more droning, angry, and atmospheric at times than their first two albums. There are also more experiments, which makes sense as the band was going through a lot at the time; but at the same time this is the first PJ album that for me contains a significant number of filler tracks. But a little bit deeper listen is still rewarding - in my youth I wasn’t the biggest fan of Vitalogy-era Pearl Jam, but with adult ears the sound of this album is more like a band fighting against the need to become adults, unable to embrace grown-up life because they’re still punky garage kids at heart, but by definition that means they have no idea what to do with their lives.

With the benefit of 8 more studio albums after Vitalogy, it’s easy to look back and see that this album feels like a transition to the more modern sound of Pearl Jam. They may have transformed into an Eddie-Vedder led exploration of rock with Vitalogy, but they also never lost their stadium anthem ability. This album is mostly a banger, and if you go in knowing the shift that was happening in Pearl Jam’s sound, it’s only the more enjoyable.

Live Through This - Hole

The album was recorded in late 1993 and released in 1994, four days after Kurt Cobain’s death. Although that fact undoubtedly drew more attention to the album’s release at the time, it’s unfair to speak about it in those terms, although the specter of that history is so large I don’t know how anyone could shake it off.

Courtney Love is an absolute force of nature as a singer, and this album is Hole’s biggest and best attempt to capture their popular potential. That’s not to say it’s poppy - this album is poppy in the way any great grunge-rock album was, mostly by having great hooks and enjoying success in the charts. But like any great genre album that also happens to sell well, the hooks are used as they should be used - as an on-ramp into something deeper.

This album often gets lumped into the “angry girl music” category or even riot grrrl along with some of Hole’s contemporaries, but to be honest that makes me a very angry boy. Maybe society in the early 90’s wasn’t ready to handle a female personality as huge as Courtney Love’s without ascribing her success to other factors, like the dumb rumors that her husband Cobain helped her write the songs on this album. And OK, I get that music historians are always looking for ways to categorize music from 30 years ago in the interest of satisfying their OCD. But we have to grow past that tendency. This is powerful grungey punky rock of a unique flavor, only made better by the fact that the nuanced feelings of frustration and disillusionment come from a female perspective that was underrepresented in 1994. It’s still a little annoying to label this grunge or rock or whatever as I’m kind of doing, because those labels are pretty well-established in the music media to refer to the Vedder-Cornell-Weiland-Corgan-Cobain ruling class, but it’s better than calling this “girl rock” and moving on. This album is visceral and emotive and brilliant, and although Hole doesn’t need to be stuck into a single category, maybe the categories that exist need to include Hole to become more well-rounded descriptors of an awesome musical era. Grunge should be fighting for the honor of counting Hole as part of its roster, even if Hole doesn’t want anything to do with it.

The Downward Spiral - Nine Inch Nails

NiN’s second studio album begins on a much fuzzier note than their debut, with a sound that blurs into almost an explosion of unidentifiable sound, much like the titular character “Mr. Self Destruct.” This trend continues throughout a lot of this album - many tracks have a similar staticky production, with the sound compacted together like a garbage truck crunching a bunch of cans, or maybe like voices crowding together in a troubled mind. Their debut had a more open and discrete sound, with the electronic sounds easily distinguishable even when the songs spiral into experimental territory. This album develops the industrial sound further, but this time it’s like we’re in an old factory where the robots need oil and regular people are scared to walk in even with hard hats. Like the cranky robots are about to take over, maybe.

But as with many albums, it’s the concept that makes it brilliant, and the concept is necessary to fully appreciate the work. It’s arranged as the story of a character spiraling down into a nihilistic world of self-loathing and thoughts of self-harm; it’s dark, but it’s so well written and cohesive that even the sunniest among us can appreciate the art that went into its creation.

Monster - R.E.M.

“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” is the art of the attention grabbing album opener, perfected. The rest of the album can get a bit sleepy, like elevator alt rock. They mostly stick to their bread and butter, low-key rockers and slightly oddball lyrics that can be somewhat morbid at times, despite the upbeat tunes and the addition of crunchy guitars that give constant hints of this being a hard rock album without fully delivering on the promise aside from isolated songs. But that’s not the point. REM’s brand of songwriting is so their own that it can’t be overshadowed by even the most overdriven guitar tones, and the relatively rockish sounds serve mostly as supplements to the band’s signature sound. The band was trying to make an album that innately mocked the glam and pop rock scenes, but ended up creating something almost too authentically REM to be considered parody, like they couldn’t fully commit to the bit of writing cheesy rock. And in the end, the album is better for that fact - REM is what we all came for, after all, not another reboot of 80’s glam rock. I think lifelong REM fans were a little disappointed when this one came out, but to my relatively fresh ears it’s a good one.

As always, I’d love your recommendations! I fully expect to be bowled over by all the music from this year. Woe is me.

Superunknown - Soundgarden

Soundgarden’s breakthrough to the mainstream via the top of the charts was a long-deserved cashing in of all the hard work they’d put in. As Soundgarden was widely credited as one of the formative forces of the Seattle sound that was everywhere in 1994, this album was released with super high expectations - and it more than delivered. It hit right in the midst of the Grunge and alt-rock frenzy in the US, finally putting Soundgarden in the charts after they watched their neighbors Pearl Jam and Nirvana dominate the airwaves in the previous couple of years.

Chris Cornell had one of the most iconic voices in rock history. His versatility - going from a throat-shredding scream to a haunting melodic tone in a heartbeat - is one of a kind. There aren’t many rock singers who have so much unique timbre in both their scream and their “standard” singing voice - but no matter which style you hear, you know instantly you’re listening to Chris Cornell. I actually discovered Cornell first through Audioslave, who was releasing albums as I grew up, but when I traced his history back to Soundgarden I instantly fell in love. As a completely talentless singer, I’ve very rarely had the “guitar hero” moment when I hear a singer and imagine myself in front of a stadium performing their songs, but Chris Cornell had that effect on me.

If you’ve never heard his cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” you should. The live version is my favorite - even 20 years after the band’s peak, when he recorded this in 2015, he still had it. It was released after his death on the perfectly titled compilation No One Sings Like You Anymore (after a lyric from “Black Hole Sun”), and it gives me the goosies.

Superunknown is a little more musically challenging than some of the other mega grunge acts - but only relatively speaking. This is still grunge (plus a little metal), and it’s just as guitar-driven and dark and gloomy as you’d expect from the genre. But this album hints at stretching the form into something a bit larger, a little bit more poetic and spooky rather than just in-your-face pissed off gloom. It was trying to move both towards and away from the popular mainstream - although the popular music scene ate this up. And for good reason.

Dookie - Green Day

Green Day had such a good feel for album construction. You wouldn’t guess it from their pop-punk sound (or some of their later albums) - they act like they DGAF, but musically they very much GAF, like they’re punks with music degrees that won’t let them truly do anything outside the boundaries of music theory. “I declare I don’t care no more” are the first lyrics on the album, which might be true about life in general, but musically the sentiment is clearly not applicable. The songs feel crafted with a disgruntled kind of love, with grunty vocals and crunchy guitars arranged like a simple classical piece. Songs flow into each other like an album of old, it’s one unit and a bunch of dope singles all at the same time. I can’t say if there’s a true concept uniting this album other than the inside of Billie Joe Armstrong’s disillusioned head, but maybe that’s enough.

This album, the band’s first on a major label, was perfectly timed to capture both the rise of multiple guitar-driven rock-adjacent genres and the gap in the rock soundscape left by the decline of punk rock in the late 70’s (depending on your definitions). Just as Oasis revived British pop-rock, Green Day revived 70’s punk. And both bands’ popularity broke through into the mainstream as a result of a potent mixture of talent and nostalgia.

I think Green Day, even compared to the other behemoths of 90’s rock in all its forms, may well be the most iconic and remembered sound of the 90’s 50 years from now. The instantly recognizable sound is already becoming emblematic of the era, despite the band’s more recent and more forgettable albums (which in my mind are already forgotten); how much more will this effect grow over the coming decades? It seems plausible that children of the 2050’s will consider Green Day’s sound as quintessentially 90’s as we currently consider Sinatra emblematic of the 50’s.

Grace - Jeff Buckley

Another great album that Rolling Stone dismissed when it came out. Am I just 30 years late in realizing they seem to hate anything that’s not already a platinum-seller? In the years when alt rock was taking over the charts, the main criticism they could come up for Grace was essentially “this isn’t the next great alt rock thing we were hoping for. Meh.” This album was moderately successful on release, but took off into another stratosphere after Buckley’s untimely death. I’ll bet the 20th anniversary RS review was glowing.

Spotify’s writeup calls this album “Van Morrison meets Led Zeppelin”, which seems to be a common refrain, at least in the larger publications. Now I’m no 70’s kid, but I know a thing or two about Zep and Van - that comparison sounds pretty lazy to me, mainly true on the surface level and only at times. Sure, there’s the occasional Zeppelin-esque guitar riff or strumming part on Grace. And there are some arrangements that recall Van Morrison here and there. You could also squint your ears and hear Robert Plant in a few of the high-register screams on songs like “Grace.” And I think the legend is made even stronger by the fact that Buckley was said to be last seen singing a Zeppelin song while swimming under a bridge the night he passed away. But there’s so much more here, enough that even a comparison to Zep is doing the music a disservice because it shoehorns Buckley into a box that doesn’t fit.

Now don’t get me wrong - any album billed as Van Morrison meets Led Zeppelin will immediately have all of my attention. So sure, keep using that comparison to introduce completely new listeners to Jeff Buckley if you want. But I don’t think there should be many deep-dives exploring those comparisons, because they’d be reaching at best, making shit up at worst. Buckley’s music is something entirely his own.

Jeff Buckley sounds like an artist searching for the absolute limits of his voice, experimenting with anything and everything to see what creates the thinnest possible veil between his brain and the listener. Listen to this one with good headphones - every nuance you can catch adds an extra little hit of emotion when you’re least expecting it, and you can put yourself into the same headspace that Buckley seems to have on the album cover, listening to the music and forgetting the world.

Dummy - Portishead

There’s no doubt that if I’d known about this album as a kid, my musical trajectory would have changed completely. The music resonates so well with me now that I have complete FOMO for what I missed - the trip-hoppy beats make me do a stank face every time, like a guitar player grimacing out a powerful solo. Instead of pursuing the alt-rock/grunge/classic rock obsessive path I chose growing up, I might have been tossed headfirst into the world of electronic beats and industrial sounds at an early age, following them all the way through to the albums they influenced in the rising industrial/trip-hop sound of the later 90’s.

Electronic and electronic-adjacent bands can get a lot of flak for relying on computerized sounds to carry their music rather than on songwriting or more universally accepted musical practices. But that’s an issue for all kinds of artists - the 70’s were littered with rock and roll bands who thought a distorted electric guitar was a worthy substitute for actual lyrics or songwriting skills. Hell, I’ll bet when the acoustic guitar was invented there were people out there calling it a gimmick, that you couldn’t have real music without a bow vibrating the strings. New technology is new technology, and songwriting is songwriting, no matter where you are in the timeline.

But Portishead, even in a genre that’s seen by outsiders as full of gimmicky sounds, is impossible to classify as anything but song-driven brilliance. The beats and sounds they choose fit the songwriting perfectly, adding to the atmosphere or the emotional content at any given moment. It all aligns perfectly, the new sounds and inventive songwriting producing an additive effect, a true 1+1=3 situation.

This album has quickly become one of my favorites ever, and will be in heavy rotation for a long time to come.

Illmatic - Nas

Last week I said I was becoming a West Coast hip hop guy. Nas must have heard me, because this one made me question my loyalties completely. It’s a little more hardcore than I typically prefer, but it brings the best parts of the 90’s east coast style together - the jazz influence, the underground freight-train-like beats, the gritty New York attitude of pretending to love living in the city because it makes you tough but low key hating every minute of it. (Side note - I feel like Stockholm syndrome could be renamed New York City syndrome. Might just be the country kid in me. Or the fact I live in a beach town where everybody’s from the Northeast US and spends all their time talking about how great NYC is, but for some reason never go back there).

Nas’s flow is smooth and he uses these multi-tiered rhymes that make you pause for a second to savor - but a second is too long to pause because you’re going to miss stuff. Listen to this one with the lyrics in front of you - I like using Spotify’s karaoke mode which follows along with each line - and you’ll fall into a trance trying to keep up. It feels like a movie to me, and it’s hard to believe this is a debut album.

Definitely Maybe - Oasis

I want to preface this by saying that I love this album as much as anyone. It’s good-time rock ‘n roll, and it’s impossible to hate in my opinion. Keep that in mind as we explore this album - I do love it, but it raises questions for me about why we love Oasis so much, and I’m not sure that’s due to the band’s talents alone.

I think this album, while great, has become insanely overrated in our collective memories. There’s a rule known as the rule of 20 which states that pop culture trends are cyclical, coming back around into the mainstream every 20-ish years. (or 15 years, or 40 years, depending on the area of pop culture we’re talking about). Any Millennial who’s watched Gen Z embrace the horrific calf-length socks of our parents’ generation knows what I’m talking about - high socks are making their 20 year cycle return. As was foretold.

I think this is one big reason for the 90’s revival we’re seeing in 2024. True, the 90’s were 30 years ago (holy crap) but the 20 year rule is loose. 90’s culture is everywhere in 2024 - half of Gen Z’s lingo is from early 90’s hip hop, from what I can tell - and it seems like Oasis’ popularity is benefiting from that trend as much as anybody. Their alleged reunion is well timed in 2024 - it’s caused mass hysteria among alt rock fans and nostalgia-seeking elder Millennials.

But in Oasis’ case, the 20/30 year rule runs even deeper. In 1994, Oasis was essentially an early Beatles/Stones revival band. Their sound in the 90’s was catnip for the nostalgic 70’s kids entering their 30’s and 40’s. So in 2024, we’re actually experiencing a form of inception - a revival within a revival. We’re harking all the way back to the 60’s and 70’s when we go nuts for Oasis’ reunion tour. Add that to the fact that this reunion was said to be completely impossible, and I can’t even tell if people are excited about the music at all, or if it’s simply the legend of Oasis (and by extension, the Beatles/Stones) that’s causing all this enthusiasm.

Musically, this album is about as straightforward as music can be, just wistful enough to get your feelings going, but not in ways that are too difficult to sort through. It’s the perfect guitar pop formula - nothing invented, nothing destroyed. Liam Gallagher sounds like an enthusiastic kid doing John Lennon karaoke, with just a touch of grit and more than a touch of teenager in the sound, and mostly relegated to just a few notes above and below center. It’s unhateable and fun, and even though I can’t see that it broke any new ground, it’s such a huge part of 90’s culture and my musical upbringing that it’ll always have a place in my playlists.

Weezer - Weezer

Weezer’s debut album is geeky, self-aware, and completely unforgettable. Many other words came to mind, but Weezer’s press kit for the Blue Album prohibits most of them:

“All of these words are officially forbidden from use in describing Weezer. Hopefully, after studying this list, you will listen more carefully and find your own non-trendy descriptions:

Quirky
College
Retro
Fun/Funny
Goofy
Wacky
Pop/Punk (may be used separately but never together)”

So, the challenge has been laid down. I’ll do my best, but I can’t guarantee I’ll live up to Weezer’s standards for describing their debut.

Weezer’s take on the early 90’s alternative / 70’s power pop revival / guitar rock explosion / mainstream angst scene was unique in the level of self-awareness; it’s almost self-mocking at times, but at the same time there’s plenty of room to appreciate the music at face value or to listen to it with a hint of irony at the blatant power-pop sound. No matter which way you take Weezer, it’s undeniably great. And many people seemed to take Weezer at face value - to the point where the band basically seemed to say in subsequent albums, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” and went full-tilt for the power pop sound.

I can’t say why I find it so satisfying that Weezer knew exactly what they were doing; from their look to their sound, they were cheekily recreating power pop with the intent of making fun of it, and if they made the genre even better it was entirely by accident.

Even if you totally miss the point of Weezer, there are still plenty of reasons to love Weezer. If that’s not genius, I don’t know what is.

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With all the new music flying around in 2024, this seemed like a good time to come up for a breath of fresh air and see what’s going on in modern times before continuing to relive the 90’s, as every Millennial dreams of doing.

The premise of this post started when I got a free trial to SiriusXM in my car, turned on Today’s Hits channel, and realized I couldn’t identify a single song for like ten songs in a row. Through the low-resolution satellite-beamed signal, the tunes of Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and even the internet’s current favorite Chappell Roan were foreign to me, almost blurring together - the only conclusion I drew was that there’s a very 2024 sound to a lot of these artists, a subgenre of sorts forming at the top of the charts, and I wanted to know more about it. I knew these artists were everywhere and probably wouldn’t fit my typical genre preferences (an assumption I’m trying to stop making), but I just wanted to understand.

I’ve written a lot about the way I used to approach music before starting this newsletter - I had lots of disdain for Pop as a genre, which was partly inherited and partly me trying to act cool and smart about music as many insecure humans like to do. Part of the reason I’m doing this project is to figure out why this disdain existed, and to prove to myself that it was dumb and preventing me from enjoying a bunch of dope music. I’m figuring that out, but I still find myself getting little cringes when I hear poppy pop music, little echoes of my old self bleeding through: “what are you doing, this isn’t Pearl Jam” or “Pop is for regular people but you’re a unique and special boy, you shouldn’t listen to this” or “you’d get verbally assassinated and possibly assassinated for real if you admitted you like this on Reddit.”

I’m going to be brutally honest - 2 years ago I would have, and probably did, make fun of people who liked the artists I’m writing about here. What I didn’t consider at the time was that if you’d asked me what I liked that was so much better, so much more deep and meaningful, I would have crumbled like a house of cards, mumbling something that sounded like “pearljamzeppelin…chilipeppers…basicboymusic”. This has been the best and most freeing revelation in my music appreciation career: it turns out the old me actually knew nothing, and I was missing out. I don’t have to like all the Pop I hear, but I at least need to listen to it with open ears to form my own opinion.

Since then I’ve been expanding my music listening as much as humanly possible, in many genres including pop. I’ve discovered enough awesome pop music to mostly get past those little judgy impulses, but there’s still room for improvement. So now, it’s time to see if all the listening I’ve been doing has, in fact, made me a better listener. To do so, I’m gonna hit myself over the head with some poppy 2024 poparific pop.

“But Dave,” you might ask, “doesn’t everyone already know all of these artists? Surely we don’t need another online person talking about them?”

You’re right, but that’s not what this is about. This is about demonstrating that growth as a music listener is both possible and fun, and listening to pop music happens to be an area in which I personally wanted to grow. It’s a test of how open my ears have become. And most importantly, it’s to show that when you listen critically and reflect on what you’re hearing, you tend to find the good in things more than you did before, even if the negatives are still there. That’s what I want to get better at - finding the good in music even if I ultimately dislike it. That will lead to a more balanced attitude and allow more good music to find its way into my brain.

Project NAE - The New Album Experience

This selection of albums is based on pretty much 2 things - they’re new, and they’re impossible to miss if you search “music” on Google in 2024 (note: yes, I’m a Millennial so yes, I know this is sub-optimal Google search technique). By the time this is published there will be ten more albums in this category, and I’ll just have to get to those another time - it’s not meant to be complete. I thought very little about it, to be honest, like a well-meaning kewl dad just trying to fit in with the kids these days who picks up the first album he sees in the Walmart music section.

HIT ME HARD AND SOFT - Billie Eilish

Before listening to this album, I never even came close to “getting” Billie Eilish. I’ve heard a lot of the common complaints about her music, and I probably even used them myself as excuses not to give her a shot - she’s just whispering, she’s only big because of social media, etc. I also had to admit the all-caps thing was a little annoying, and then a little funny when I realized that she basically sings in subscript while naming her songs in ALL CAPS.

This album is pure bedroom confessional pop songwriting - literally, in Billie Eilish’s bedroom - and it’s impressively done. Sure, she sings as if she’s afraid her mom will overhear her from the next room, but one, that’s a very universal feeling that’s being captured perfectly, and two, when you pay attention you realize how much control it must take to create that effect so consistently.

I think Billie Eilish’s story outside her music is almost as important to her mega-success as the music itself. She’s relating to Gen Z as few can. She publicly struggles with many of the personal issues that are at the forefront of the cultural conversation for her generation - body image issues, exploring sexuality, searching for acceptance. She represents many of the social views shared by her generation - she’s vegan, concerned about climate change, and supports ethical work practices in her fashion. I don’t even know how one person can handle being a public symbol for all of that, but she does it well.

Would these songs be as impactful without her specific, “Ms. Gen Z” persona? I don’t know. But I say it doesn’t really matter - because could this music even exist without her persona? Could someone with another persona have written these songs? I doubt it. The whole package, her personality and her music, feels extremely authentic and inseparable to me.

The album gets better the longer you listen. You kind of have to fall into a trance to really get into it though - like match your breath to the beat, stare into space for a minute, let your eyes unfocus. Inhale, exhale. Downward dog. 

All in all I’m a few steps closer to getting Billie Eilish - I don’t actively dislike her music - but I still can’t get into the all-caps. Millennials are afraid of all caps, it feels like you’re yelling at us. We’re just out here trying to survive, y’all.

Jams

• “WILDFLOWER”

• “THE GREATEST”

• “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”

Short N Sweet - Sabrina Carpenter

The production of this album is flawless, but to me it feels very plastic. This album feels like more of an effort to capitalize on social media fame than an honest musical effort - the songs are all hook, and even the best hooks feel like social media bait more than anything. That seems to be Carpenter’s business model, though; hooks and one-liners designed for TikTok. And identifying a successful business model, then executing it flawlessly, is arguably one kind of genius even if it’s not everyone’s favorite kind.

The beats are enjoyable and bouncy, and her voice is big, which is kind of at odds with the uncomfortable-to-watch pre-teen aura she seems to put off. This is pop designed to be pop, with all the good stuff at the surface with little hidden underneath. But hey, that’s perfectly fair; it’s a tried and true route to success, and every generation is entitled to reinvent the tried and true in their own way.

To be totally clear, this album is not bad. It’s actually closer to perfection, from a certain point of view - it’s exactly what it’s designed to be. But it feels like an actress/influencer making an album as a promotional tool, not a musician making music to authentically express herself. She’s bouncing around genres to see what sticks (see the insanely awkward country-thing “Slim Pickins” and the R&B experiment “Don’t Smile”). It feels like she’s saying “Idk who I am as a musician, so here are some options. You pick!”

To be fair, “Espresso” is an absolute bubblegum banger despite the above complaints, and the world can never have too many of those.

While I’m improving when it comes to my acceptance of pop for pop’s sake, this album was difficult to embrace musically. I guess I get why it’s popular - it’s almost like today’s version of easy listening, with no brainpower required to bop to the beats, the only thing to shock your mind back into activity being the occasional lewd reference or inexplicable genre change. I just don’t value the traits that make it so popular, which is probably a reflection of my exhaustion with social media as anything else. Social media stars, and those who pursue that kind of ten-second-soundbyte fame, rub me the wrong way. And this music is so entwined with the influencer and Disney kid vibe that I don’t know how to separate the two. Would I like it if I hadn’t been on Instagram in the past year? I’m not sure, but I’d probably like it more.

Jams

• “Espresso”

The Tortured Poets Department - Taylor Swift

Here’s a fun thought experiment - is Taylor Swift creating a new version of the blues? Her music isn’t technically that similar to the blues, but there’s an element of cathartic expression in the self-confessional sad bedroom pop genre she’s spearheading that reminds me of the blues. It’s made up of new topics and new voices, but the main joy to be found is in the music, in the hope for better days expressed by the major chords and sometimes the lyrics. That’s the blues, baby. We’re in music’s sad girl blues-reinvention era, and it’s resonating with tons of people around the world. And like the blues, the downcast vibes of these songs isn’t just complaining - it’s tinged with hope, images of overcoming whatever’s got you down by becoming a badass, as in “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?”.

I feel like this theory has the potential to make everyone on the internet mad at the same time. Taylor Swift sings Gen Z’s version of the blues. Send all complaints to my agent.

My only musical issue with this album is the somewhat tired-sounding production from Jack Antonoff. It feels like he’s used up all his tricks at this point. It never gets in the way, and it shouldn’t considering T Swift needs her songwriting at the forefront anyway, but it’s not like the days of 1989 when the production drove the songs as much as anything else. He’s entered the realm where his die-hard supporters will cry “minimalism is the best kind of art” while the rest of us get bored and move on to more interesting beats, like my off-balance washing machine, for example.

The most enjoyable parts are mellow and background-y (“Down Bad”, “Fortnight”), with only one fun song on the whole album that still has “new blues” (TM) undercurrents (“I Can Do It With A Broken Heart”). Also, “Florida” is unintentionally hilarious. I don’t know what the message is supposed to be, but I literally laugh out loud when I hear it. FLORIDAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. It’s like a battle cry.

There are some artists where you get the feeling they’re trying to write more intelligently than they’re really capable of - T Swift is the exact opposite. I get the feeling she has to simplify and edit her songs to make them as approachable as possible. That’s purely speculation, though. Maybe she just naturally hits that sweet spot, intuitively sprinkling on a few grains of her brand of intellectuality to spice up the pop base layer without over-doing it. But I think it’s more fun to imagine it’s all intentional string-pulling.

Nothing I heard on this album makes me think T Swift isn’t the mastermind she claims to be. But even a mastermind can get stuck in a rut - T Swift might not be there yet, but her tires have started spinning just a little.

Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess - Chappell Roan

I’ve noticed some recurring themes in my exploration of the top of the 2024 charts. Chappell Roan hits them all:

Theme 1: “I’ve been good, now it’s time to be bad”

Theme 2: “We broke up and now your life sucks”

Theme 3: “I’m hot, let’s dance”

Theme 4: Always pronouncing the letter O at the end of a word like it has an umlaut (why does everyone say “uhh” while making an “O” shape with their mouth? What is this new Gen Z accent?)

This album is the result of a long, hard slog for Chappell Roan to make it to the top. Even though she was essentially discovered via Youtube, she’s the definition of a working musician, and it’s pretty cool to see someone have this level of success after so long in the trenches - it seems she’s rejecting the attention as much as she possibly can, which makes me think she’s even more authentic in her blue collar musical roots.

There’s real creative energy here. Sometimes artists can yield to inertia when trying to fill out an album - but this album feels like it was edited down from a larger pool of songs rather than expanded to fill the space. The variety is pleasant, and so is the performance, although the vocal “flicks” and yodels were a little heavy-handed at times. 90% of the time the yodel comes across like a little exasperated sigh at the end of each note - like she’s pissed about something but also exhausted about it.

The Midwest makes zero appearances, to my knowledge, but it seems the story here is about her leaving the whitebread land of her upbringing and seeing the wide world for the first time, her personality and awareness expanding into the larger universe she now occupies. The message I take away from this quest is shallow at first glance - shit sucks, so let’s dance - but who ever said Gen Z doesn’t deserve a little escapism to deal with the crazy-ass world we’ve handed them?

Jams

• “After Midnight”

• “Pink Pony Club”

This Is How Tomorrow Moves - beabadoobee

If you’re a 90’s alt-rock fan, this will be your favorite out of this selection by far. Look past the voice that could belong to a 16 year old, and you can imagine that her Spotify Wrapped is full of Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails and 90’s alternative jams that have influenced her sound. The lyrics sound well-read, there are actual, honest-to-god guitars on a lot of the tracks, and the songwriting is stellar. Beabadoobee has brought guitar pop to the mainstream in a way I wasn’t expecting to hear in 2024.

The only negative is the cover - why does she look so confused? Beabadoobee is the least confused of anyone I’ve listened to this week - she’s self assured in her songwriting, confident in where she comes from musically, and seems unafraid of writing music for herself and not for the algorithm. None of the other top of the charts artists are even in the same league as the songwriting on this album - and it’s not remotely close.

These days not writing music to target an algorithm is in itself an act of rebellion. For a generation whose lives have been dictated by algorithms and feeds and phones, this makes perfect sense, and it’s a rebellion I’m fully onboard with. Between the alt-rock influences and the subtextual rebellion, I’m totally onboard with Beabadoobee. (Damn, I guess it’s beabadoobee, all lower case. I guess I’m too old to understand, but I’ll be doing my best not to mis-Case anybody else in the future).

Jams

• “California”

• “Girl Song”

• “Ever Seen”

• “Everything I Want”

Guts - Olivia Rodrigo

All lower case instead of Billie Eilish’s all caps. Is capitalization the next cultural battle of this generation? I just need to know so I can get onboard the train.

OK, this one is a year old now, but thanks to Rodrigo’s ongoing tour it’s still been all over the mainstream, plus I already listened to it and I’m not turning back now. It’s new enough and it’s totally new to me, so we’re going with it.

If T Swift is reinventing the blues for today’s generation, it feels like Rodrigo is trying to reinvent punk-pop. That’s not to say that true punk aficionados will recognize their favorite music except a surface-level resemblance here and there, but that’s why I called it a reinvention. It’s got totally different input energy than the punk of old, but it’s undeniably filtered through the punk vibe filter - a little angry and a little unserious and totally over the bullshit.

Her influences seem to be everywhere - “Making the Bed” could be a Taylor Swift B-side, and “Logical” sounds, complete with the “s” pronounced “sh”, like “it wash all in my mind. She sounds like a major music fan inspired by her favorites and making these songs as an homage to them. Great reason to make music, if you ask me. She also has a weird country-lite song just like Carpenter, which is an interesting trend. Are pop stars starting to be country-curious again? Or is this just another tribute to a favorite artist of Rodrigo’s youth? It’s hard to tell, but somehow even with the varied influences, this still feels like a relatively confident and cohesive album.

eternal sunshine - Ariana Grande

I’m no producer, but I don’t believe it’s possible for Ariana Grande’s voice to be more in your face than it is on this album. Her main vocals are mixed so far to the front you forget there’s music behind her, and on top of that you’re assaulted by a chorus of more Arianas from all sides, singing harmonies and multiplying like an Attack of the Clones. They have you surrounded and they’re not going to let you forget it. The mix and the music is all about her voice, almost to the point of narcissism.

But to be fair, she’s clearly the most talented pure singer on this list. That’s not lost on Ariana - her brand is like the mega-voiced divas of the 90’s and 2000’s, with the songs serving her voice and her persona rather than the other way around. There are lots of sparkly Disney dreamland vibes, which I suspect are mostly an act of branding. She acts very spacey and the music fits that, which on the one hand achieves a very consistent brand, but on the other hand I refuse to believe someone with so much talent is actually an airhead in real life as the occasional Insta posts the algorithm sends me about her would have me believe. I think it’s an act to appear more relatable, hiding the genius within for the simple fact that America hates smart people.

It’s cool that she makes it seem so easy and acts like she’s just kind of bopping along through life. But I also hate that fact because it probably makes people think she didn’t work her ass off to get to this level of singing prowess. I hate when artists underplay the amount of work it took them to get to their level - why hide that under the rug? Why not be proud of how hard you’ve worked? I get that they want a cool, DGAF image, but it sucks that our society doesn’t see the grind as the cool part.

This album is calculating and shrewd, and Ariana Grande has undoubtedly inspired millions of singers with her talent. But it’s interesting to me in the way a story about a CEO is interesting. Impressive, but there’s not much human connection and nothing drawing me back in.

And here are parts 1 and 2 for fun if you missed them. The list so far includes albums by: Wu-Tang Clan, The Breeders, De La Soul, Yo La Tengo, Depeche Mode, Pearl Jam, Liz Phair, PJ Harvey, Nirvana, Snoop Dogg, Smashing Pumpkins, and A Tribe Called Quest.

Best albums of 1993 - Part 3

Black Sunday - Cypress Hill

I’m coming to the conclusion that despite my East Coast upbringing, I’m a West Coast guy when it comes to the golden age of hip hop. I’m still learning about the genre’s roots, so it seems like every new album I hear during my exploration of the 90’s is even more definitive than the last. This album and this group are even more emblematic of the west coast sound as I know it than previous favorites like Snoop Dogg and the Pharcyde. G-funk is slowly weaseling its way into my heart right alongside Grunge and my precious, precious 2000’s rap-metal (am I joking? Do I really love rap-metal or is this some kind of sick joke? Do I do it all for the nookie? Stick around to find out).

The feelings this album creates are more complex than you might imagine when you picture the biggest single, “Insane in the Brain.” There’s plenty of bizarro subject matter and G-funk style beats, plus the standard confrontational boasty early 90’s hip-hop hallmarks, but on top of that this album has a twisted feeling like you’re in a battle of wits with the Joker. The sounds and rhythms distort ever so slightly, while B-Real and Sen Dog throw their wild don’t-give-a-damn loco vocals over the top. It makes you feel like you’re in a smoke-filled basement or the parking lot of an L.A. Shell gas station either having a dance battle or tripping on shrooms, depending on the song.

You can also hear, for better or worse, the precursors of what I can only fondly refer to as “early 2000’s shit-rock” in their sound as well, the inspirations for what would eventually become the broader genre of nu-metal and maybe nu-punk. Don’t get me wrong, I love some nu-metal and rap-metal as much as any other card-carrying millennial, but that genre was perhaps the most hit or miss genre that’s ever existed. The gulf between the best and worst rap-metal emulators of the Cypress Hill sound is HUGE - to me, only Country can boast such a wide spread between its best and worst moments. Imagine having Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine in one subgenre? Crazy how difference the quality levels can be.

But Cypress Hill themselves are among the best in the G-Funk sound. The blend of west coast hip hop and hispanic influences and attitudes is just perfect (not to mention the mixing that was done largely while tripping on ‘shrooms - chef’s kiss). It’s a melting pot of the west coast itself, a cultural smoothie that just works. This is one of my favorite albums I’ve heard in the past year.

Better believe this one’s getting blasted at the BBQ this weekend.

Jams

• “I Wanna Get High”

• “Insane In The Brain”

• “When The Shit Goes Down”

• “3 Lil’ Putos”

Debut - Bjork

Dancey acidy trippy experimenty. It feels like the soundtrack that should be playing over a montage of an old school chemist tossing a dash of this and a dash of that into a beaker, brightly colored fluids mixing and steaming and bubbling into psychedelic concoctions. 

I couldn’t predict any of the sounds, the direction of the songs, any of it. There’s a sense that the singer knows things, like the art people who claimed to see deeper meaning in that weird-ass painting of King Charles that was all over the internet a few months ago (the symbolism is that it’s super duper red, if you didn’t notice), but Bjork isn’t trying to wall off her heightened artistic sensibilities or lord them over you, she’s trying to share them. I could almost pretend to fit in at a modern art museum with this playing in my headphones.

I don’t know many artists who could convincingly take us from the dance hall to a harpist’s chamber so convincingly without making it feel contrived. There’s no moment where it doesn’t feel like we’re getting all of Bjork, her voice and personality and limitless creativity. Her voice ranges far and wide in step with her songwriting. I could see her being a huge influence for artists in several different genres - the obvious dance-house-poppers like Robyn (and lately Due Lipa, maybe?), dream-poppers, experimentalists across disco and hip hop, and even some adventurous indie rockers. But Bjork could also be a more general symbol for artists who just want to invent without limits. It’s somewhat miraculous to me that Bjork had the commercial success she did, while not even remotely pretending to cater to a mass market audience, at least not on the surface level.

I think the biggest pop stars are usually the most approachable, and approachable can mean many things, many angles through which the audience relates to the music. Bjork’s angle of relatability is different in every song, and somehow instead of making the album unapproachable, this functions like a musical roundabout, pulling you in from all different directions and taking you for a ride around the circle until you find the exit you want and veer off in whatever direction suits you best.

Very - Pet Shop Boys

Pet Shop Boys are one of those acts I might have described as a guilty pleasure back when I thought Pop was a dumb genre. They ornament their pop in every almost-lame way imaginable, with strings and horns and synths and superficially intriguing lyrics, and it’s the poppiest of the poppy. Every beat and chord change is straightforward to the point of trope, but they lean into it so hard it doesn’t sound contrived. 

I’m actually at a loss to explain why I like Pet Shop Boys so much relative to my expectations. Maybe it’s because their goofy album covers put you in a totally unpretentious state of mind (at least until this album, which featured a cover with raised bumps like a fancy handbag and was featured in the MoMA) that, for me at least, makes me assume they’re being unserious most of the time. And like most things melodramatic, the biggest determinant of cringeyness to me is the artist’s intent - in this case, my assumption that they’re partly just screwing around makes me love what I’m hearing. If I thought they were serious or tone-deaf, I’d probably do a 180 on my opinion. But this isn’t lame synth-pop, it’s regular synth-pop with a hint of satire, or so my brain tells me. That might not be true, but it’s true in my head and it totally transforms the experience.

Pablo Honey - Radiohead

Radiohead. Oh, Radiohead. You released this album in a more innocent time in your career, a time long before you would confound me with another album the entire music industry has convinced themselves they love, an album that represents perhaps the greatest existential threat to Jamwise and my quest to become a good, open, and fair music listener - it shall remained unnamed for now, since we’re still lost somewhere in 1993, but it’s always there on the horizon, looming abstractly. Pablo Honey is the tortured teenage poppy alt rock offering that started your career; music I could, if not fully love, at least understand. 

Some Jamwise readers might have noticed my running gag about Radiohead and thought I outright disliked the band, or that I never even gave them a chance. Not totally true - I even owned Pablo Honey on CD, a purchase that represented a big investment for me at the time, namely a couple of weeks of cutting my parents’ grass and raking the mountains of oak leaves that fell in their front yard in exchange for an allowance. As much as possible for my age, I’m a Radiohead OG, for better or worse. 

But none of Radiohead’s later work is in focus today. This is their debut, and it’s an album I actually listened to quite a bit in the late 90’s/early 2000’s when I became old enough to discover it. There’s a specific time in many teenagers’ lives where Radiohead’s brand of gloomy whine hits close to home - and although I have no clue what caused those feelings in my own life, for a little while, roughly from the ages of 11-13, Radiohead actually hit right. I think discovering this album led me down a musical tangent where I discovered many such emotional songs, to the point where my mom thought I was going through a phase and started feeding me even more than usual.

I don’t know when I gave up on Radiohead. I discovered their debut after the infamous Kid A had already been released - maybe even then, a young Dave stumbled across Kid A and thought “this must be my punishment for seeking out new music. Better stick to what I know from now on.” Maybe Radiohead is singlehandedly responsible for forcing me to only listen within my comfort zone for so many years. I don’t know.

While there’s some science behind the idea that repeated listens often make us enjoy music more, this is a case where repeated listens have dimmed my excitement level considerably. Some songs still give me a little jolt of enjoyment like they used to, but it’s more like I’m remembering when I was a pre-teen with my life problems still hazy and unformed, which I think is the only frame of mind when Radiohead actually makes sense. Today, with the problems in life more or less clear in front of me, the aimless loathing of life that Radiohead built their sound upon just doesn’t do much for me.

August and Everything After - Counting Crows

I have a somewhat unique relationship to the song “Omaha” from this album. I was a college baseball player (for those that don’t know, university sports are huge in the US, and baseball, while a much smaller audience than American football, is still a fairly well-liked college sport). The yearly baseball championship, known as the College World Series, is played in a city called Omaha, Nebraska. So Omaha is kind of a mantra for college baseball players, the vision of success that you’d remind yourself of every day. My team printed “Omaha” all over our gear in little places as a reminder - getting to Omaha was the goal. So of course they played the song “Omaha” at every baseball stadium we visited, during pregame warmups or between innings; everywhere you went, it was on. When I hear it, I smell fresh-cut grass and get a mini stress-daydream that the game’s about to start and I’m not ready yet, plus I forgot how to throw a curveball since I haven’t played in 13 years. Good times.

The rest of this album is kind of a yin-yang situation for me. “Mr. Jones” might be the perfect pop-alt song, too flawless to even describe at this point in its lifecycle after 30 years of radio overplay. But the rest of the album is down, man. I don’t know what’s going wrong with the protagonist in these songs, but damn, life is not going his way at all. I’d never realized how much Radiohead is in Counting Crows’ sound, but it sounds like the gloomy weather I imagine fills every day in Radiohead’s Oxfordshire migrated over to California while Counting Crows were writing these songs.

Jams

• “Around Here”

• “Omaha”

• “Mr. Jones”

So Tonight That I Might See - Mazzy Star

This dreamy album was almost totally new to me except the classic opening track “Fade Into You”. Evidence suggests that 1993 was a year of many problems for the alt rock acts of the day, but this album feels like Mazzy Star chose to dissociate completely from their worldly worries rather than put them to a straightforward melody and cry about them like their peers. Or maybe instead of wearing their feelings on their sleeves for all the ladies and concerned parents to see like Radiohead and Counting Crows did, Mazzy Star is simply seeking empathy from some higher and more ephemeral power.

It’s sleepy and folksy, a nice counterpoint to the about-to-explode 1993 alt scene. Soon enough the idea of alt rock as a sideshow would be thrown out the window, and the bands that smack you in the face with emotion painted in bright primary colors would find a fitting home in the world of pop. Next to that backdrop, Mazzy Star feels like a pastel watercolor in the best way.

Tuesday Night Music Club - Sheryl Crow

The album is named for the group of musicians that came together every Tuesday to make this album, and that was a perfect vibe choice - it suggest a casual approach to both the songwriting and the recording, and it’s believable. It makes you feel like you’re listening to a group of friends making an album for fun instead of something scripted and master-planned, which I’m sure it was.

I don’t know how Sheryl Crow’s voice sounds so effortless and cool, but it does. It gives her a casual kind of swagger that many artists have miserably failed to achieve. There’s a special kind of brilliance required to make things sound this easy, and you know it’s great when it inspires lesser talents to imitation. It might sound doable and might give many the confidence to try, but that only serves to embarrass the pretenders and show how great the master truly is.

My Liked playlist is the best record of this trend. When I filter by Date Added, I see streaks of a month or two when I was furiously searching for new music, and then several months might pass before I found anything new. I’m not entirely sure what I was doing between these bursts of new music - I was probably either listening to my old playlists, overplaying the new songs I’d just found, or not listening to much music at all. I’ve been streaky like that in pretty much every hobby in my life, so it makes sense.

But the weirdest thing about that inconsistency is that I know the positive effects music has on my life. When I work, for example, I know I don’t get as much done without music on. I’m distractible and bouncing around until I put on something ambient or familiar to drown out the noise. I notice when I’m not listening to music, but for one reason or another I sometimes still avoid it. Maybe I try to justify that by thinking I should be able to focus without music. Or maybe it’s just laziness, or the fact that I don’t have anything new in my playlists, or just force of habit.

I don’t really think about leisure activities as things I need to form a consistent habit around. I figure I’ll do fun stuff when I feel like it, so what’s the point of making a habit around my fun activities? Habits are dull, fun stuff should be spontaneous, right?

To my surprise, I’ve actually found that not to be the case. I’ve been listening to multiple new albums consistently for almost a year now as a part of this project, and I’ve actually found that the habit, the weekly-ish cadence of listening to new music and reflecting on what I’ve heard, has increased my enjoyment of the music I hear - not to mention the known music I also listen to from time to time. A habit has made my leisure activity even more enjoyable, and has injected zero stress into it, as I might have once feared.

I think the reason is that habits remove the “decision fatigue” involved in choosing what to do. Decision fatigue is even worse when there’s so much music to choose from. So what I’ve done, inadvertently, is created a habit of listening to something totally new to me without worrying about whether I’ll like it. This has removed all decision fatigue from the process, which lowers any residual stress that might have been involved and makes the music even more enjoyable. Consistency, even in a fun leisure activity like listening to music, has immense benefits. Good habits are fun, and I’ll have to find some more places to apply that in my life.

Project BAE - Best Albums Ever

I have to admit, I went a little nuts this week with the 1993 albums. I just couldn’t contain myself, so there’s going to be a part 3. And three parts still won’t even cover the whole list I wanted to get through. I don’t know why 1993 seems like an overlooked year, to be honest - it’s simply loaded. We’ll see if 1994 lives up to the hype compared to this.

So now in no particular order, here are 6 more dope albums from 1993. I’ll accept further recommendations as always, but it might be similar to offering a hotdog to Joey Chestnut after he just finished an eating contest. I’m stuffed, dog.

Also part one is below, in case you missed it.

Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) - Wu-Tang Clan

Note - it was a little hard to find the original album on Spotify. The OG track list contained the censored versions of the songs, which are a little bit pointless for many of these songs. So the link is to the expanded edition, which includes the original tracklist with a few extras. I listened to the original tracklist based on the expanded edition above, then went back for the deluxe version later just for fun.

Is grunge rap a thing? This has the grimy energy of a grunge-alt album layered with the NY undergound sound. It’s nerdy and smooth, like a comic book store owner who goes all Clark Kent on us and tears up clubs on the weekend. It’s also dusty and analog-sounding, a collection of weird beats and samples that find ways to support no less than nine vocalists as we’re introduced to the Wu-Tang Clan and their obsession with verbal and nonverbal kung-fu.

The history and lore around this album has a distinct effect on how much I enjoyed it, and I can’t help but think that’s the way the creators would want it. Wu-Tang members released album after album of uniqueness on the momentum of this album, and I find that knowledge only enhances how cool the introductions on Enter the Wu-Tang sound today. The music stands on its own, but lore is just as awesome sometimes.

Jams

• “Bring Da Ruckus”

• “C.R.E.A.M.”

• “Method Man” (after the skit, anyway)

Last Splash - The Breeders

I had quite a journey listening to this album. I admit I had to go through it about four times before anything really stuck in my head. By the fourth time through, though, I felt like I’d known the songs forever. It was a strange experience; maybe it’s because of the mumbly garage alt rock sound, where the lyrics are mere hints rather than understandable words, with the vocals mixed so far back it’s hard to tell if they’re intentional at all, but something about this album wormed its way into my head like a worm might do to the heart-apple on its cover.

I’m no sound engineer, but to me the recording equipment is overpowered by the actual energy of these songs. To put it another way, I felt a very mellow, fuzzy energy from this album’s mixing - but at the same time, I fully believe a live show comprised of the same songs would be LIT. There’s clearly so much power in the songs, but it’s like the producers decided to turn up the fuzz and turn down every other slider until these well-written and nuanced songs almost turned into static. In songs like “Drivin’ On 9” this fuzz adds to the song’s intended effect, the vocals fading in and out like an old school microphone. But the bigger-bones songs almost overshadow themselves (lol yes I know how pretentious that sounds lol. “It insists upon itself” as the memes would say). I found myself trying to “squint” with my ears to see the full picture through the haze.

But the songs are plain awesome. When they’re imperfect it’s in a very human and endearing way, with ebbing and flowing energy throughout the album that keeps you hooked. There are a lot of distinct varied songs in 39 minutes, and they grow on you more with every repeat listen.

Jams

• “New Year”

• “Cannonball”

• “Flipside”

• “Drivin’ On 9”

Buhloone Mindstate - De La Soul

This album illustrates one major trend I’m noticing in my music taste - anything nonserious, joking, or the least bit self-aware is my absolute jam. De La Soul’s entire premise to this album is that it, like a balloon, “might blow up, but it won’t go pop.” The group was worried about alienating their fanbase by becoming too mainstream, too pop, and this was their response. They make fun of themselves, examine their own sound, and poke at the record labels who would presumably steer them in a more poppy direction to sell more albums. It’s a lot of fun.

I think the root of humor is awareness, and by extension to make fun of oneself requires a high level of self-awareness. There are few things worse to me than music that’s painfully not self-aware (Katy Perry, anybody?), but the artists who know who they are, where they fit in, and most importantly don’t take themselves too seriously are the absolute best.

I try not to take myself too seriously, and albums like this are great reminders to keep pursuing that mindset. I’ll come back to this one for the jazz-infused beats, and I’ll stay for the reminder that music - both creating and consuming it - is supposed to be fun.

Jams

• “3 Days Later”

• “In The Woods”

Painful - Yo La Tengo

I’ve started to see every album that has an element of ambience or abstraction as an opportunity to approach an emerging goal of this newsletter, which is to “get” ambient music. This isn’t ambient by any stretch, but it does have that shoegaze sound that employs lots of droning riffs and noises that hypnotize you into letting the music float you along. My ADHD struggles with that, especially with the noisy interjections sprinkled through this album that jar you out of any dream-state you might achieve. I found “Big Day Coming” the most funny in that it expresses the band’s excitement for what’s to come, that they can hardly wait, while the music meanders along like a dreamer with nowhere to go at all and no urgency to get there.

I don’t mean this in a negative way, but this is boredom music. It’s the feeling of sitting in your room before the internet and scratching the cool “S” into the wood of your bedroom wall, then hiding it behind the curtains so your parents don’t see. It’s a kid doing the rubber pencil thing, or giving themself an “injection” with a mechanical pencil, or sticking their fingers in their ears and going “la la la la la” just to fill the silence. Was the 90’s a boring time? Was all this pent up boredom the reason all the technology that was about to come hit us all over the head like a ton of bricks?

In the end, there’s a fine line between boredom and meditation. It’s all about your intentions. My capitalism-conditioned brain struggles with the idea of letting go and just being bored and in the moment for a while, but this album seems designed around that very idea, and a little purposeful boredom is good for us from time to time.

Jams

• “Nowhere Near”

• “Sudden Organ”

Songs of Faith And Devotion - Depeche Mode

I’m learning that I’m a sucker for the industrial music sound. Maybe I worked in a factory for too long. Maybe I’m turning into a robot of some kind. But not the kind that’s trying to take my place as a writer and destroy art and make a bunch of tech bros temporarily rich before the upcoming tech market crash, but the good kind of robot, like the big friendly robot from The Iron Giant. Or Wall-E, maybe. He was one of the good ones for sure.

Depeche mode is industrial-adjacent at times, with a longing sound and a deep automatic-sounding energy driving each track. The emotional content borders on melodrama at times, but if you buy into the experience it’s not a problem at all. Just pretend you’re in a stadium-sized support group and everybody’s also trying to get over their inner stuff, and you’ll get right into it.

Jams

• “I Feel You”

• “Condemnation”

• “Get Right With Me”

Vs. - Pearl Jam

Early Pearl Jam, man. I gotta say - I started this project to get away from listening to my 90’s alt rock and grunge favorites endlessly, to break away from the cycle of mostly loving music that my demographic is supposed to love.

But even more than 300 albums into my quest, Pearl Jam just scratches an itch in my head. I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation - music during our brain’s formative years, and all that - but I don’t even care about that. Pearl Jam is connected to so many great memories that I’ll never be able to look at their music with fresh eyes. I’ll always see college road trips and basement ping pong tournaments and the first time I saw PJ in concert - when Eddie Vedder handed his onstage wine bottle (a common move of his, at the time) to the guy next to me and we finished it to the guitar solo of “Alive.”

I’ll always associate Pearl Jam’s music with my first electric guitar, with the guitar tabs (a quick and easy way to avoid actually learning to read music) I’d print out on the school computer and put in my binders to study all day before going home and trying to learn to play the songs.

I can honestly say I’ll never understand people who dislike Pearl Jam - not because I think they’re wrong, or because there aren’t legitimate reasons to dislike the band, but because I simply don’t have the distance from PJ’s music to make a fair evaluation. I’ll just never get it, no matter how passionately someone might make the case that they’re the worst band ever formed. I’ve been getting better at identifying music I like that many wouldn’t, and understanding the reasons behind that difference of opinion, but not in this case. PJ simply can’t be one of those bands for me, and I figure it’s better to be honest than pretend to tolerate any slander against the band’s dopeness. If you don’t like them, you’re not wrong, I’m just going to use my prerogative as a fan and choose not to understand your opinion because it’ll just ruin my fun.

But in all seriousness, I think everyone needs that one band (or more, for the lucky) who makes them fall in love with their music without any logical reason necessary. That’s the best part of being a fan, after all.

As for Pearl Jam’s second album - Vs. is full of classics, it’s got the wild energy of a young band in their prime, and although nothing can quite match Ten in my mind, this album makes a dang good effort.

Jams

• “Animal”

• “Daughter”

• “Dissident”

• “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town”

So I thought it would be good for posterity (translation: me in six months when I forget) to put that summary in the main post. Many people don’t get the email header if they subscribe through Substack, so here it is (apologies if you’re reading this for the second time in your inbox):

Welcome to Jamwise, my newsletter about how to be a better music listener. I explore the idea of listening critically in order to understand our tastes, reflect on our relationship with music, and most importantly, to find more music we love. Because critical listening shouldn’t be a formal skill reserved for critics and music theory students - it’s something we can all do.

Jamwise is 100% free. The best way you can support is by subscribing and sharing with someone else, or better yet, leaving a comment. Tell me what you think, what you’re listening to, or just say hi.

Thanks for being here!

So there you have it - Jamwise is about learning to listen critically. But I want to take a slightly different approach compared to the traditional way some people think of critical listening. I’m not a critic, dissecting music to see how it works and killing the joy of it in the process. I’m also not listening critically in order to meet some false standard of “coolness” by proving how savvy and smart I am about music, or to somehow prove that I have superior taste (not a thing). I’m listening critically for a very simple reason: to understand what music I like, why I like it, and to use that knowledge to find more music I like.

To be honest, “critical” listening might be too intense of a definition for what I’m trying to do. I’m engaging in something more like “reflective” listening. I often think more about why I feel the way I do than the objective quality of the music itself, although it’s difficult to separate the two sometimes. I want to learn about myself and the world as much as I learn about music - that’s my version of critical listening. It’s inward and outward at the same time. I’m working on it, but that’s why I chose a newsletter as the outlet for this project - it’s meant to evolve over time, and it will.

So that’s Jamwise in a nutshell: I’m exploring, together with all of you, my relationship with music through reflective listening. By doing so, I hope to encourage people to listen more critically and reflectively - not to “improve” their music taste, but to understand it and use it for their own joy.

Best Albums of 1993, part 1

I heavily considered staying in 1992 for another week, which is becoming be the universal Millennial dream at this point. It was an awesome year with lots of great music, but at some point I want to actually get back to the present day, so we have to move on to 1993. I appreciate all the additional 1992 recs - I’ve been listening through them and realizing I should have spent that year jamming to all the new music instead of learning to eat solid foods. Live and learn.

1993 was also a momentous year - I’m pretty sure I said my first word, which was “ball” - and the music scene was almost as exciting.

Any favorites you see missing from the list? I’d love to hear about them!

Exile In Guyville - Liz Phair

Exile in Guyville was Liz Phair’s celebrated debut album. The story behind it is pretty fascinating - it was recorded in Chicago with pretty much only Phair and her producer playing every instrument, giving it a raw and unpolished sound. It’s also famously a loosely-structured response to The Rolling Stones album Exile on Main St., although the response isn’t apparent in the music for the most part. Instead, it’s intended as a conceptual counter to the Stones’ album’s constant celebration of male debauchery, mostly related to taking advantage of and bragging about their exploits with women. Phair’s response to that is twofold; some songs explore the way the Stones’ style of philandering affects the women involved (spoiler - it sucks - insert surprised Pikachu face). And second, if the guys down in Guyville can act that way, why can’t women debauch just as hard as men and brag about it too? Liz Phair does so memorably. I do think the comparisons to Exile On Main St. are kind of overblown and obscuring, however. That’s just one of those stories the media gets hold of and can’t contain themselves, and it blows completely out of proportion. To me, this album stands better on its own.

If you’d heard Liz Phair singing these songs in a coffee bar in the early 90’s, with her constantly almost off-key style of singing, you might not think much of it. And if you did, you either had a copy of the lyrics or you’d heard the songs before - the simple instrumentation and production aren’t attention-grabbers, and the subject matter requires some interpretation to get the full effect. Only then do you realize the way she intonates is a perfect match for what she’s saying, combining to create the “over your bullshit” vibe.

Some music requires deeper immersion to “get it” - I’ve never had much success with this in the past, but I feel like I’m improving as I hear more and more music with depth that has to be explored to understand. Exile in Guyville is a case where the immersion and deeper listening (and a copy of the lyrics) paid off for me. The context of the times, and Phair’s life at the time, is important to understanding why this album is interesting and relatable to many people - unless you’re just a master of poetic analysis and you can get all of that meaning straight from the lyrics, which I personally can’t. So I’m happy to say that I get the artistic value, I definitely get the cultural value, and Liz Phair is just plain cool. 

Rid of me - PJ Harvey

This is PJ Harvey’s version of angst 2.0, now tinged with something like professionalism, or polish, or just more self-assurance, not that any were lacking on her debut. It’s a clear development of her music that remains dark and ironic throughout.

It’s fascinating how the threads of grunge, a genre in which PJ Harvey is often lumped, seemed to almost dead end in 1993 (the year changes depending who you ask), but PJ Harvey’s thread continued so strongly and so uniquely. Grunge was one of those weird musical cul-de-sacs where the normal cycle of “rebels invent a new sound” to “toned down version of the new sound for the masses” didn’t really happen on a big scale. But not for PJ Harvey. Looking back, she really stood apart from grunge, alt rock, and riot grrrl. A motivated listener could find elements of each in her sound, but not on every album. PJ liked to change her sound, her look, even her persona on each album, the only rule being “no repeats.” If there’s ever been a philosophy I can get behind, that’s it. And it’s probably a big reason she’s had such a long career, with her latest album in 2023 receiving all kinds of critical praise and a Grammy nomination. Sure, Pearl Jam and some of their peers continued down the grunge path for years, but their later efforts (as much as I love them) seem more like nostalgia-preservers than anything groundbreaking. But somehow PJ Harvey kept her music fresh and evolving with the times, like her own little thread of where the early 90’s alt sound could have evolved.

Jams

• “Missed”

• “Run ‘Til It Bleeds”

In Utero - Nirvana

Nirvana’s last album before Kurt Cobain’s death was an attempt to get away from what was, in the band’s view, the too-polished sound used on Nevermind. I think they succeeded - the recording is fuzzier, less transparent, as if you can feel the room they’re recording in (actually the same studio where PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me was recorded), whereas on Nevermind you can’t even imagine them being in a room at all. Nevermind was digital sounding, while In Utero sounds like it’s coated with wood and vinyl and dust. The songs themselves are very much siblings to those of Nevermind, however, and the band was clearly still at the top of their game as trailblazers of the Seattle sound.

The only critique I have is a minor one - this album has less all-time singles than Nevermind, although as I wrote about Nirvana before, the amount of absolutely perfect tunes on this album would more than satisfy any other band. Talk about looking for clouds on a sunny day, Dave. I guess Nirvana’s music can do that to you.

Jams

• “Polly”

• “Heart Shaped Box”

• “Dumb”

Midnight Marauders - A Tribe Called Quest

This album feels like a total 180 from the hip-hop trends in the early 90’s. It’s still got that signature 90’s sound from the perspective of 2024, but it’s unforced and tight, without relying on any super-extreme elements like the other big names of the late 80’s and early 90’s seemed to do. It seems like the big, bad east coast / west coast rappers were stuck in an escalating upward spiral, more and more extreme sounds and boasts and violence, while A Tribe Called Quest rose above that (or stayed a little bit underground, perhaps) and just focused their energy on making an album. They were an essential part of the East coast sound, of course, with the New York jazzy influence that many others employed and developed together with ATCQ, but this album feels more focused on itself than others despite the taunting and bragging that was a genre hallmark.

Jams

• “Steve Biko (Stir It Up)”

• “Award Tour”

• “Oh My God”

• “Keep It Rollin”

Doggystyle - Snoop Dogg

This fits somewhere between the murdery vibes of Ice Cube and the playful sound of groups like the Beastie Boys. There’s not much socially aware about this album - the social aspects of the subject matter are mostly limited to vices of all kinds, only social because they’re shared with friends. On the Ice Cube to Beasties spectrum (sound-wise) this is like a 4/10 - yeah I know that’s meaningless, but I can measure stuff however I want. Maybe we should say it’s 4 parts gangsta rap and 6 parts chill-out-and-party rap. Like I get the feeling Snoop wouldn’t take any shit, but that’s secondary to his desire to pump himself and his friends full of cannabis.

This is fun stuff because the beats are a blast - but the less you dive into the lyrics, the more enjoyable it is. Play it as party background noise, but maybe not on a roadtrip with the kids.

Siamese Dream - Smashing Pumpkins

Fun fact - the first “real” concert I ever attended was a Smashing Pumpkins show. I sat in the upper deck of a pretty small coliseum between a bunch of 30-somethings who were burning interesting things while my high school girlfriend pouted because she didn’t like the music and they wouldn’t sell us alcohol at the concession stand. The concert wasn’t a life-changer, that’s for sure, but it gave me a starting point to compare with when I went to my first actual awesome concert. Don’t get me wrong, the Pumpkins were great, but it taught me how much more fun it is to share awesome music with someone else vs. just enjoying it on your own (or worse, having someone being an active downer). Nothing wrong with disliking a band, but still - few musical experiences are better than a concert with a friend who’s just as big of a fan of the band as you are.

The king of fuzzy overdriven guitar, Billy Corgan, writes a decent song despite doing his best to convince you there’s something wrong with your headphones from the overblown tone on his electric guitar. I picture Billy in his basement collecting millions of effects pedals and stringing them together to see which one will make a sound most like a car spinning its wheels on a sandy road, slinging rocks into the undercarriage while the engine overheats and rain sizzles on the hood. Hashtag imagery.

The tone makes me think fondly of the $2 Walmart headphones I used to use as a kid - those things transformed even the most crystal clear and perfect recording into a treble-heavy eardrum-scarring mess, and I loved them to death. When I finally saved up the money for an iPod and the headphones that came with it, I felt like I’d grown ears for the first time compared to my old earbuds.

Don’t let that put you off, though - this is solid alt-rock, just with a weirdo hissing guitar tone that creates a big soundscape-y effect over a group of well-written songs.

Jams

• “Cherub Rock”

• “Today”

• “Mayonaise”

Look, I get the point that many have made - “there are enough best-albums-ever lists, we don’t need more.” Sure, if you’re talking about ranked lists from the big media outlets who set out to create a set-in-stone canon of the best music in the world, in ranked order, then I agree. There are plenty of mainstream lists out there - they do serve a function, as I’ll argue later, but they aren’t in short supply.

But the act of listing our favorite music is universal. Listing is a way to satisfy the human need for organization, it helps us process the wild world of music in a way we can see and understand, and it gives us a more solid way to compare our tastes with those of others. They’re tools of communication. Playlists are named the way they are because they are lists of songs, y’all (mic drop). Albums are just playlists created by the artist. They’re all freaking lists of songs. Some are in ranked order and some aren’t - but even the ones not in ranked order have an inherent ranking - songs that were chosen and songs that weren’t.

If you’ve ever listened to more than one song, congratulations! You’ve got yourself a list of songs you’ve heard in your life. If you’ve ever liked one song more than another song, congratulations! You’ve got yourself a ranked list of favorite songs. Your lists might be internal, and they might be a little fuzzy as far as what you like and why, and they might be changing all the time. But they’re lists nonetheless.

So the idea that we should stop making lists is absurd.

What’s a little bit less absurd, but still feels wrong to me, is the idea that we should stop sharing our lists.

Many, many people love to discuss their tastes with others. Even those that don’t actively take part in the discussion like to listen in - to find new music or find others who like the same music, there are a thousand reasons. This discussion is how music spreads and reaches our ears - social media, radio, streaming algorithms, blogs, and even the dreaded Top 100 lists are forms of musical discourse, and they’re essential for music to reach our ears. You could even view an artist’s album release as the ultimate statement of their musical viewpoint - a list of the songs they want to share with the world - as the most critical lists of all, when it comes to musical discussion.

I don’t think there’s anyone here who would say discussing and sharing our music preferences is a habit that needs to go away. If you do, uhhh, I think you’re lost because that’s basically the only thing I write about.

So: discourse in many forms is critical to music. We’re all in agreement, right? Good.

To contribute to good discourse, I need to know where I stand, and where my position is relative to who I’m discussing with (learning the other person’s position can be the point of the discussion, but I still have to go in knowing that they likely have a different position than me, which requires knowing my own). In other words, I need to have my thoughts organized if I’m going to effectively share them with or compare them to others.

Lists are just ways of organizing your thoughts. Organized thoughts are essential to know where you stand, and without them discussions about music preferences are impossible.

Discourse is an interchange of thoughts - multiple people sharing their ideas, which are ideally organized in some way. Even those who don’t participate directly often rely on the discourse for their own internal thinking, for discovery, to spark ideas, or to learn. Sharing organized ideas is critical.

So: Lists are essential to good musical discourse.

A little trickier is the idea of the ranked list. These can get a bit counterproductive to good discourse for the simple fact that in order for one thing to be ranked higher, another thing has to be ranked lower. This is easy to take personally - music taste is very personal, and if I connect emotionally to a song that someone else ranks lower (dislikes), it’s hard to separate their judgment of the song from judgment of the emotions I associate with it. It’s also too easy for someone to make a ranked list, go share it with the world, and then think that they need to rank their ranked list compared to others - the power of judgment goes to their head.

The line between someone making a list to organize their thoughts or making a list to showcase how smart they are is very thin on the internet.

I’m not saying that ranking things is wrong - it’s another level of mental organization, of categorizing and knowing where my musical preferences lie. And competition - the process of force ranking things - is an unavoidable part of life that can’t be shunned entirely. I’m only saying that ranking your music taste against someone else’s is nonsense because it’s not measurable - there’s no definition of good taste, bad taste, or anything between, and there never will be.

It can create a lot of noise when a gigantic organization like Rolling Stone or Pitchfork or the Grammys shares lists of their top-ranked music. For better or for worse, these large organizations are perceived to have more trustworthy or more authoritative judgment on music. This can easily lead to confusion - if I read a Rolling Stone list, is their ranking influencing my own ranking? Do I even have my own taste at all, or am I some kind of naive media sucker who only loves what I’m told to love?

These big-market lists, competitions, etc. do have a purpose. Part of that purpose is commercial, an incentive for artists to strive for to reach larger audiences and income pools. A larger part is to increase the list maker’s power and attention - to get clicks, views, money. But the most useful purpose of these lists - for music fans like us - is to raise awareness of what music is out there, and to give us a starting point of “vetted” music to consume. Whether this ability to raise awareness is wasted on those who don’t need it or not is up for debate, as is the idea that these listmakers are skilled at vetting music, but it’s clear that third party best-of lists create lots of attention and excitement for artists that wouldn’t otherwise exist. They help people start listening.

In this kind of world, I think it’s even MORE important to have my own ranked list of music in some form or fashion. It can change and evolve (and it should), but it’s also a semi-stable representation of my own musical identity, a life vest in a sea of clashing opinions. It helps me remember and trust that I do have my own taste, and that I’m not a TikTok trend-zombie masquerading as an independently thinking human. It’s only when I get too invested in my tastes, when I try to etch them in stone and stand by them come hell or high water, that I can get in trouble. Taste isn’t always permanent.

Sharing ranked lists for the average person, however, is fraught with danger - of judgment, of general online nastiness, of becoming too set in my ways because I dug in my heels during an extended argument with GunsNRosesFan420 on Reddit. It also projects a sense that my taste matters, and I’m sharing it because I’m important. Some people do have that impression of themselves, unfortunately, but for the non-sociopaths in the group, sharing lists should be treated as a discussion starter, not a flex.

Why you share your lists, especially ranked lists, matters. Bad taste doesn’t exist, but bad intentions certainly do. If you share your taste with good intentions, I’m all for it. But if you’re trying to shut down other people’s opinions rather than have a friendly discussion about them, then you have bad intentions, and you shouldn’t be sharing ranked lists. You’re defeating the purpose when you do that - defining good taste for anybody but yourself is impossible. It’s not a thing.

Your taste is good to you, mine is good to me. Maybe your taste overlaps with mine, and maybe not. Comparing can yield new ideas for both of us, but it should never lead to one person thinking their tastes are better or worse than the other’s - ranked lists of who has the “best” musical tastes should never exist. If this statement is confusing, please leave a comment.

Look, I like to start discussions on my music taste for one reason: my own gain. There you go, the cat’s out of the bag. I only post these newsletters to have discussions that lead to me knowing more about music. Oh, did you think Jamwise was free? Joke’s on you, I’m actually farming the internet for free music recommendations and wise insights and the only thing I pay for is the electrons that keep my computer running while I type this. Suckers!

But in all seriousness, I firmly believe that sharing our music taste is essential to start discussions, when it’s done the right way. GOOD: start discussions using our ranked lists as a way to compare and understand each other. BAD: compete to see whose taste is better. Let’s all be good, friends.

Aaaand… Argument complete.

Lists are critical for organizing thoughts, organized thoughts are necessary for having good discussions, and good discussions are what make the music world go ‘round.

Make your lists. Revise your lists. Share your lists. Debate your lists. Enjoy your lists. Read a Rolling Stone list if you want. Just don’t take them too seriously.

And on top of all that, there’s another pile of 1992 albums that deserve a nod, I just didn’t have enough time to listen to them all. I may never make it out of 1992. Oh well.

Part 1’s selections can be found here:

Dirt - Alice In Chains

Crawling, grimy, oily, grungy metal. I find the constant harmonization an unusual choice for metal, but it works adding a droning, atmospheric effect to the crunchy guitar and pounding drums. It’s more like the sound of a group of warlocks chanting in the forest than to Crosby, Stills & Nash’s harmonies. Like an old barbershop a capella group but the barbershop they work in doesn’t actually cut hair, they just make you grow it to your shoulders.

Alice in Chains is capable of creating some truly grimy sounds, but they’re such well-rounded musicians. The deep musicianship is an overlooked aspect of many metal bands, but AiC takes it a step further with their acoustic arrangements (not to mention their incredible MTV Unplugged performance where they really showed off their talent). Grunge will never be everyone’s favorite, but this is among the best of the genre.

Jams

• “Them Bones”

• “Down In A Hole”

• “Rooster”

• “Would?”

Wish - The Cure

It’s a shame that the silliest song on this album is the one everyone knows - I associate the Cure with “Friday I’m In Love,” and that song, when taken out of context, just makes them sound like an insipid and unserious pop group, and not in the way I often like. That song kind of feels like a restaurant a friend of mine worked at one time - it’s known for its fantastic and creative food, but in the end cheeseburger sales pay the bills. “Friday I’m In Love” is the Cure’s cheeseburger song, fodder for the pop culture sphere that has little to do with the artistic achievement of the rest of this album. I don’t know how the band feels about that song, but I’d probably be sick of it by now. It seems meant as an ironic counterpoint to the brooding songs surrounding it on this album, like an inverted “build tension and then release it” technique, but one where the public missed the point and took the song at face value. Taken ironically, it fits and accentuates the rest of the album through contrast. But taken literally and on its own, it’s the worst song on a great album. 

Jams

• “Apart”

• “Doing The Unstuck”

• “A Letter To Elise”

Selected Ambient Works  85—92 - Aphex Twin

Widely considered a major inspiration (or copypasta) for Radiohead’s Kid A, by an artist who doesn’t like Radiohead. I feel kind of justified in my, shall we say, infinite confusion about the near-universal love of Kid A after hearing this album. It’s superior and came earlier. It’s original. It’s unpretentious. It’s smart. It’s perfect for deep focus on something else or deep introspective listening. Ambient music isn’t even my favorite - I have a pretty low hit rate even among the greats of the genre. But this is something else entirely, and I’m happy to say I’ve found ambient electronic music I actually enjoy. IDM, the genre Aphex Twin helped pioneer, is appropriately named based on this excellent example - Intelligent Dance Music. 

I think there are different ways to show intelligence through music. Some might think it means to overcomplicate things, to make crazy 13/5 time signatures and confuse the hell out of people, obscuring the point of the music so much that they can claim “you’re just not smart enough to get it” when there’s really nothing to get. Others might turn to wild concepts that require a companion novel and an astrophysics degree to understand. But Aphex Twin’s music is intelligent because it’s understandable, yet still keeps you guessing at every turn. It twists the everyday sounds into something totally warped yet cohesive, like an alien with a different grasp of physics. It doesn’t need to rely on gimmicks or wacky concepts or lyrical obtuseness. And for that, this gets my vote for the most “I” of the IDM I’ve heard so far.

Jams

• “Xtal”

• “Ageispolis”

Dry - PJ Harvey

Another insanely impressive debut. PJ Harvey’s first album is the definition of raw energy. In her own words, she performed this album as if it would be her only chance to ever make one - and how fortunate we are that she was wrong. It feels like she was exploring another possible evolution of rock - this isn’t following in anyone’s footsteps. She ignores the broader alt-rock and grunge-rock trends and makes a path towards something totally her own. It’s both complementary and completely different to the other guitar rock of the day.

I didn’t register PJ Harvey’s music in youth because I was in my basement reading Guitar World, worshipping 20-year-old classic rock music and the occasional present-day guitar slinging band instead of keeping up with the times. And I would have undoubtedly loved her music. No ragrets, as they say - we’ll undoubtedly come across PJ many more times, and I can’t wait.

Jams

• “O Stella”

• “Dress”

Core - Stone Temple Pilots

STP’s debut is straightforward and purified grunge rock - this might be what they’d put next to the encyclopedia entry for Grunge if encyclopedias still existed. I get that grunge might not hit a lot of people the right way - the emotions involved are less subtle human expressions and more of a wordless shout of mixed frustration, determination, anger, and a little bit of swagger all rolled into one. Maybe it’s not the deepest genre in the world, but this is a well-developed example of smart people making heavy rock music without just succumbing to the temptation of hiding behind epic guitar riffs (not that those are missing here). Maybe they do sound like Pearl Jam crossed with Alice In Chains - but such is the way of genres. Look at today’s music, look at 1970’s music, and you’ll find clusters of artists that sound identical to each other from the perspective of outsiders. This is how music devleops, how genres grow; through a bunch of talented bands exploring the depths of the sounds together. True invention isn’t real - iteration is how greatness really gets made. And STP iterates on the greatness of the bands around them with stellar results.

So many of these songs have stayed with us over the years that it’s mind-boggling. Just try to listen to a rock radio station for an hour without hearing “Dead and Bloated” or “Plush”. This music inspires a deep nostalgia for me since grunge (and rock music if you’re a pessimist) has more or less disappeared from popular music. It’s got all the classic elements of the things Millennials are most nostalgic for - it’s from the 90’s, it’s gone, and modern kids would probably hate it. But dang, do I love STP.

Jams

• “Dead and Bloated”

• “Plush”

• “Sex Type Thing”

• “Wicked Garden”

• “Creep”

• “Piece Of Pie”

Dirty - Sonic Youth

You can almost hear the sound of grunge seeping into their signature tone. This album has such a different sound from Goo - a fact most people chalk up to the pop-leaning production and more polished sound than many of the band’s previous releases. Every review I read references how much Sonic Youth fans hate this album compared to their discography, but I don’t get that. I might need that one explained to me by one of the wiser denizens of the musicStack world.

Jams

• “Drunken Butterfly”

• “Theresa’s Sound World”

3 Years, 5 Months And 2 Days In The Life Of… - Arrested Development

Living in the southern US is a complex blend of emotions. This album, by a group from Atlanta, deep in the heart of the south, captures many of the less discussed aspects of the south beautifully - it’s a story of terrible history, lingering prejudice, economic struggle, yet also one of faith and family and relentless optimism.

It plays like a response to the east coast / west coast gangsta rap scene, offering people a hip hop voice that doesn’t endorse the violence and anti-glamor of the mainstream artists of the era, the Ice Cubes of the world. It’s introspective where its peers fought over slights to their outward images. It’s about love where much of the 1992 hip hop world glorified violence. In short, it’s powerful enough to make you drop everything and listen, and when you’re done you have to sit in silent contemplation for a while.

Jams

• “Dawn Of The Dreads”

• “Mr. Wendal”

Part 1 of my examination of the year 1992 includes the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums entries from the year, and part 2 (and maybe part 3?) will include a selection of albums that were left off and perhaps shouldn’t have been. 

As always, I’d love to hear your favorite albums from 1992 that didn’t make the list!

The Chronic - Dr. Dre

This is the album that helped launch Snoop Dogg into the world - and funnily enough, I’m writing this during what can only be called Snoop Dogg’s Olympic Games, which might be launching his fame even higher worldwide.

Look, I get that times were very different in the 90’s, and the heroes of gangsta rap had an image to uphold - but these lyrics haven’t aged great. It’s the classic problem of trying to appreciate art from a different time that has elements today’s society doesn’t like - although to be fair, it’s not like sexist lyrics have disappeared from music today either. And maybe fair is the wrong word.

This album was a huge moment in music production - the beats are phenomenal, original, full of musicianship and swagger, trailblazing the G-funk style. It was influential, and inventive, but the glamor of the gangster references has pretty much worn off for me. I love it as a history lesson, and for the funk-tinged production, but not so much for the content.

Jams

• “Nuthin’ But A G Thang”

Automatic For The People - R.E.M.

I’ll make an admission that the internet will likely roast - I held a long, powerful dislike of REM for years. It’s undoubtedly been over ever since I listened to Out Of Time as an adult many years ago, but I still think back on that time with interest. Listening to this album made me think a little deeper about why I missed out on REM as a kid - and I think I have the answer.

I grew up with no internet, a desire for new music, and a $5 a week allowance. So I had to make judicious decisions about what music I bought. This led to a massive collection of greatest hits CD’s, including REM’s greatest hits, which I recently dug out of the closet as I thought about my relationship with the band more deeply.

I listened to every CD I owned on repeat. For the most part this led to an appreciation of the artists I chose - best-of CD’s often led to my enduring love for bands whose albums, while great, don’t appear on any best-album lists, like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Boston and the Marshall Tucker Band. Some of these bands, I’d argue, are almost better appreciated through greatest hits than their individual albums. Or at least, if you have a time or money constraint like I did, you’re not missing out on as much as you could be. 

The best of REM, however, had the opposite effect on me. You’ll note that the disc above has a few songs from Automatic For the People, which is widely considered one of the band’s best albums, but they’re in totally random order, with Man on the Moon and Nightswimming totally separated to the first and last songs on this compilation as if just for fun. Maybe there’s a designed flow to this greatest hits thingy, and maybe it’s just a collection in whatever order the producers thought would sell the most. 

Either way, this greatest hits album made me think I didn’t like REM very much. Their silly poppy songs were at the forefront, with zero context that their full albums would have provided. For example, I still can’t stand the song “Everybody Hurts” thanks to this CD. In a vacuum it sounded so inane and silly and cheesy - its sound was totally ruined to me because of endless listens to this CD. I can’t explain it further, honestly. It just didn’t sound good in this greatest hits context - remember, this was my first exposure to the band ever - and I think the format is to blame. It’s similar with “Man On The Moon” - you have to hear the band’s other songs to know how tongue in cheek the song is. “Stand” has a similar out-of-context feel on this disc that makes it frankly annoying. 

To my credit, I got over my misguided lack of enthusiasm for REM pretty quickly after actually digging into their discography as an adult. But man, I wish someone had told me back then just to buy their dang albums and skip this best-of nonsense.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot - Automatic For the People is great, and is helping me recover from my greatest-hits-induced trauma.

Jams

• “Drive”

• “Try Not To Breathe”

Songs I can never listen to again thanks to Warner Bros Records:

• “Everybody Hurts”

Slanted and Enchanted - Pavement

The early 90’s indie rock parade continues! This album was Pavement’s debut with a now-familiar slacker rock feel; somewhat sloppy out of tune guitars, bored-sounding vocals, production that makes it sound like it was recorded in a basement with moldy gray carpets and a cracked leather couch. And you know what? Together, those traits add up to a refreshing and enjoyable album.

I think this is the kind of music that AI will never be able to create. How can you add up such a discordant and imperfect set of inputs to create the vibe of this album? The individual parts could have been recordings of some teenage kids noodling around at Guitar Center, yet the ultimate effect is so much more than that. The equation doesn’t make any sense. It’s like how mathematicians couldn’t make their equations work so they made up imaginary numbers so the equations actually worked out (don’t quote me on the history of imaginary numbers, it’s been years since I was in a math class). There’s an imaginary number at work here, and I think it takes the form of the complementary nature of the individual components - the playing, singing, recording, and production all point the same direction, towards the ultimate vibe that’s been labeled “slacker rock.” It’s a 1+1 = 3 scenario - the music is more than the sum of its parts, somehow. This album would sound worse if they were trying harder - compared to the too-polished music everybody’s cranking out in 2024, it’s extremely refreshing.

Jams

• “Trigger cut/Wounded-Kite At :17”

• “Here”

Rage Against The Machine - Rage Against The Machine

Rage Against the Machine’s debut album is a combination of genres that captures the best of each of them. Unforgettable metal guitar riffs. Lyrics delivered with unmatched energy and passion and, well, rage.

So why does this album make me so damn happy? I’ve frequently complained about music that sounds, well, complainy in the past. That’s not a vibe that I can get onboard with. But there’s a big difference between complaining and Raging. Complaining is often relegated to small issues - girls don’t like me, my truck broke down, nobody gets my tattoos, my parents don’t like my music. But Raging… Raging is for when the problems are bigger. It’s for when the problems are on a societal or global level, so big that there’s literally no point in getting down in the dumps about them. You just have to rage, and if you can do so with a guitar in your hand, so much the better.

Conveying emotion is one of music’s main jobs, and this does it extremely well. I think the true signal that you’ve found a favorite song or artist is when that emotion rings a bell with you - that could mean it matches your mood, or even contrasts with it. Does my liking this album mean I’ve got some rage against the system buried somewhere? Probably, and I’ll bet we all do. Music is teaching me about myself as much as anything else. But hey, I’m no psychiatrist, I just dig music. 🤘

Jams

• “Bombtrack”

• “Killing In The Name”

• “Freedom”

Little Earthquakes - Tori Amos

This album is very obviously genius. I’ll admit I found myself disliking small, surface-level things - I’m not a fan of her frequent over-emoting or her unusual vibrato, for example - but at the same time I realize that level of critique is way too reductive for songs of this scope and magnitude, not to mention that these are beloved traits for many people. More importantly, I’ve learned that when I zero in on the surface level details of music and ignore everything else, that means I’m not really getting the bigger picture - or in this case, that I don’t want to because of how depressed the music makes me feel. I’m diverting my attention to something I can get my head around, and that usually means something simple like a tone or a few singular moments in the music.

The subject matter is varied, if consistently a bit downcast for my taste; raging against prettier girls and bullies, lamenting loneliness and emotional distance, exploring the struggles of leaving home. There’s dense poetry, raw emotion, and incredible talent on display here. You could call it angst, but that word is somehow too small.

It’s interesting to know how powerful and brilliant an album is while simultaneously having zero desire to listen to it ever again. I chalk that up to how emotional Tori Amos’ songwriting truly is - it has the power to force emotions on the listener, and for me that means it has the power to put me in a shitty mood. This album is a massive thundercloud - it’s beautiful, impressive, and harnesses the power of emotion in an epic way; some people like chasing storms, but I personally don’t want to go outside until the lightning and thunder have passed.

Love Deluxe - Sade

I did Sade a disservice last time I listened to them by not taking the time to sit down and appreciate their music. But in the meantime, and while listening to this album, I think I’ve started to understand why - Sade sounds amazing, but I have some subliminal BS going on that’s made it hard to connect with their music without repeated listens.

There are several factors at play here that have tainted my initial impression of this album and smooth soul as a genre. First, for some reason this style of music (and in some ways, the saxophone itself) has been turned into a parody by popular media. Smooth soul/jazz has turned into a joke for many, and I’ve fallen prey to that almost subliminally, which is a complete shame. Second, this is the kind of music that requires you to slow down and pay attention, two skills that the e-generations have started to lose, if not lost outright. You have to kind of let go and let the music carry you forward, and I’ve got issues letting anyone take control, coming from the generation who has never felt what control over the future even feels like. 

These songs are beautiful, the bass lines are intoxicating, and the vocals are beyond relaxing. This album, and the broader genres it dabbles in, are going to be the subject of further study for me. The main reason is to unlock an entire spectrum of music that my mind has reflexively much blocked off in the past, simply because a few stupid sitcoms and movies and who knows what else turned the saxophone into a joke. I hate that I still get the eye roll reflex when a smooth soul or smooth jazz song comes on. It’s totally irrational and it’s not related to the music at all. 

I wonder how many other genres, musical styles, artists I’ve been dismissing because of stupid genre biases that I can’t even remember forming. That’s a rabbit hole of epic proportions. 

Jams

• “No Ordinary Love”

• “Like A Tattoo”

Check Your Head - Beastie Boys

It feels like the Beasties just do whatever the hell they feel like. This album is all over the place - they funk and they groove and they party, and they even alt-rock a little bit. That might explain why, aside from “So What’Cha Want”, there aren’t many radio favorites on this album (from my radio experience, anyway) but it seems like there should have been. The mixing was a little off for me on the remastered version, which could have been any number of things, from Spotify to my headphones / car stereo or anything in between. But it’s a start-to-finish enjoyable experience, and the experimentation is what makes it fun rather than a plethora of singles.

Jams

• “Funky Boss”

• "So What’Cha Want”

What’s The 411? - Mary J. Blige

I reviewed this one before and couldn’t get into it. A re-listen improved nothing for me. It’s a showpiece for Mary J’s amazing voice, designed to launch her career, and nothing more. To many that’s a positive, but to me it makes the music feel meaningless. I’m rarely a fan of the “I’m more important than the song” style of musician, even a virtuoso like Mary J. So I’m not saying it’s bad, because that’s an invalid way to describe music. I’m just saying it doesn’t move my personal emotional needle whatsoever. 

Bizarre Ride ii the Pharcyde - The Pharcyde

This is where listening to albums alongside their peers really pays off. The Pharcyde feels like such a breath of fresh air compared to the gangsta rap that was prevalent in the early 90’s. The music sounds like a “chill out, man” kind of reaction to the anger and swagger of Ice Cube and Public Enemy and the more combative side of the broader genre. It’s got a bizarro feel that seems like part of an intelligent plan that’s just out of reach, and whoever is designing your experience is a little annoyed with the world trying to force them into any semblance of normal. 

It would be shallow to compare this to the Beastie Boys, but I can’t get away from the comparison. Maybe it’s the punky attitude, like a bunch of school kids rapping on the playground, and maybe it’s the ridiculousness lurking around every corner, the complete lack of taking themselves seriously. If I’m a sucker for anything, it’s an artist who doesn’t take themselves too seriously, especially a group as talented as The Pharcyde. 

This one is a hell yes for me.

Jams

• “Oh Shit”

• “Soul Flower - Remix”

• “Passion’ Me By”

In any list like this, great albums get left off, and others get included for reasons we disagree with. My personal issue with RS’s list, for example, is the presence of 9 Dylan albums. I totally appreciate the impact he had on music, don’t get me wrong, and maybe each of these albums had a distinct legacy that doesn’t overlap whatsoever with the others - but on the other hand, after the first 5 albums on the list, don’t you think the point is made? Let’s include someone else, like maybe a genre other than singer-songwriter, alt-rock, or Britpop (the list is literally stuffed with these. My unofficial count is approximately 600 out of the 500 come from these genres. I won’t be verifying my numbers at this time).

On the other hand, the point of a list like this isn’t to create a new definition of the popular music canon - or at least it shouldn’t be. The point should be to share things we take joy in, and to create discussion that leads to even more learning and knowledge of great music. It’s the list after the list that holds the real value - all the ones that should have been included, and all of the discussion around them. So in that spirit, I’m going to do a followup post after my weekly greatest albums list post where I go through the great recommendations from the comments on my standard posts. (That’s a political way of saying I’m going to shamelessly steal…. Uh, I mean, borrow album ideas from those wiser than myself).

So here are my favorite albums that were left off of my 1991 post from last week. I could probably do like 5 issues about 1991, but there are more years to explore. Thanks to , , JC, , and for the recommendations!

Project BAE - Best Albums Ever - 1991 Pt. 2

Loveless - My Bloody Valentine

OK, this one actually was on the RS list, I just happened to miss it thanks to an oversight in my Excel sheet, and as many have pointed out it’s too major not to explore. So let’s just pretend this one was in last week’s issue, K?

This album has cemented the idea that I’ve been listening to the all-time greatest albums all wrong. I was going through best-album lists on shuffle, with no regard to time or genre. I actually first played this album months ago and had pretty ambivalent feelings towards it - but I’d listened to it alongside the randomly-selected mishmash of Lorde, Roxy Music, New Order, The Breeders, and Janis Joplin. No wonder I had nothing to latch onto - I was rudderless in a random sea of albums. The context of 1991 was entirely missing. Looking back, that seems funny when the entire reason I’m hooked on albums now is to avoid the senseless Spotify shuffle doom loop I’ve grown to hate so much.

I’ve found that listening to albums against the backdrop of the times and their peers to be far more enjoyable. I’ll admit there’s still a side of me that thinks music should be good even if you have no clue about the context. I made that case once when reviewing Kid A, an album I still struggle with - it’s considered great to a large extent because it was such a radical reinvention of Radiohead. But what if, I wondered, a no name band had released the exact same album? Would it be considered great? I had, and still have, my doubts. But I’m also realizing that line of thought is a bit flawed, and very shallow. Context is everything in the ephemeral world of the arts. How can you be subversive, for example, without knowing the context of what you’re subverting? How can, say, a war protest song mean anything if you were born decades after the war and never learned about it? How can Bob Dylan’s songwriting be appreciated without knowing how different and advanced it was compared to his contemporaries, especially when you’re young and you’ve heard a million better-sounding modern Dylan knockoffs over the years? Context matters. 

This album didn’t hit me right the first time I heard it. It was lumped together in an issue covering the Kinks, the Beatles, Kanye West, and Green Day. Green Day also released their second album in 1991, to be fair, but there was still a fair bit of whiplash in that group. It was like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth - the taste is just different based on what came before.

So while I still don’t love this album, I’ve learned two things. First, I can see the point a bit more clearly now since I’ve been so zoomed in on the early 90’s. The legacy left by this band, and this album, is massive. MBV’s Spotify bio claims they were the inspiration for the term Shoegaze because of how still they were during live shows - true to the genre’s name, this is introverted music, leaning on (and almost hiding behind) feeling-scapes of noise and atmosphere to express themselves instead of trying to find the right words. It’s telling that Spotify didn’t bother to activate the lyrics function for most of the songs - the lyrics feel like they’re not the point, like mumbled attempts at conversation of the stereotypical introvert, subverting swaggering in-your-face pop music. It feels like the early 90’s emergence of genres like shoegaze were the beginning of pop society’s celebration of the shy and introverted and all the ways we can express ourselves without being loud and obvious - something that’s almost universal today. 

And second, I’ve learned that I seem to deal with my introversion differently. I don’t want to listen to music that reinforces and amplifies that “too-much-in-my-head'“ feeling, as MBV does for me. I want escapism, something that makes me feel the opposite of introverted and introspective. That’s just my preference - it’s the same if I’m unhappy; I don’t want to listen to sad songs. I want the opposite. So I can appreciate the strides made in this album, even though I’ll be leaving it out of my vinyl collection.

De La Soul Is Dead - De La Soul

This album has a smooth and silly and almost bored sound, as if De La Soul is trying to change up the sound from 3 Feet High And Rising but not trying to sound like they’re trying too hard. You almost get whiplash from all the different sounds, from a lazy punky vibe to roller-rink disco funk to raps bordering on comedy skits, over beats even the most rhythmically challenged among us (read: me) can groove to. 

I’ll give credit where it’s due - Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (a classic video game for my generation) hit the nail on the head when they chose “Oodles of O’s” for their soundtrack. Pro Skater games always have iconic soundtracks that play while you tear up virtual skate parks and do kickflips over city streets and stuff. That kind of punk / skateboarder feeling isn’t exactly what this album contains, but the two worlds definitely have some overlap. There’s a kind of “just go with it” feeling hidden in the sometimes silly, sometimes discontent lyrics of this album.

I loved this album even more than 3 Feet High and Rising, but even more importantly, I’ve discovered my next Jamwise project - dissecting the soundtracks of every Tony Hawk Pro Skater game. It’s gonna be a blast.

Jams

• “A Roller Skating Jam Named “Saturday”” 

• “Bitties In The BK Lounge”

Trompe le Monde - Pixies

It’s hard looking back at an album from before I actually gained consciousness and trying to evaluate its place in history. Many who appreciated it at the time consider this album underrated and ahead of its time - from my backward-looking perspective, I can say it does sound more modern than a 33-year-old album, which supports the ahead of its time narrative. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it doesn’t sound as dated as other alt rock from the period.

My conclusion is that this is the epitome of alt rock before it was cool - it’s both influential and underrated. This album must have been a bit overshadowed in the mainstream by Nirvana and REM’s releases at the time - how many alt rock albums would even fit on the charts in 1991?  With Nirvana, REM, Pearl Jam, Chili peppers, guns n roses, Metallica occupying so much pop culture space, not to mention the pop behemoths?

It’s interesting to compare this to the other great rock/indie/grunge/metal and adjacent albums that dominated pop culture at the time. Trompe le Monde is a bit less focused than Nevermind, which to me is great partly because of its consistency and single-minded sound. Pixies’ scream-tracks like “Planet of Sound” and “The Sad Punk” are less hard-hitting than Nirvana’s, their alt-rock tracks like “Alec Eiffel” and “Palace of the Brine” are like REM-lite, and the mixture of the two styles, while super entertaining, could explain why this album’s sales didn’t match its value. BUT I also think my opinions above are influenced by the fact I’ve heard so much of the music this album inspired, and it doesn’t fit into a nice timeline in my mind. There’s a chance I’m under-rating the influence Pixies had, which would be a shame.

And the variety of the album is a feature, not a bug - I love it, but I don’t think pop charts audiences enjoy anything that’s not 100% to-the-point all the time. I think to make a huge splash in terms of sales, consumers want something a bit more linear. They want one-flavor albums, straightforward and consistent concepts - it’s probably a little harder to present a slightly more scatter-brained album like Trompe le Monde and find millions of people who can relate to its every aspect. I think the 1991 charts support that - Metallica and Nirvana and REM were each certainly capable of variety, but their 1991 smash hit albums were linear and consistent examples of their work, while I feel like Pixies mashed a lot of concepts into a single album here. Simple tasting wine sells more bottles than something more complex and varied - that’s just the bell curve effect of pop society. But to the discerning drinker, it’s a different story. I’m not the most discerning person in the world, but I love the variety of this album.

Jams

• “Head On”

• “U-Mass”

Green Mind - Dinosaur Jr. 

Once, when I was like 8, I participated in an impromptu talent show on the playground. For my act I went in front of everybody (it felt like hundreds, but in reality it was probably like four third graders) and told them I could make the best weird faces in the world. I held my breath and stuck my tongue out and crossed my eyes and went “hngggghhh” until my face turned almost purple while my classmates laughed (or so I assume). Then I accidentally passed out and fell over on the grass and got made fun of for weeks. If I’d been able to speak while doing my “talent”, straining to turn my face purple, I think my voice would have sounded like J Mascis’ on this album.

OK, I’m just making that comparison for fun, don’t worry. Yes, Mascis’ vocals have a straining sound like he’s forcing them out through vocal chords the diameter of a cocktail straw. But the difference is he seems to be straining to express something deep inside, not fooling around on the playground like a moron. It gives the album a vulnerable and relatable sound, and it’s part of the unique character of what I think of as the punk-adjacent side of indie rock.

I also love that this album was largely performed by J Mascis himself. There’s no instrument that sounds like it’s not played by a specialist - many people praise his guitar work, but to be honest it’s the drums that really won me over on this album. The energy they create is massive and never lets up.

I missed out on lots of the formative music of the 90’s for the silly reason of not being a human being yet, but I feel like in this album I’ve discovered a common ancestor for many of the bands I did know once my brain was more fully developed. It feels like, as I trace through the music of the 90’s in more detail, many of the roots I follow will lead back to Dinosaur Jr. 

Jams

• “The Wagon”

• “Muck”

Bandwagonesque - Teenage Fanclub

It’s funny looking at the contemporary ratings for this album - they’re pretty much 5/5 or 10/10 across the board, except for Rolling Stone who gave it 2/5 stars. No wonder it got left off their greatest albums list. Spin Magazine even voted it album of the year in 1991 ahead of Nevermind, which most Millennials would consider heresy looking back.

I’ll be honest, I can’t tell the difference between power pop and alt pop and pop rock and whatever else people have used to describe this album. I thin it depends on who’s writing about it, or maybe on how many copies the album has sold. RateYourMusic calls it both Power pop and indie rock, which are total contradictions to me. Whatever, y’all. I don’t think I even care at this point.

There’s something wistfully 70’s buried in the sound just beneath the surface. My favorite songs were on the power pop end of things - they were infectuous. I kept thinking “this song is OK”, then by the end of the song mashing the like button and then repeating the process for the next. I can hear a lot of yet-to-come bands in this album - it almost plays like a greatest hits of the 90’s album from a dream where you don’t know any of the words but you know the songs are all super well known. There’s a sound here, a tone there, that reminds you of something else but is gone before you can place it.

Jams

• “The Concept”

• “What You Do To Me”

• “Star Sign”

• “Is This Music”

Out of Time - REM

This album brings out R.E.M.’s country leanings, which I admit I didn’t fully appreciate before now. And to be clear, this can’t be considered country music by any stretch - I’m a full-blooded redneck from the deep south of the USA, not far from the city where R.E.M. formed, so I’m fully qualified to comment on that - but the tinge of the folky southern sound fits R.E.M.’s music extremely well. Pop fans and Rolling Stone writers probably think songs like “Texarkana” are country music; while it’s most certainly not, it’s still fantastic. There’s no shame in calling it southern-tinged alt rock, especially since it’s really good southern-tinged alt rock.

This is my favorite R.E.M. album. It’s a bit less frivolous than the R.E.M. I know the best, exploring several topics and tones and focusing largely on introspection. It’s also a perfect example of a band exploring new sounds while remaining themselves - even the extremely awkward funk-exploration “Radio Song” that opens the album couldn’t taint their distinct sound. In my experience it’s hard to overcome the tone set by the first song on an album, yet Out Of Time does just that. Drop the first song and this is a near-perfect album.

Jams

• “Losing My Religion”

• “Near Wild Heaven”

• “Half A World Away”

Continuing the series of listening through the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. This week’s focus is all albums from the list released in 1991, excluding compilations. And what a year it was!

Blue Lines - Massive Attack

Massive Attack has been one of the greatest discoveries of this project for me. Mezzanine was my introduction to the band, and I’m justifiably jacked up to listen to Blue Lines, their debut album that’s widely credited with kicking off the trip hop genre.

If anything I liked this album more than Mezzanine. It has a variety and “finding themselves” vibe that makes it feel unique in multiple ways. Repeated listens were even better, cementing this as a true favorite. The variety and consistent quality blew me away; this one’s going on the “need on vinyl” list immediately.

Jams

• “One Love”

• “Be Thankful For What You’ve Got”

• “Five Man Army”

• “Hymn Of The Big Wheel”

Nevermind - Nirvana

I used to have a weird mental block about Nirvana in my teenage years. I think it stemmed from the way I was introduced to them - through downloading “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on Limewire and playing it endlessly while I saved up the money to buy my first Nirvana album, which was MTV Unplugged. I’d heard how great Unplugged was, but as the extent of my Nirvana knowledge was the pure raging beauty of Teen Spirit, I was thrown off by the acoustic set and didn’t really enjoy it. I should also mention that I didn’t have high speed internet until college, so I had no way to research what I was getting into (for context, pirating a single song on my parents’ dial-up internet took like 7 minutes to download). So I decided based on that insurmountable evidence (and one of the best live albums of all time) that Nirvana was whiny and pouty and annoying, and despite using Teen Spirit as my baseball walkout song for years, I maintained I wasn’t a huge Nirvana fan.

Man, I was an idiot. Or maybe I was just uneducated, but that’s kind of the same thing.

Every song on Nevermind would be the crowning achievement of any lesser band. How many rock acts in the 90’s would have killed for a single song on the level of “Breed,” “In Bloom,” “Polly,” or “On a Plain”? And these are only a few of the all-time perfect pieces on this album. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is channeled from the essence of the universe, “Come As You Are” is so pure it freaking shines even with a foot-thick layer of grunge piled on top, and “Lithium” is half full-tilt angst and half effortlessly flawless. I can’t explain why so much angst and anger makes me so fricking happy to listen to, but it does.

This album defines a genre, a time period, and a legendary genius all at once. I think it should be the first thing we play for aliens whenever they land on Earth. This album is a 10/10 for me, without question.

Jams

• They’re all jams, goodness gracious

The Low End Theory - A Tribe Called Quest

I think RateYourMusic’s classification of this album as jazz rap is fascinating. I don’t get the impression that the jazz rap genre is overall populated, and the fact that this album draws from jazz samples and jazzy bass lines seems like a somewhat thin connection to jazz if you’re going to assign it a whole new genre. To me this is 90’s rap with smooth, effortless lo-fi style beats (that term might be wrong, but it fits in my mind) that sounds just as good with the volume turned up high or down low. It’s less angry, thanks to Q-Tip’s laid back voice, but it still seems to divide the internet with the love/hate for the lyrical choices. I had no huge issue with the lyrics even though I wasn’t overly impressed, although it’s hard to tell if the lyrics are simply from an older time, earlier in the development of hip-hop lyricism, or if they’re just not overly good. 

Overall the beats are my style, and so are the jazz samples (especially the bass lines), and the vocals are just kind of there.

Jams

• “Excursions”

Achtung Baby - U2

Ahh, U2 before they forced their music onto every iPhone in the world (as far as I know) and made themselves a little bit of a joke in the eyes of my generation. I’m also receiving reports that this album was produced by friend of the newsletter Brian Eno. Come on, Brian, make me love you like everyone else does!

“One” is U2’s ultimate distillation to me. It’s an attempt to be universal and huge in scope yet introspective, with a rattly over-processed Edge guitar part and epic strings. It’s like they were trying not to write a stadium rock song, trying to show their depth (as always), toning down the guitars and even adding some acoustic strumming, with the string section and the Edge’s ultra-delay-reverb guitar kind of ruining the “downsizing” effect. It’s a great song, but it feels so self-important that it’s a bit tainted. That’s U2’s legacy in my mind. 

This album is quite different from the pretentious undertones of Joshua Tree, which felt like an exercise in musical colonization more than anything else, but the same “I’m important” attitude seems to pervade every song. I struggle to call U2 rock at all, to be honest, although rock and pop are often a distinction without a difference. The main reason for that is that U2, although they might be underdogs, don’t act like they see themselves that way. They’re the ultimate corporate rock band, the “I know better than you and I’m doing this for your own good” activists. True, I’m sure they put their money where their mouth is when it comes to real-world activism, but speaking purely about the music, there’s an element of condescension that makes some of the songs hard to relate to as much as I should.

Now all that being said, I believe most of the above criticism is me projecting the band’s image onto the music of this album. That’s hard to avoid, and it’s a bit unfair, as many of the songs are superbly written and are well-worn classics for a reason. 

Jams

• “One”

• “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses”

• “Mysterious Ways”

Ten - Pearl Jam

I had this entire album memorized as a young teen; lyrics, guitar solos, and all. It’s hard to believe this is the band’s debut. Although I’m too close to this album to write anything resembling an objective review, I think it’s somewhat well-established as a fantastic album. It’s certainly one of my favorites; the number of all-time songs on Ten is mind boggling. 

The 90’s aren’t exactly a decade of guitar gods, as far as I’m concerned, but I feel like Pearl Jam carried the torch of the air guitar rock band forward to a whole new generation without totally trying to recapture the sound of the 70’s. And not to mention it was one of the reasons I got into the guitar in the first place - this one is cemented in my personal hall of fame.

Jams

• “Once”

• “Even Flow”

• “Alive”

• “Why Go”

• “Release”

Metallica (The Black Album) - Metallica

I wrote about this album all the way back in the first issue of Jamwise, and it’s cool looking at how far I’ve come over 37 issues. The point of this project is to expose me to new music and to teach me to be a better and more open music fan, so it’s interesting to look back at this album and see how the context of my appreciation for it has changed.

There’s not much metal on the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums list, but Metallica is a pretty obvious choice to carry the flag for the genre. Musicianship and shredding skills are a wise combination - too much virtuoso showing off is a huge turn off for me, but Metallica makes the rapid fire hallmarks of metal sound like pieces in an orchestra rather than blunt instruments to smack you over the head with. 

Jams

• “Enter Sandman”

• “Holier Than Thou”

• “The Unforgiven”

• “Nothing Else Matters”

Blood Sugar Sex Magik - Red Hot Chili Peppers

The Chili Peppers could conceivably be blamed for a lot of pretty bad music that followed in their footsteps. I think that’s a large part of why they annoy a lot of people. That, and the stoner bro pseudo-wisdom of Kiedis’ lyrics, are a recipe for polarization. 

And yet I love the Chili Peppers. I think that’s because it feels like they are 1000% all-in on their personas, their music, their belief that they have something extremely deep and meaningful to express. True or not, that kind of gung-ho energy is energizing, even if you don’t care about the drug- and women-related experiences that have informed the majority of the band’s life philosophy. It’s like watching an ultramarathoner fight through an impossible race - sure, they’re objectively insane, but the fully committed effort of the spirit is still compelling to watch. Or like when my dog stares at a squirrel out the window; her entire mind and soul is fixated on it, and it’s cute to watch. The Chili Peppers’ energy falls somewhere between the wide range from cute barking dogs to inspiring overcomers of odds, in my opinion. There’s simply no hesitation or self-reflection to be found in the music, and that’s what makes it fun.

But in the end, you don’t have to buy into their lives, philosophies, or viewpoints to enjoy their music, and if you add a little funk to any genre I’m gonna love it. Add John Frusciante to the mix and you’ve got a Dave-certified classic.

Jams

• “Blood Sugar Sex Magik”

• “Under the Bridge”

• “Give It Away”

Screamadelica - Primal Scream

I’ve also reviewed this one before; the second time around, this album has a little more context in my head. It’s largely what I’m coming to know as the sound of 90’s early electronic music - a genre I either love or hate. The reasons for my reactions seem so random - I love Primal Scream’s “Inner Flight”, a loosely organized ambient-style track of the sort I normally can’t stand, because it has this comforting epic video game quest vibe that I love, not least because of the flute melody that carries the track. I’m also a sucker for a major key track, and for some reason the abstract elements of some tracks just appeal to me more when they’re not so broody. 

This is still my favorite 90’s electronic (or electronic-adjacent) album so far. 

Jams

• “Slip Inside This Hiuse”

• “Higher Than The Sun”

• “Inner Flight”

I’ve recently realized that there are 101 albums released in the 90’s on the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums list. Being a Millennial, this decade is the one that I’m supposed to be the most connected to (even though most of my formative years were spent listening to 2000’s music, but whatever). That’s what social media says, so that’s what I’m going to dive into - the 90’s were king for my generation, and who am I to argue?

On top of that, I’m getting a little tired of the decade whiplash caused by listening to the albums from the Rolling Stone list at random. I’m feeling a little bit lost in time, and I think I’ve been missing some of the nuances of the different decades, as well as the view of where these artists fall in the timeline. Will I complete the list at random, or by decade? Who the heck knows. Let’s see how fun this 90’s sub-project is, and then we’ll figure that out.

So without further ado, this week’s issue is dedicated to the year 1990. The RS list has a whopping 8 albums from 1990 - buckle up!

The Immaculate Collection - Madonna

This compilation is from Madonna’s 80’s singles, so it might not really fit in this 1990 list. But whatever, I grew up with a weirdly high awareness of Madonna, and so she stays in the 1990 retrospective.

Madonna seems like the ultimate pop chameleon. I get the feeling she’d thrive in the current era of TikTok trends, where everybody makes a video in an identical format and changes it just a little to make it sort of their own. That’s how her songs feel to me, just a master capitalizing on every trend she comes across, and blurring the lines between “she copied it” and “she invented it.” Maybe an 80’s music expert could dissect that statement, but from my perspective looking back, I don’t really see the difference - Madonna took ownership of pop, and whether she invented it or just perfected it, that’s pretty damn impressive. She’s like a pop robot - whether she’s self aware or programmed by someone else, the end result is the same.

I think a lot of her appeal is in her pseudo-innocent voice mixed with very, ah, not innocent lyrics and imagery. This let her relate to kids and young folks who might idolize her and want to follow in her footsteps, and it let her appeal to adults who wanted… other things. But at the same time she feels utterly devoid of emotion to me, presumably because she’s focusing on sounding impish at the expense of all else. She’s at her best, to me, on the dance floor on tracks like “”Into The Groove” where depth of emotion isn’t the point.

Madonna may have invented or perfected all the things that have made me dislike pop in the past. Shallow lyrics, totally inoffensive beats and synths and backing tracks that could be the soundtrack to a Disney kids show, themes that slap you across the face in order in case the core concept of SEX SEX SEX is too subtle to grasp. And those traits have become features of pop at times, not bugs.

HOWEVER: I’m learning that nothing I complain about above makes the music bad - it makes it pop. And pop has a very important place in the music world. It’s not like Madonna is hiding what she’s doing - “Material World” is a braggy confessional of who she is, and if that’s not authenticity (the trait I love most in music) then I don’t know what is. This is pop distilled. It’s authentically and unapologetically plastic, like a toy for a 3-year-old, all primary colors and gloss, to be tossed out in a few weeks for a replacement.

Madonna’s music, and the millions of pop songs she inspired, are the simple sugars of our music diet. Yes, you need complex carbohydrates and proteins and vitamins to really have a healthy diet, but simple sugars are fun, too. 

Jams

• “Material World”

• “Into The Groove”

Violator - Depeche Mode

Another theme of the 90’s is that, well, the 80’s were over. Nobody told Depeche Mode, though - they were just gaining strength as 1990 rolled around, and this album was considered their songwriting peak. These phrases may mean different things to different generations, but to me this album goes from goth kids on the dance floor music, to the backing track to a vampire drama, to the trance-ey brooding of a misunderstood, overlooked genius. That’s not meant to sound reductive - rather, take each of those tropes and elevate it to something sophisticated, at times something darker and almost twisted, with a pulse of unsettling obsessive energy lurking just under - or above - the surface, and you’ve got Violator.

I’ve learned that I don’t like droning, formless music. But after hearing the vampiric “Waiting For The Night” I’ve decided there’s a place for droning music with a pulse. Maybe my ADHD mind just can’t handle completely unstructured music, but give me a little beat to latch onto and a little hint of melody to guide me through the song and I’m back onboard. 

It takes taste to restrain yourself when you’ve got such a huge library of new sounds at your disposal, and DM does a stellar job of using their new electronic sounds, which were probably emerging every day in 1990, in a controlled and additive way. The song is king here, and there’s no designing around a cool sound at any point, which is another feature of some other artists I’ve found off-putting.

Jams

• “Personal Jesus”

• “Waiting For The Night”

• “Policy Of Truth”

Fear Of A Black Planet - Public Enemy

Nonstop energy rolling and rolling and rolling. The commentary is still relevant in 2024 - a sad fact, to be honest - and the delivery, which is almost matter of fact even when covering Hollywood racism or misguided white outrage, is brilliant and somehow uplifting. It gives the feeling that we might as well keep our heads up and dance despite all the bullshit. It’s constructive outrage, and I love it. 

Jams

• “911 Is A Joke”

• “Welcome To The Terrordome”

• “Who Stole the Soul?”

• “Can’t do nuttin for ya”

Amerikkka’s Most Wanted - Ice Cube

Same musical energy as Public Enemy, but with much more focus on self promoting of crime credentials than social commentary. It’s like a middle school playground version of the Public Enemy album, all “me me me” with no focus on the outside world.

This aged far less well. The lyrics speak of bitches and street deeds and abortions and the fact that it is, in this album’s worldview, a man’s world.

We should just forget this album entirely, in my opinion. Let me know where I find the instrumental version and I might be back in. It’s a shame because Ice Cube has a great voice and delivery, he just spends this entire album using it to deliver complete bullshit. Perhaps it was inventive at the time, and the beats are undeniably great, but it’s not something I’ll play for my grandkids when boring them to death with stories about the golden age of hip hop.

Heaven Or Las Vegas - Cocteau Twins

There hasn’t been a more thorough dismantling of English phonetics since Buddy Holly or Sting. But where Buddy Holly’s mangling of words feels performative and Sting’s feels like the rumblings of an oncoming mental disorder, the Cocteau Twins make their mumbling sound completely endearing. It’s got the would-be innocent energy of an anime theme song. Were they singing about sunshine and fluffy pillows or summoning a demon? I have no idea. I’m onboard either way.

Lacking discernible words, we’ll judge this one based on pure vibes. And not to worry, those are strong. The dreamscape world of this album is all cotton candy, but there’s a wistful air to many of the songs - I can almost see the lights of the Vegas strip blurring into the fluffy yellow clouds of a Charmin Ultra Soft commercial. 

Jams

• “Cherry Coloured Funk”

• “Pitch The Baby”

• “I Wear Your Ring”

Mama Said Knock You Out - LL Cool J

It’s cool to compare 3 major hip hop albums from the same year. LL Cool J’s sound is a little more dated to me - more focused on enunciation and funk sounds than a more rough-edged voice and max-energy mixes like Ice Cube and Public Enemy. 

Maybe it’s my perception of LL Cool J, who I know mostly from his TV and award show hosting roles, but his voice sounds more corporate at times than the other hip hop in this issue. “Mr. Goodbar” sounds completely performative, like he tossed it in the album because you had to have a sexual braggadocio song to be considered acceptable in 1990 hip hop. But the beats are interesting and varied - almost industrial on “Eat Em Up L Chill”, more jazz/funky on “Farmers Blvd. (Our Anthem)” and “To Da Break Of Dawn”.

It’s interesting to compare the lyrical content between the 3 acts as well. LL Cool J is somewhere between Public enemy (lots of commentary) and Ice Cube (nothing but street cred chest thumping), but much closer to the Ice Cube side. It’s less challenging material, more self-celebratory than anything else, which is really just a genre norm (or perhaps a “sell more albums” strategy).

Jams:

• “Farmers Blvd. (Our Anthem)”

• “Mama Said Knock You Out”

• “To Da Break Of Dawn”

Goo - Sonic Youth

Abstract experimentalism morphed into structured tune-based songs by this album

Song for Karen has such a cool structure - instead of breaks we get accelerating beats and driving energy

Alt rock pioneers with a bit of cross pollination with grunge from the perspective of 30 years later. I think the clinical term for SY is noise rock. 

“Disappearer” is a cryptic ode to the sun, as best as I can tell. 

This is the kind of DGAF I love. Smart musicians, not giving a fuck, writing smart music that somehow doesn’t take itself too seriously. The random noises help with that effect, paradoxically - I’ve often felt abstract noise music is too self celebratory in general, but not here. Songs like “Cinderella’s Bog Score” where the melody is buried in a discordant noise sandwich drove the point home - Sonic Youth’s noise is like the difference between a sung note and a scream - a clean guitar to a distorted one - they just took typical sound and structure and ideas and ran them all through a conceptual distortion pedal, twisting them but with enough respect to the original to identify it. This isn’t pure abstraction - it’s distortion of recognizable things. Picasso, not somebody slinging paint cans in a basement and calling it art (cough cough, Kid A, cough cough). Sonic youth is like the artists who paint detailed and clear paintings and then smudge the hell out of them, rather than others who go straight for the abstract chaos without wasting time on the structure beneath. It’s an easy call to me which requires more skill. 

I love the juxtaposition of a couple of British mods on the cover against the distinctly American alt and grunge-adjacent attitude and noise. I can see the spirit of the mods picked up here, but without the grey-skies gloom that seems to hover over so many British acts. This is more joyful, somehow. I loved it.

Jams

• “Disappearer”

• “Cinderella‘s Big Score”

• “Dirty Boots”

• “Mary-Christ”

I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got - Sinead O’Connor

The award for the most retro-looking album cover goes to I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. An instagram filter for someone trying to photographically revive the 80’s. Heck, this style is probably trending again in 2024. 

This album is, simply put, painful. But don’t get me wrong, that seems to be the intent - the groove varies from acoustic and folky and sparse (“Three Babies” to semi-funky, almost industrial (“I Am Stretched On Your Grave”), to pseudo-upbeat pop rock (“The Emperor’s New Clothes”, but the lyrics don’t let up at any point. There are only variations of sadness and pain - sometimes witchy, sometimes brooding, sometimes ironic, sometimes full of rage, but always depressing. I have no clue what O’Conner was going through, but it sounds massive and crushing. There’s no veil between O’Conner’s innermost feelings and the music - this is perhaps the most efficiently communicated sense of despair and gloomy anger I’ve ever heard. It comes to a head with the cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”, which pretty much floored me with its longing energy. 

This album is raw human emotion artfully expressed, and it makes me feel like complete shit. But it’s an achievement without a doubt. 

Jams

• “I Am Stretched On Your Grave”

• “Nothing Compares 2 U”