Jamwise #44 - The Best Albums of 1993, pt. 3
The last one for 1993 I swear!!! Featuring: Cypress Hill, Bjork, Pet Shop Boys, Counting Crows, Radiohead, Mazzy Star
I’m just having too much fun in 1993. I promise this is the last week I’ll spend there (for now) because the legendary 1994 is looming on the horizon. Hope you enjoy! And don’t you dare send me more recommendations from 1993! (wink wink)
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.
"Omaha" and "Murder of One" are all-timers!
As for Bjork? I don't know what planet she beamed down from, or why she picked Earth, but I'm sure glad she did.
I was a big fan of the Counting Crows and Sheryl Crow albums in '93. I think her later albums were richer but this one was a great start. I also enjoyed much of the Bjork and Pet Shop Boys albums. (I still really like the latter group!)