(or How Peace, Prosperity and the Compact Disc Destroyed Popular Music and How George W., 9/11 and Internet File Sharing Saved It Again)
Just so we’re all clear, I don’t hate all 90’s music. There will always be a few genius artists in any generation that will push back the limitations of the day and make music that will stand the test of time. The 90’s did give us Beck, Bjork, Jay-Z, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead and The Wu-Tang Clan, just to name a few.
But on the whole, I absolutely loath 90’s music.
Of every decade and genre of music–from the 60’s up until today–90’s music has to be the least represented genre/period on my iPod, which seems really odd in a way, because the 90’s were the decade that I really discovered music. At the start of the decade I was just hitting puberty and going into middle school and by the end I was graduating high school. (Literally the end. I graduated in 1999.) Basically my entire formative teenage years were crammed into this decade, and yet I can’t stand most of the music that came out of it.
It wasn’t until I went to college that music started getting better again and I finally discovered my personal taste in music.
So what happened? Where did the 90’s go wrong? And why do I hate them so much?
Let’s start with that last question, and with the music itself. What’s so wrong with 90’s music, Ben? Well, the 90’s were typified by hit songs that were so saccharinely sweet and infectiously catchy that you almost instantly hated them, at which point the radio programmers kicked it into high gear and never stopped playing them. You had two major styles that songs seemed to fit into–either the weird and quirky hit (which basically sounded like someone threw a bunch of music genres at the wall, saw what stuck, and made a song out of that) or the safe, pleasant, sissified and accessible hit.
It was a decade where anything that sounded different (or “alternative” to coin a term) was served up to the masses as if it were the second coming of pop music, when in reality there really wasn’t anything different about it. You had the same pop structure that had been working for years recycled over and over with different bells and whistles wrapped around it to make it seem edgy and unique. Which it wasn’t. Punk and New Wave had already opened up that door a decade earlier and everything since started to sound tired and recycled.
Of course we all remember how this decade of music started. There was one musical genius that showed all of us a possible ray of light of what was to come (not to be confused with Madonna’s Ray of Light). But all hope for a good decade of music died when Kurt Cobain took his own life in 1994. Maybe he saw where music was going and didn’t want to be a part of it.
C'est Non Un Blog 