Playlist #3: Nineteen-ninety FUN!
--By Tzarathustra & YLD-- After several weeks away, my head is finally back home in the 90s. It was the above featured song that did it. One listen and all I wanted was the sound of a Boss DS-1 (the most heavily used distortion pedal of the alternative era).
To start things off here's an image of a pale Winona Ryder in a black leather jacket and a Tom Waits t-shirt, which acts as an archetypal summation of every alt-rock chick I ever craved throughout my highschool experience of the 1990's. You can practically smell the clove smoke and espresso.
We all know that any sensible person basically lives like the 90's never ended. And no I'm not talking about nostalgia for Goodburger or Rugrats. Instead it's the specific existential add mixture of diffidence about life and optimism about the future, like things would pan out eventually if we just shrugged and zoned out enough. It's our collective sickness and we're happy that way. I'm just going one step further and making manifest our shared lively illness.
I declare by my new calendar the year is Nineteen-Ninety Twenty-four.
C'mon, it'll be fun...
--titles link to tracks--
Jangling college rock guitar, semi-monotone slacker vocals, lyrical references to the social value of coffee, disillusionment with absolutely everyone, and to the spurious authority of Captain Jean Luc Picard. This is fanatasy getaway soundtrack music perfect for remembering the last decade in which anything in this world made any damn sense at all.
One would think that someone with as serious a 90s addiction as myself would, at some point, cease rediscovering songs that he heard like twice in 1997. And yet, here's the song "Jenny Says" by Cowboy Mouth. When I heard it again a couple months ago, I couldn't believe I still knew all the words, but had completely forgot this song existed. A bizarre blind spot in my no-hit-wonder knowledge.
Aside from the alchemical wizardry through which HUM produced this kind of thunder, aside from the cultural millieu that expressed space travel and the ambition to leave the solar system as a function of boredom and disillusionment, HUM are symbolic of different time in which rock stars could look that normal. And also a time when Lollapalooza rocked.
