Tag: Music

Everyone’s favourite year in music is probably the music of their youth, but come on, people – objectively speaking 1994 was one hell of a year for popular music. 

It was 25 years ago now, and I can slap together a list from memory easily of 25 fantastic albums from ’94 that I still listen to regularly. 

1994 was a crazy, buzzing year in my memory – graduated university, grabbed my first job at an actual newspaper, fell in and out of love a bit, and spent a hurly-burly summer working as an intern at Billboard magazine in New York City, surrounded by and swimming in the music of the times. Some of the music I discovered that summer – Guided By Voices, Freedy Johnston – still grab me today. Others were just in the air, like Nirvana or Green Day. 

Yes, this list is a bit white, alternative and male, but to be fair that’s what I was listening to in 1994. It’s the songs that stick with me a quarter of a century on, a soundtrack to a year I’ll never forget. My top 25 albums of 1994, in alphabetical order: 

1. Tori Amos, Under The Pink: One woman wearing her heart on her sleeve, confessing everything, afraid of nothing. 

2. Bad Religion, Stranger Than Fiction: Punk unafraid to preach, and soaring with erudite anger at the state of the world. 

3. Barenaked Ladies, Maybe You Should Drive: Their open-hearted power pop swung between sentimental and wordy, and here they hit the perfect balance. 

4. Beastie Boys, Ill Communication: It still seems wrong that the Beastie Boys are over now, but we’ll always have “Sabotage.” 

5. Beck, Mellow Gold: “Loser” was everywhere, but this is overall a fundamentally weird, ramshackle record, ambling along to its own strange beat. 

6. Blur, Parklife: Is “sassy” the right word here? Britpop’s finest hour IMHO, swinging and smart and cynical. 

7. Johnny Cash, American Recordings: A giant takes the stage for a valedictory round that very nearly surpassed all he’d done before. 

8. Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, Let Love In:  A noir tale of a tall handsome man, in a dusty black coat with a red right hand.

9. Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Brutal Youth: A burst of venom and flame from someone who’s not quite an angry young man any more, an overlooked and underappreciated gem. 

10. Green Day, Dookie: Pop-punk propelled along at 1000 miles an hour, ephemeral and yet unforgettable. 

11. The Grifters, Crappin’ You Negative: Rusty grunge from deep in the heart of Memphis, a hidden gem I wore out on road trips through Mississippi in the summer of ’94. 

12. Guided By Voices, Bee Thousand: Glittering shards of surreal power pop, hit records from another dimension – it hooked me on GbV for life.

13. Hole, Live Through This: Subtract all the Courtney Love baggage you might have – this album is still one fierce wound of a record.

14. Freedy Johnston, This Perfect World: Heartbreakingly gorgeous, wistful songwriting by a guy who should’ve been huge. 

15. Nine Inch Nails, The Downwards Spiral: The sound of not knowing, and screaming in the dark. 

16. Nirvana, MTV Unplugged In New York: A curtain call, a last bow, what might have been, what never was.

17. Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: Unfolding like songwriting origami, nuggets of obscure beauty – go back to those gold soundz, and keep my advent to yourself. 

18. Pulp Fiction Soundtrack: Music curation is an art form, and Tarantino’s never done it better than this perfect mix tape. 

19. Tom Petty, Wildflowers: You belong among the wildflowers; the late Petty’s greatest album, contemplative and gorgeous and at peace. 

20. REM, Monster: Fuzzed-out and distorted, REM at their peak of fame, and their still strangely askew, enigmatic run of hits. 

21. Soundgarden, Superunknown: IMHO, Pearl Jam’s stuff hasn’t really endured that well; Soundgarden’s angst-filled grunge has. 

22. Velocity Girl, ¡Simpatico!: Effortlessly charming, sunny grunge-pop, well worth seeking out. 

23. Velvet Crush, Teenage Symphonies To God: Power pop with a ‘90s sheen, sweet harmonies and teenage kicks. 

24. Weezer, The Blue Album: One of the great power-pop debuts of all time; I hear it makes you feel just like Buddy Holly. 

25. Neil Young, Sleeps With Angels: Of the approximately 457 albums Neil Young has released, this one has the beauty of a dusty abandoned saloon falling apart somewhere way out in the wild west. 

Bubbling just under: Sugar, File: Under Easy Listening; Outkast, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik; Sebadoh, Bakesale; Veruca Salt, American Thighs; Portishead, Dummy; Meat Puppets, Too High To Die; Youssou N’Dour, The Guide (Wommat); Frank Black, Teenager of the Year; Alice In Chains, Jar of Flies. 

Sometime in the next few months, Elvis Presley will have been dead longer than he’s been alive. 

It’s 42 years today since Elvis died at age 42 in 1977, and it took a long time for me to take him seriously. For most of us Gen-Xers, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll who died fat and a parody of himself was a joke. It took me years to see that there’s a thousand different Elvises. 

I was a California kid, but I lived in Elvis’ backyard for much of the 1990s, just outside Memphis and just an hour down the road from his birthplace of Tupelo. I wanted to work at Graceland for a summer job, but I couldn’t beat the competition. I fell in love with a girl from Tupelo. I slowly found the King behind the jokes. 

There’s at least four eras of Elvis proper – the young fiery prodigy, captured best in the haunting Sun Records recordings that still amaze today; the post-Army burnout whose talents were wasted for years in movies and cheesy soundtracks; the black leather-clad colossus who stormed his way to a ’68 comeback, and who then melted into the sad sweaty mess of his final years. 

When a legendary person dies, they slowly transform into myth. There’s a Shakespearean heft to the Presley story, a boy from nowhere who conquered the world. Elvis becomes a trailblazing comet or a paunchy punchline, a star of endless daffy movies, a boy who mourned his mother, a kung-fu kicking drug case who once pestered his way in to see Richard Nixon. 

I like the “Comeback Elvis” years the best, from that stunning 1968 TV Special on to the early ‘70s. At his best, he’s like a lone gunslinger bashing through the saloon doors, reminding all the young guns why he mattered. It’s the height before the fall. He’s got the years to give him authority, but he’s still young enough to prowl like a tiger in that insane leather jumpsuit. There’s a horrible trail of wasted possibilities in the Elvis story, which you can lay at the feet of his drug problem, his emotional immaturity, or the terrible mismanagement by the Colonel, who never really understood the power of Elvis. The story is Elvis is a story of lost dreams. 

Imagine if a 60-something Elvis had gone on to have a Johnny Cash-style latter years revival, if he’d just taken a stage with a guitar and a song and captured something of the haunting echoes of the Sun Studios years. 

One of my favourite Elvis songs is “Hurt,” (not the Nine Inch Nails/Johnny Cash version, of course) which he covered just a year before he died. I used to listen to it with a jaded, ironic eye, because Elvis sings the HELL out of this song, murdering it with an unrestrained abandon that teeters right on the edge of parody. But listen to it, man. Listen to the voice breaking as the song launches into the stratosphere, listen to the way his voice dips deep into the canyons as he sings how he’s hurt “way deep inside of me.” He’s singing about a lot more kinds of hurt than just being dumped. This is Elvis in his autumn, looking back at his highs and lows. 

It’s easy to see a punchline in the thousands and thousands of different Elvises the world has seen in the last 42 years. But deep inside the best of his songs, whether it’s the slow burn of “Mystery Train” or the unrestrained operatic bombast of “Hurt,” the real king still awaits. 

If I ever was to bottle the essence of my late teenage angst circa ages 16-20, it would smell a lot like Depeche Mode.

Of all the ‘80s alternative icons I revisit in my dotage, there’s few  more evocative than Depeche Mode. There’s a grandiose charm to Depeche Mode’s work. It’s the kind of twisted pleasure you sometimes get from being alone in your room, miserable, but yet you don’t really want to be anywhere else. 

The Cure were dark, Joy Division were doomed, but the spice that Depeche Mode has comes from Dave Gahan’s sonorous voice, a bombastic prophet who makes everything he sings seem like the most important words anyone’s ever had to say. His Las Vegas-style showmanship isn’t subtle, but combined with the ever-inward songwriting of Martin Gore and the epic swirling keyboards of Alan Wilder, it made for a combination of gloom-pop you could dance to. Doubt and fear never seemed so glamorous. As Gahan sang on on 2005’s “Lillian,” “Pain and misery always hit the spot.” That’s Depeche Mode in a nutshell. 

One of my bigger teenage regrets was not seeing Depeche Mode on their ‘101’ tour when it passed through Sacramento. It would’ve been a great first concert for teenage me; instead I saw synth-popster Howard Jones, whose keyboards malfunctioned and he swore dramatically at them. 

1990’s “Violator,” released just shy of 30 years ago now, was peak Depeche Mode. The deeply layered woe-is-me “Enjoy The Silence” was everybody’s go-to misery pop anthem. “Personal Jesus” a swinging display of nonconformity. “World In My Eyes” and “Waiting For The Night” the kind of hushed dark romantic murmurings a black-clad teen wished he could dedicate to someone, anyone. 

I got obsessive enough that I was the guy that bought the cassingle of “Personal Jesus” featuring no less than five loping, thumping versions of their hit single, carefully analysing each piece on a quantum scale of misery.

Depeche Mode can roughly be broken up into three periods – their lighter “synth pop” phase of the first couple albums, when Erasure’s Vince Clarke was in the band, the “imperial phase” running from roughly “Construction Time Again” to “Ultra” when they pretty much ruled the proto-emo world, and the more muted, less omnipresent latter Mode, after Alan Wilder left the band, which continues pretty much to this day.

You know what you’re getting with Depeche Mode – dark, glittery midnight music that casts pretty much every decision in one’s life as an epic battle for the soul. It can wear thin – which is why their records post-1997 or so haven’t gotten as much traction – but even the least of Depeche Mode’s albums still has one fist-pumpingly bleak anthem to moan along to. I spin “Violator” yet again and it still transports me to their stark world. After that, words are very unnecessary.