'90s Rewind
One of the local radio stations has been doing what it calls a
rewind
this last week: they’re playing everything
they’ve ever played in chronological order. It’s really
quite cool, and has drilled home one over-riding point: modern music is
rubbish.
The last half of the 1990s featured an amazing variety of popular (at
the time termed alternative
) music, and a good deal of musical
ability therein. Even the pieces which I don’t care for are
good—just not my thing. In contrast, modern music is for the most
part a worthless sameness of poor writing, poor singing and poor
playing. Then we had the Wallflowers’ One Headlight;
we had Rammstein’s Du Hast; we had the heyday of
Cake; we had Prodigy; we had Fiona Apple; we had the Cowboy Junkies, the
Sneaker Pimps, Blur and so on. What do we have now? Ten thousand
variants of that most worthless of musical
forms, rap.
Something else which occurred to me is how utterly absurd—and yet at the same time utterly cool—the swing music phenomenon was. I mean, we’re talking about a bastardised jazz/big band/what-have-you thing. But it worked, and it worked well. Tell me you can’t hear Zoot Suit Riot without wanting to get up and dance. Tell me that the Squirrel Nut Zippers didn’t put out some great tunes.
Sure, I realise that some of my fondness for the music is due to the fact that from 1996–2000 I was in college. No doubt I’ve rose-coloured glasses to a certain extent. But even taking that into account, the music of the late ’90s was far, far, far than the pap played now.
