ITT: /mu/ in 1994
Oh God, I can't even begin to imagine how insuffurable /mu/ would be after Kurt deepthroats a shotgun.
>>130530243over 9000 post sticky and lots of kurt no brains jokes
Hey guise, we're back and we're totally grunge now. Honest, right?
It's all bad, man.
>>130530243he put it in the back of his head and fired, wasn't in his mouth
musically, Hieronymous Bosch as post-industrial atheist. lyrically, Transformers as kiddy porn ("Eraser", "Hurt"). *
>>130530227The Allman Brothers Band's new album is so good. And they are so fucking good live. Dickey Betts can still bring it. its 1994- who knew? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvPqtzo8-Mo
Three great songs here: in ascending order, the cheater's whisper "Creep," the sisters' sermon "Waterfalls," and the wet dream's statement of principle "Red Light Special." The filler sustains, the skits are funnysexycool, the male rappers rock. But other wet dreams end badly--a guy would have to be pretty hard up to sustain four minutes interest in "Let's Do It Again"'s vow of lifelong intromission--and the project's caution is summed up by the Prince cover. Really, ladies, the brilliance of "If I Was Your Girlfriend" was that a guy was singing it. B+
>>130530411>>130530299uggh, the money lust of these two fuckers is getting out of control. it's only going to be exceeded by that one 4 year old girl in Reading.
OH GOD, OASIS SUCKS
Their popward shift doesn't change their specific gravity because they're all surface either way. Where before their noise was an intrinsically intriguing sonic signpost sweetened by their tunes, now their tunes gain savor from their noise. Talented boys, absolutely, often with something thoughtful to say about feelings the average college graduate has already thought through, and since I've got nothing against surfaces, I look forward to their romantic maturity. I also advise the Algerian and Norwegian pen pals they crib from to demand points. B+
holy shit
>>130530447they were hot but totally disposable music
I'm not saying single of the year.But it's single of the year.
>>130530552too bad the production on this is crud compared to Vulgar Display>those clackity clack tapping on a keyboard drums
IMPEACH CLINTON
As a white person in an integrated, how do we say it, nabe, I should breathe a sigh of relief that pithy Christopher Wallace seems content to exploit his own people--"I been robbin' motherfuckers since the slave ship," or, if you prefer, "I be beatin' motherfuckers like Ike beat Tina." As a male person, I should be grateful he doesn't want to pimp my kind either. But because I live a lot farther from the edge, these things don't make me feel better at all--I'm outraged when anyone gets robbed, beaten, or pimped, descendants of slaves especially. Hence I'm not inclined to like this motherfucker. But the more I listen the more I do. Wiping the cold out of his eyes at 5:47 a.m. or pulling his gat as the wrong guy comes down the street, he commands more details than any West Coast gangsta except carbetbagging Ice-T. His sex raps are erotic, his jokes are funny, and his music makes the thug life sound scary rather than luxuriously laid back. When he considers suicide, I not only take him at his word, I actively hope he finds another way. A-
>>130530658imagine showing a black person this review. he'd be like tf did I just read?
Wanna know why these guys are getting attention? It can't possibly have anything to do with that other band from Aberdeen..no, that can't be it. Oh right, I know. They're pure. Always ugly. Slow, too (here up to Sabbath tempos at times) with ten minutes of din at the end to shore up their cred. If you're young and not very bright or maybe a little too bright this music may speak to your condition and far be it from me to suggest volunteering for Rock The Vote instead. The rest of us can read about them. C
The Afropop Fund has less of a beef than do parents and plain old pop fans--better secondhand mbube jive (Mbongemi Ngema simulating pan-Africana) than thirdhand razzmatazz (Elton John and Tim Rice dusting off the big themes, dull hooks, and Jungle Book shtick). With half an exception for Nathan Lane's meerkat, the voices are even more negligible than the songs, which number five in all--it takes three Elton versions plus four Eurocentric instrumentals to bring a lousy EP up to 12 tracks. C
>>130530227Best Woodstock this year. Mud people everywhere.
What the actual fuck?Music is dead.
Although Tim's vocal traces are in his genes as surely as John's are in Julian's, it's wrong to peg him as the unwelcome ghost of his overwrought dad. Young Jeff is a syncretic asshole, beholden to Zeppelin and Nina Simone and Chris Whitley and the Cocteau Twins and his mama--your mama too if you don't watch out. "Sensitivity isn't being wimpy," he avers. "It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom." So let us pray the force of hype blows him all the way to Uranus. C
>>130530339ok that's actually funny
>>130530411>gets banned from country radio just for saying that folks should be le nice to each other
>>130530796>instead of listening to this cool noise rock you would be better served making sure the Democrats don't lose the '94 midterms. the polls aren't looking good, here.
Rock is dead, fucking grunge crybabbies ruined everything. Take me back to '83 when the music meant something.
Tempting though it might be to poke fun at reformed Halo of Flies fans going gaga for Tony Bennett, the wily old codger is certainly prudent about deploying his lovingly-preserved pipes. But this guy's got a nerve. It's not quite as awful as some computerized nightmare where Manilow replaces Tex Beneke and Martha Tilton on classic swing records, but it's also worse--swing as '50s TV music, astonishing chestnuts (Frank Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters, what taste), reimagined or reconceived arrangements by the "original" orchestras (whatever that can mean after 50 years). All, of course, fronted by Manilow's uncompromisingly inoffensive voice--a voice that never once hints at history or sex or chops. Incomprehensible press quote--"I've found a funkiness and intelligence in this music that will last forever and I wanted to remind my listeners of what a hip era this was." C
seductive self-regard over the best tracks fame can buy ("Don't Stop") **
triple whopper with cheese ("Weird Al" Yankovic: "Bedrock Anthem"; Green Jelly, "Anarchy in the U.K."; the BC-52's, "(Meet) The Flintstones") ***
what's not to like? ("Hungry Hamed's," "Cleopatra's Cat") *
Although her attack is more austere, DeMent's voice is as country as Kitty Wells's or Loretta Lynn's, and her writing defines the directness sophisticates prize in traditional folk songs--she has something she wants to say, and so she proceeds from Point A to Point B in the straightest line she can draw without a ruler. She doesn't get lost not just because she knows where Point B is, which is rare enough in this ambivalent time, but because she knows where Point A is--she knows that who she is begins with where she comes from, and she's made her peace with that. Unlike so many American artists who outgrow fundamentalism, she's not wracked by rage or guilt; at worst, she's sad about her distance from forebears she loves and admires despite their strict morality--a morality she'll never return to even though it's the bedrock of her personality and ultimately her work. The only change her major-label move means is a firmer commitment to pleasure--that is, to melody. Her dad, who gave up the fiddle when he got saved, would surely understand. A+
>>130531112>astonishing chestnuts (Frank Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters, what taste)What would have possibly made you think he was gonna go for deep cuts on this one? That's not the purpose of this type of album.
>>130531002>still caring about Beastie Boys in 19 fucking 94you also waiting for the next Ratt album to drop?
Goodnight sweet princess.
keeping the bad faith ("Incomplete," "Hooray for Me") *
over a gawky world-groove, basic singer-songwriter stuff--the biological mystery at the core of technological life ("Lillies of the Valley", "Buck Naked") **
the confessions of everygangsta swallow the boasts ("County Line," "Mama I'm in Love With a Gangsta," "In Da Closet") ***
>>130530279Where's Vince and what did you do with him?
>>130531444this slop only got put out because the president or something of Viacom was a fan of him
>>130531466>So if TLC can do an anti-crime track for low effort critical points/top 10 airplay, why can't I do the same? We'll get back to you on that one next album. Cya.
In which these pranksters proceed to prove absolutely that a sense of humor provides useful training in broader human feelings. Among those they don't put down are a porn actress, a happy born-againer, a guy in Birkenstocks and a tie-dyed Rancid T-shirt, Hasidic O.G.'s, and--implicitly--people who like tunes with their rant and rave. They're a six-figure advance away from that exalted state where assholes everywhere can call them shallow and suburban. A-
Holiday is a great American artist, a genius whose musical improvisations only deepened an unfathomable persona that was sweet, willing, knowing, suspicious, sly, cynical, and impossibly unhappy before she hit 25 and then gained texture as her body broke down. James is merely a fine r&b singer who's been stroking her cult since before she had one. Entertaining an audience of self-anointed sophisticates who had a thing for earthy music, she fell into the habit of cutting her own earthiness with a flattering wink and coasting from there, and as she herself would tell you, preferably while signing your CD booklet, it would be stupid to buy this before taking on Holiday--Columbia's young three-disc box (with Billie, crappy material just adds to the challenge), or Verve's mature two-disc set (with Billie, a ravaged voice ditto). But short of Chess's young two-disc Essential Etta James, it's Etta's most consistent and musical album--her melodic nuances are every bit as hip as the ace backup of Cedar Walton's tight septet. Beyond repertoire, it has little to do with Billie--at most, Etta suggests Holiday's tough soul the way Diana Ross did her pop smarts. But compared to Miki Howard's disgracefully self-aggrandizing "tribute" or Terence Blanchard's dismayingly schmaltzy "songbook," it's an act of love. It's also a hell of a torch record. A-
>>130530433>Dickey Betts can still bring it.great new song by Dickey....but that Haynes solo
The cover art depicts a terrified little girl on a swingset cowering as the menacing shadow of a hook-handed rapist draws near. The band loves this image and flaunts it in their trade ads as Sony flogs their death-industrial into its second year. They also sing about child abuse--guess what? They're aggin it. But if their name isn't short for kiddy porn, then the group should insist on a music video where they all get eaten by giant chickens. C+
>>130531823i was listening to korn yesterday after like not hearing them for 20 yearsi couldn't believe how many views their videos havelike half a billion
>>130531823took that long to get to it?
>>130531823i mean, obviously it was about Davis being molested when he was a kid. Faggau took the most cynical possible take that it was closeted cockrock.
i grew up in the 90s and I don't really listen to anything from then70s, 80s, and 00s is what i mostly listen to
>>130530433>>130531812You now remember Woodstock '94https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDGUFXMTLLA
His clip file is home to a bigheaded kid who's memorized Bob Dylan's Playboy interview, a slacker version of the Pretentious Asshole--here a folkie there a punk everywhere an image-slinger (with absurdist tendencies, mais oui). But his album barely contains an exuberant experimenter whose verbiage coheres on record--either because he knows records are history or because repetition tamps down the loose ends. He's a folkie-punk version of, well, the Young Bob Dylan, except that he also loves hooks enough to cast his net wider than the Young David Johansen, finding them everywhere from an electric sitar to an illicitly taped tirade from a "Vietnam vet playin' air guitar" downstairs. Full of fun and loaded with 'tude, he doesn't care what you think of him and makes you love it, right down to the nose-thumbing bummer dirges that close each side. Proving how cool you are by making an album that sounds like shit is easy. Proving how cool you are by making an album that comes this close to sounding like shit is damn hard--unless you're damn talented. A
>>130531760>Entertaining an audience of self-anointed sophisticates who had a thing for earthy musicso much projection
Always a song band, they reverse the usual evolution by slathering themselves with grunge, which they play for weird sounds rather than dull despair. Hence their anger seems more metal-generic than punk-programmatic--rooted in the rock and roll everyday, where it belongs. It should go without saying that it's often about gender nevertheless; how anyone can accuse them of riding a bandwagon is beyond me. Every day, women is what they are, and there are lots of ways that can be shitty--the rape avoidance diary "Can I Run" describes only a few. But every day, rock and rollers is also what they are, and they're much better at it than Candlebox or Alice in Chains. And yes, the songs help. A-
You think the million-plus American rockers who've purchased Gavin Rossdale's not altogether unmusical howl of male pain are this far gone? For that matter, you think Rossdale is? Nah. It's an idealization--a level of despair to aspire toward rather than shared pain requiring collective catharsis. In other words, things could get worse. B-
>>130530535it has only two good tracks
imagine you guys crying over some mf-er with a guitar who blew his head off like he's freakin' Michael Jackson. white people, i swear.
Instead of distilling their weakness for experimental trash into noise-rock that sounds like a million bucks, they apply their skill at major-label compromise to their eternal propensity for experimental trash. After all this time, they know what they're doing when they fuck around, and their long-evolving rock and roll groove breaks down only when they have something better to do--there's nothing aleatory, accidental, or incompetent about it. Anyway, usually the groove holds; this is no Sister because it moves when it means to. Its unexpected noises are the marks of flesh-and-blood creatures thinking and feeling things neither you nor they have ever thought or felt before. If they can't quite put those things into words, that's what unexpected noises are for. A
Eddie Vedder's struggles with stardom have a concreteness missing from more mythic epics of resistance. But it isn't his MTV boycott or TicketMaster stand that make his third album his best--it's his need to live up to Kurt's musical example and expiate Kurt's mythic pain. Three or four of these songs are faster and riffier than anything else in P. Jam's book, token experiments like "Bugs" are genuinely weird, and in an era of compulsory irony his sincerity is something like a relief--a Kurtlike relief at that. A-
>>130530590fuck off Rush Limbaugh
Punk aesthetic or no punk aesthetic, Courtney Love's songs wouldn't be compromised and might be deepened by steeper momentum and more articulate guitar noise. But they prevail anyway. Their focus is sexual exploitation, and not just by the media, evil straights, and male predators of every cultural orientation. She's also exploited by Courtney Love, and not only does she know it, she thinks about it. These are the confessions of a self-made feminist bimbo--of the girl who wanted the most cake. Just because she's a phony, whatever that means, doesn't mean the world isn't out to deny her her props. A
For accuracy's sake, I should note that you haven't exactly heard it all before--the drums are punchier, the structures trickier. But insofar as you have, that's the point: punk lives, and these guys have the toons and sass to prove it to those who can live without. Before they start to wear down, they've done their bit for apathy, insanity, voluntary poverty, and the un-American way. A-
Even when they split the difference between jangle and boogie, bands given to blunt popcraft and elementary guitars generally favor singers up toward the whiny end of the dramatic spectrum. So Darius Rucker's gruff grit adds an extra layer of substance to a music already deeply comforting in its formal certainties. As a black man who takes his vocal cues from what Gregg Allman made of blues and soul, not to mention a black man embraced as eagerly as Carl McCall by white people loath to think of themselves as "prejudiced," he's significant, with "Drowning" one more hit about racism than Tupac or Dr. Dre has bothered with. But since both patterns can be traced to late minstrelsy--by which I mean not the whiteskin brainwash of perfervid radical rhetoric, merely the twisted roots of American pop--he's hardly unprecedented. And whatever his significance, a cornball is a cornball is a cornball. B
>>130532756ugh, so overplayed
Nuts, I forgot to tape Seinfeld last night.
>>130532756It's just a by-the-book grunge album with the novelty of a black singer. Don't see what the hype was.
Although I'd love to hear him throw something together with Dave Grohl and Chris Novoselic, the Cobain connection is a ringer--dozens of young bands could scare up a Nirvana tribute more wrenching and dynamic. Instead think Johnny Rotten revisited and Rust Never Sleeps. The 14-minute "Change Your Mind" is not now and never will be "Like a Hurricane." But this caps five years of trying with lyrical will-o'-the-wisps, weird road tales, sociological crazy mirrors, rock and roll's first great middle-age anthem, and the ecology edition of "Welfare Mothers." Now let's hope he doesn't go for Hawks and Doves. A-
Sick of dummies claiming they can't rock, the old Zepheads deliver the first power-riff album of their highly lyrical career. Peter Buck's sonic palette is rainbow grunge--variegated dirt and distortion as casual rhetoric--and he's so cranked even the slow ones seem born to be loud. As for Mr. Stipe, he's in the band, where he belongs. Message: guitars. Which after years of politics and sensitivity is well-timed. A-
>>130530311Bitch, how?
>>130533064this was Aileen Wuornos's favorite album on death row
sixties schmixties. back when they were a tribute act they were the Diamond Dogs ("Rock 'n Roll Star", "Shakermaker") *
You and Tony Bennett, Rosie. That Oasis tune wasn't about you guys, though it could be if you let it.
Justin Bieber vacuumed Cobain's life force so he could be born.
>>130532617Enjoy them while they're still pure.
In Mo' Meta Blues, Questlove describes "hip hop's funeral": the battle of the debuts at the Source Awards, when Biggie's Ready to Die buried Nas's Illmatic, already a critical and in-crowd legend, and he watched Nas "wilt in defeat" in the Tommy Hilfiger shirt his manager had just financed. Sez Quest to Black Thought: "He's never going to be the same. You just watch." And he was right. Nas immediately transformed himself into a hit-seeking faux gangsta of depressing conventionality and didn't make another good record for eight years. That still begs the question, however, of exactly how good this spartan effort was and is. Better than I thought at the time for sure--as happens with aesthetes sometimes, the purists heard subtleties principled vulgarians like me were disinclined to enjoy, especially beatmaking where Large Professor along with such fellow New York smoothies as Pete Rock, Q-Tip, and the great Premier convert samples into haunting looped groove elements. Also enjoyable is Nas's ability to transform simple lines like "I never sleep because sleep is the cousin of death," "I'm out for presidents to represent me," "The world is yours," and even "One love, one love" into de facto hooks. And my mind tells me that I have to admire how cagily he walks the line between doing the crime and hanging with homies for whom nothing else is "real" even if my heart isn't in it. All that said, however, Ready to Die still gets my vote. A-
For a time PE's confrontational music/ideology compelled young blacks to hope that consciousness would get them somewhere, and don't think it was the limitations of Chuck's worldview that left them hanging. He never said it would be as easy as pop fans always expect, but he must have figured racism was a little more tractable than this. And when it wasn't, well, here came da gangstas--copping instant gratification for the padded jeepbeats they dealt, they talked tough and stayed out of the man's way. Taken for granted as an elder statesman by the young turks who are always coming up, resented for leading on middle-class followers who've since discovered War and Rose Royce, what can poor Chuck D. do 'cept rap in a rock and roll band? So he harangues and excoriates same as always, his dense rhetoric deep with puns, his hard beats charging you up just when you think the enamel on your bicuspids will never be the same. Over and above the gangsta-dissing "So Whatcha Gone Do Now?" and the ecology-dropping "Bedlam 13:13," half these tracks dynamite the harshly layered formula one way or another and the other half reprise a great sound. Some kind of funk, I swear, and if I understand the complaints that they sound like a damn alternative rock group, well, I always did--that's one reason I love them. A-
>>130533064fuckin' Seinfeld bass music
>>130531112at least previous decades had music and genres worth revisiting. there is literally no nostalgia at all connected to any of these bands from the 90s until present day. nobody cares about any of these people.
>>130533455>>130530651wouldn't say that
>>130533455That's a little unfortunate as 90-96 was really the last era of organic, non-corporate music existing in the mainstream.
>>130533476>wouldn't say thati would. i obviously pay attention to the world of music and had no idea soundgarden was together and actually touring at the time of chris cornells death. thats how forgotten all these legends from the 90s are
>>130530572The other is that they used up all their good songs on Vulgar Display and this one is just a bunch of jam sessions ala Pearl Jam's Vs.
90s rock was about hating and wanting to Cobain yourself. Sure, it hit the spot when you were an edgy 13 year old but it doesn't hold up, it holds up worse than the hair metal you were supposed to hate and be laughing at in '94.
Still, I have my suspicion that all three of these ladies are actually the same person using different names. Have they ever been seen in the same room together?
>>130530299Then again she did include a couple of the religious tunes so points for that, at least.
>>130533757it was all mom music, although not bad as mom music goes. the industry trying to appeal to that demo of women in their 30s who grew up on the Doobie Brothers and Emmylou Harris.
>>130533757One track on here is a duet with MCC so we can assume at least two of them are different people.
>>130533757Maybe Talking Heads covers weren't such a good idea though.
>>130530424>>130530339>>130530552>>130530796>>130531823this year was probably the heaviest rock ever got in the mainstream. after that there was no further place to go so it was all down from there.
>>130532293Reddit in music form.
Nobody cares about Nirvana anymore. What can they do about it?
Leave those silly Rolling Stones be, children--you're an old-fart virgin until you've done the deed with this slab of eternal life, created in a mere eight months by two well-heeled boys farting around the Irish countryside. Jim Capaldi's drums are mixed like a tribute to the disco of yesteryear, but Stevie, I mean Steve, enters the CD age on his own terms--where ordinary old farts jack their releases up to an hour by unloading 14 or 15 songs, he stops at 10. Title tune takes a full two-and-a-half minutes of overdubbed overture to get to the lyric. Which begins . . . oh, you don't want to know. C-
Popular groundswells do vary in discernment, as students of jogging, nail care salons, and tax limits know. Like his homeboy and forebear Bruce Hornsby, Matthews jams politely. His instrumentation invokes classical, jazz, and bluegrass niceties. And although one can understand the deep-seated impatience with agony-as-entertainment his renown reflects, he's as bland as a tofu sandwich. C+
world's greatest roots-rock band ("Brand New Car," "New Faces") **
hasn't lost a step, hasn't gained one either ("Spinster," "You Got a Problem") **
porn now an annoyance, funk still a surprise ("Loose!" "Pheromone") ***
>>130532495>Nirvana, Joan Jett, and Suzi Quattro all smushed into one
an around-the-way girl's recipe for happiness ("Mary Jane," "I'm Goin' Down") ***
watch out America--polite four-part harmonizers are coming to fuck your daughters ("U Know," "I'll Make Love to You") ***
Where his homeboy Snoop plays a well-chilled sociopath whose indifference to pain is the centerpiece of his carefully plotted menace, Dr. Dre's kid half-brother is more like a mischievous seventh-grader. Giggling at Bootsy's funny glasses one minute, selling crack on the corner the next, he could go either way, or both in tandem. His cool and his tough are less practiced, less cocksure, hence more dangerous--and more tragic. Teamed with the tunefully murderous Nate Dogg, he's nasty in a new, neurotic way. Giving work to the Twinz or Dove Shack, he's one more G. B+
Who cares whether it's "real" or not? However much Nina Gordon, Louise Post, and their bepenised rhythm section sound like the Breeders, you could tell the two apart in a blindfold test (probably). But the confluences overpower the divergences anyway, and good. Commercial calculation is as irrelevant here as they're-just-a-band gender-has-nothing-to-do-with-it crapola. Whatever their motives and existential reality, they're less coy, less goofy, clearer melodically, and surer of their rhythmic turf at least in part because the Breeders got over, thus diminishing (but not eliminating) their felt need for diversionary tactics in a continuing project of aesthetic reconceptualization--creating a pop-rock style that steers between male-identified canons of manipulative pseudocertainty and female-identified canons of pseudoconfessional sensitivity. At present, what they say with that style means less than how coherently and attractively they configure it. If and when they become (even) better artists, it won't. A-
Sade for androids ("Sour Times," "Wandering Star") *
>>130533064"Carnival" is just Laura Branigan's "Self Control", Spongebob.
>>130533638all i'm saying is the 90s really didn't hold up as well as people think it did
>>130532756Worst one album wonder ever.
>>130535213enough about nirvana
>>130534754this holds up
Burzum - Hvis lyset tar ossCannibal Corpse - The BleedingInfester - Into The DepthsEmperor - In the Nightside EclipseThergothon - Stream from the HeavensA good year for extreme metal
>>130538632based>>130534003what's reddit?
>>130530243Hell be fine
Having mocked this group's conceptual pretensions for years, I'd best point out that Chris Cornell still isn't Robert Plant, Kim Thayill still isn't Jimmy Page, and so forth, before cheerfully acknowledging that 1) they're all closer than they used to be and 2) it no longer matters. This is easily the best--the most galvanizing, kinetic, sensational, catchy--Zep rip in history. And though there may be a philosophical or interpersonal dimension, to me the trick sounds like it was done with songwriting, arrangement, and production. At 70 minutes, it's what used to be called a double album, not quite as long as Physical Graffiti but a lot more consistent. And though their apocalyptic pessimism is almost as content-free as Zep's apocalyptic mystagogy, Zep never reached out like Cornell in "My Wave": "Cry, if you want to cry/If it helps you see/If it clears your eyes/Hate, if you want to hate/If it keeps you safe/If it makes you brave." A-
>>130531081AOTY
>>130541144thanks, Australia/bongs but we already have Mariah. i'll pass.
>>130532883>Hootie and the Blowfish>by-the-book grungeNigga what? The fuck is "grunge" about Hold My Hand, Only Wanna Be With You, or Let Her Cry?
>>130541144Her career is over. No one will remember her in 10 years.
when's Metallica coming out with another album? it's been three years.
>>130530279My verdict: waaaah waaaaaah(I am currently being pushed out of a vagina and and not yet aware of this Album)
