Where Were We in ‘93? (In “Three Dot Journalism” Style)

This is not an anniversary post:

Thirty-one years is on no one’s list of significant milestones…

Unless you’re a fan of Frank Minnifield.

Or you prefer Piano Sonata No. 31 in A♭ major to No. 32 in the Master’s late period. (I’m just not a big C minor guy).

Inspiration struck without warning while listening to music on a recent Thursday, during a spell of drone (literally!) work in the warehouse. “Hey, look, that’s mildly interesting. There are six songs on this carefully curated 1993 playlist with one-word titles.” Hmm, what can I do with that? As long as I don’t step on the esteemed toes of @DJProfessorDan…

My 1962 playlist includes 11 one-word titles. Too many.

Only three in ‘78, though – and you don’t want a thousand words each on ‘Chains,’ ‘F.M.,’ and ‘Lights. Although the first, by Gregg Diamond and Bionic Boogie, is a little-known rock-disco monster with a young Luther Vandross handling the vocals, and probably worthy of a serious spelunking expedition.

More than three decades on, 1993 doesn’t stand out from a historical perspective.

• Sure, Clinton was inaugurated.
• The EU became a reality.

• Alyssa Milano and Drew Barrymore starred in competing Amy Fisher movies (on CBS and ABC, respectively) broadcast on the same night,

• Stephen King came out with Nightmares and Dreamscapes (still the last King book I’ve read)

• And Snoop, currently America’s Sweetheart: was cleared of murder charges. A very blah 12 months.

As for myself, I was back in college at 33: A decrepit juco student limping his way through that all-important second year during which one struggled to maintain an interest in schooling while juggling applications in the hope of transferring to a four-year institution and get on with the work of earning a degree.

Somehow, later in the academic year, I received acceptance letters from both UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. I seriously considered both.

The tipping point: a classmate told me: ‘You gotta go for the Pac-10 school, right?’ Right.

My 1993 list is 50 songs long and pretty much a standard one for a person with tastes heavily influenced by years of slavishly listening to Top 40 AM-radio.

You’ve got your Sheryl Crow, your Soul Asylum, a dab of late-career Def Lepp and early Ace of Base. Two hip-hop songs, but also, ‘Whoomp! There It Is.’ Nothing that would mark me as a fan of deep cuts from obscure but artistically important performers. Gimme that middle of the road, that fat part of the Bell curve.

In no particular order, then…

…And with eternal thanks to Herb Caen:

The least known by me, surprisingly, since it’s a melodic, mid-power pop jangle of a song … Thought for sure, just from the title, a double entendre was in the offing, but no … Reached no. 8 on the Heatseekers Chart (?) … Don’t go down into the Warehouse 13 of types of Billboard charts, past or present, or you won’t see the light of day until you start to imagine a world where Tom B. announces that his next gig will be devoting a weekly column to the Latin Rhythm Airplay No. 1s … Four or five verses, in AABCCB format

… Plot involves a lovelorn malt shop employee regretting a missed romantic opportunity… while also yearning to leave town and is perhaps The Lords of Flatbush adjacent … Strong R.E.M. circa Lifes Rich Pageant vibes … The band’s latest, Jump Rope, dropped this year … They’ve developed their sound over the decades and now exhibit strong Lemonheads vibes …

From Rolling Stone’s feature on the band (penned contemporarily by Chris Mundy): ‘Buffalo Tom offer nothing new to the rock form whatsoever. Not a thing. They just happen to be better at the same old thing than just about everyone else.’ … I don’t see that as a drag, and I don’t think it was meant that way back then.

This could have been ‘Again’ if the Fates had crooked a finger in another direction … Stereogum Reviewer Tom Breihan gives ‘Again’ a 6/10 and mentions janet. singles ‘Because of Love’ and ‘Any Time, Any Place’ in his write-up, but not ‘If’ … Ah, he does in his ‘That’s the Way Loves Goes’ review and gave it a 9 … “Janet Jackson will appear in this column again” reads wearily resigned … I see it as a 6, my go-to ‘song is unhorrible and I’ll sometimes listen to it all the way through if fishing my cellphone out of my back pocket is too much trouble’ rating …

Intro (woozy guitar, quote from the Supremes’ ‘Someday We’ll Be Together,’ establishment of the primary new jack swing backbeat) lasts 47 seconds, a big chunk of the tune’s running time … It’s a busy production, particularly in the bridge, where things breakdown, then reprise the intro … Jackson mumbles the verses as if trying to sublimate herself into the mechanized goings on around her until letting loose with proper Janet in the refrain …

Plot involves woman feverishly lusting over a so-far disinterested and/or oblivious party, along the lines of My Best Friend’s Wedding and we can only dream of Julia Roberts uttering lines like ‘your smooth and shiny feels so good against my lips’ … No, not a remake of Bread’s ‘If’ … A retrospective review written by Skinn Foley at Medium asserts that “‘”Janet Jackson and Whitney Houston were the first pop star R&B singers who were women”’” … This seems laughably ahistorical given Donna Summer and Aretha, among others.

The band’s name rubs we Californians the wrong way given our current enflamed state … Plot envisions the human race becoming subservient to another race (species, I think Perry meant) a la Planet of the Apes … Whichever film in the franchise, take your pick … I’d take Conquest of the Planet of the Apes … Roddy McDowell brings all of his Roddy McDowell-ness no matter how many prosthetics they affix to his countenance …

Would we make great pets? … I’m guessing not, considering our appetite for free expression and general distaste to being ordered around or made to do tricks, as well as a penchant for sticking it to the (not literal) man… Not being especially versed in many of the developments in and around the music biz during this period, I was surprised at Farrell’s influence across multiple spheres … Particularly his involvement with Lollapalooza …

I was in Chicago recently and found it a classic American metropolis in that ‘bigger is better’ mode … Visited New Orleans the week before and the contrast could not have been greater … I’ve never been to a music festival, so Aftershock in Sacramento this October will be my first (?!) …

Back to the tune, a mid-tempo rocker with touches of elegiac regret … For those keeping score: ‘We’ll make great pets’ 22, ‘You make great pets’ 1… Includes a lovely bass-leading breakdown that leads into the outro … Perry Farrell fans, what are the stylistic differences between Jane’s Addiction and PFP? … From a review written in 2023: ‘(The band) skillfully crafted a powerful and atmospheric composition that complements the profound message of the song.’ … That sounds a little boilerplate-ish to me.

Some number of interesting points here above and beyond being a riff-laden ear worm of a song … What’s worse than an ear worm? … Ear snake? Ear eel? Ear hose? … The first verse is the one that only goes three lines, leaving an interesting gap … Maybe James, the band, couldn’t come up with something that fits and rhymes with ‘top’ … ‘But I can’t hold off and she can’t stop’ … ‘There’s a knock on the door and in comes a cop’ … ‘And idle hands are the devil’s workshop’ … I like to think that whatever happens next is too explicit for the tender ears of the radio-listening public …

Plot: It’s the usual story of a poor guy stalked by a sexually adventurous partner … I have not experienced this kind of, how to put it, problem  … It’s the line ‘I found you sleeping next to me / I thought I was alone’ that makes me think that the song is the spiritual successor to Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Cecilia’ … The band continues to tour to this day, 42 years into their career … They’re still releasing music, too: Yummy, the band’s 2024 release, continues to reinforce their Britpop sensibilities …

Random detail: Co-founder and lead singer Tim Booth played Mob enforcer Victor Zsasz in Batman Begins … Not so random detail: ‘Laid’ was covered by Matt Nathanson for the American Wedding soundtrack … The original got up to no. 61, but Nathanson’s cover didn’t chart as far as I can figure, which is weird since I swear I heard the latter much more than the former …

For whatever reason, the band members (all male) don dresses and eat bananas on the Laid album cover… Wrote BBC reviewer Ian Wade in 2011: ““Laid” is indie-doing-sex a bit too self-consciously—Pulp would soon rise to public prominence and make this shtick their own.”

One of the Beck as proof-of-concept singles back in his barely not-starving days … He describes himself as perhaps the world’s worst rapper … Maybe, but it blew up, rising to no. 10 on ye olde Top 40 … No plot, just free association (the classy way to say ‘I’m making crap up with the hope that others will project meaning on the mishmash and think I’m deep’) … True, ‘Loser’ got big in 1994, but it was originally released in March of ‘93 … Okay, it was on Bong Load vinyl, but still …

Beck was approached by ‘Weird Al’ for the parody tune ‘Schmoozer’ and the producers of Dumb and Dumber to use ‘Loser’ as the movie’s theme song, but turned both down … ‘Soy un parador’ … To this day, the artist refutes the notion that he’s trafficking in slacker tropes here … Jay Stowe from Spin for the prosecution: “An irresistible hook-line like “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me…?” comes around maybe once a decade. So, hey, jump in the craze train. America’s browbeaten youth never had a more absurd—or honest—anthem.”’” …

I didn’t know that there was something out there like the ‘anti-folk’ movement of which Beck was a part of before moving back to LA … Disaffected pseudo-Americana diehards roaming the NYC streets upset about not getting gigs at Folk City sounds like a madcap time … I think the cut is still on Rolling Stone’s ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’ list if you’re into that sort of thing … That guitar intro always sounds like it was recorded on a piece of tape found on the floor of a studio Bon Jovi just vacated while they were trying to come up with a riff for their latest motorcyclist-outlaw-cowboy epic.

Radiohead is to musical groups what The Wire or Breaking Bad are to television shows for me: Continually lauded as top notch, but somehow I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of each show in much the same way ‘Creep’ is one of the only two Radiohead songs I know and like … I’m a philistine, I know … I did purchase the OK Computer CD sometime in the past few decades but still haven’t listened to it all the way through … I promise to do it soon, however …

I mentioned up top that the order of songs had no framework but this final pair work well as twinned self-pity exercises … Hey, more serendipity: Radiohead supported James on a European tour shortly after Pablo Honey was released … Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood were given songwriting credits due to the band lifting parts of ‘The Boat That I Row,’ which the Hollies turned into ‘The Air That I Breathe’ … Conversely, Jonny Greenwood’s interstitial guitar shards have no parallel in the Hollies’ hit, and rightfully so …

Those sounds, along with Yorke’s mournful vocals, give the whole a bit of a Nirvana feel, which of course, Pixies, et al… ‘Creep’ reached no. 34 here in the US … From The Ringer’s John Harvilla in 2021: “That’s the myth, anyway, yes? ‘Creep’ made Radiohead, and Radiohead would go on to despise “Creep.” They pretty much stopped playing it live for years. They went on to make lavishly adored and prophetically dystopian albums that pointedly sounded nothing like “Creep” whatsoever.”

… Okay, but then there’s ‘High and Dry,’ with its delicate circular guitar figure and Yorke again pleading in falsetto, sounding exactly like a radio-friendly hit … Full disclosure: ‘High and Dry’ is the other Radiohead tune beloved in this quarter … I wonder if they still play that one live.

That’s the list. I think it’s a representative dip into the early ‘90s pop realm as heard by someone well on his way to removing himself from day-in, day-out hurly burly of tracking latest releases, discovering new trends, and visiting Tower Records on a semi-weekly basis. It would take time and some serious life changes to get me back into some semblance of topical musical interest. Oh, and getting an iPod.

Postscript: Jeebus. I’ve just noticed there are three more single-word titled songs on my ‘93 list. And you thought this was already TLDR. I might try to get at least an abbreviated blurb in for this mysterious trio in the comments, should the Great and Mighty deign to publish (and no, one of them is not ‘Again’).

I also need to get my eyeglass prescription updated.

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