Insanely Great 90s Songs You're Not Sick of: 1994

 

It is scientifically impossible to be sick of this video

1994 was another seminal year for Alternative Rock. So many landmark albums were released it boggles the mind to consider so much great music came out in just a 12-month period. 

Insanely Great Nineties Songs You Aren't Sick Of: 1993

Disclaimer: great song not included with this video clip.

1993 reminds me a lot of 1983: a year in which the established mainstream gave way to a new sub-generational cohort, along with a new wave of very disparate bands being marketed as a coherent genre. 

Insanely Great Nineties Songs You Aren't Sick Of: 1992

When life gets me down and the walls start closing in, I always reach for a surefire panacea: the coked-to-the-gills King Ad Rock showing off his favorite Flavor Flav moves while the Beasties rip through a frantic, frenetic run-through of their 1992 comeback hit, "What'Cha Want."

If I could recreate that effect in a lab and bottle it, I would.  

Insanely Great Nineties Songs You Aren't Sick Of: 1991

Before the Deluge...

It's no easy task finding great 90s songs you aren't sick of when it comes to 1991. Pretty much every blockbuster-- the records people think of first when they think of 90s rock-- was released that year. Nevermind, Ten, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Use Your Illusion, Out of Time, Achtung Baby, the "Black Album," For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, and Badmotorfinger all coughed up huge hits, which can still be heard every day on every classic rock or alternative radio station.

Insanely Great Nineties Songs You Aren't Sick Of: 1990

I'm sure many of you know the Nineties is my happy place. There are a lot of various reasons for this (cough, X-Files, cough) but a lot of it that the 90s was when first-wave Generation Xers took the reins on the pop culture buggy. And alternative rock was clearly the centerpiece of this project. 

You all know what happened when Nevermind broke, and you're sick of all the overplayed Seattle chestnuts, so let's take a deeper dive into the alt.rock lagoon and find some hidden hits and secret sounds that should have gone straight to the top of the charts.

Let Me Play You Some of My Dreams

 

Hello. Nice to see you again. Do you have some time to sit down and listen to some of my dreams? 

No, I mean the soundtracks to my dreams. 

What's that? No, I have no idea how they were able to record them. Sometimes it's better not to ask.

The 90s Are My Happy Place: Pocketful of (the) Posies

    Sometimes yourself and an artist are on vastly different tracks in your journey, but somehow meet up at an intersection before continuing on your own merry ways. Seattle's Posies are like that; a band whose earlier work had done nothing for me and whose later work wouldn't either, but we happily found ourselves in the same headspace for brief but glorious time.

Cheap Trick & the Twilight of Young America

"Dina, can you honestly tell me that you forgot the magnetism of Robin Zander or the charisma of Rick Nielsen?"

"Eh, that's kids' stuff ..." Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 1982

How Did They Hear What I Was Dreaming?

The art I'm most entranced by is the art that feels like it was stolen from my dreams. 

There's no ostensible pattern to this. Mulholland Drive, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Max Ernst, early Cocteau Twins, the first Devo album, Tubeway Army's Replicas, certain Industrial music videos, Jacob's Ladder, The Royal Tannebaums, My Bloody Valentine, Brian Eno's 70's work, The Go Team, and Cliff Martinez' Solaris soundtrack all strike very deep chords in me that I can't quantify, nor am I entirely sure I want to. 

As tempting as it is to puzzle out exactly why this material triggers something so profound within me, I'm afraid over-analysis will break the spell.