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. 

In 1983, the MTV New Wave-wave finally forced all the 70s arena rock leftovers off the airwaves and 1993, 'Alternative Rock' became the buzzword. Even though in most cases, the term had no objective meaning, and as a marketing tag it actually excluded a lot of genuinely-alternative bands in favor of warmed-over cock-rock bedecked in designer flannel.

REVELATION FROM ON HIGH

1993 will ultimately be known to future historians as the most pivotal year in human history, thanks to the Great Revelator, the New Dispensation, the modern Canon. 

Future historians will naturally be well-trained in the scientific art of Sunchromysticism, and as such will have the lava-flow of the high-frequency syncs the series inspired committed to memory.

The Great Unveiling and alternative rock developed a symbiotic relationship from very early on. Tracks from luminaries such X, Filter, Garbage, Soul Coughing, Nick Cave, Moby, Live, Danzig and Syd Barrett were featured in various episodes and acts like Frank Black, Meat Puppets, Foo Fighters, PM Dawn, Ween, Cardigans and Bjork had tracks on various tie-in albums. And so the stage would be set for maximum GenerationX-Files synergy.

Listen, I'm sorry but everything occult or mystic or paranormal or apocalyptic always ties back to X-Files or Cocteau Twins in some meaningful way or other. I don't make the rules, OK?

The Afghan Whigs were one of those regional indie heroes (such things actually existed in the 90s) and made their major label premiere in 1993 with Gentlemen. 

I think the Whigs were a bit hobbled by being a bit too erudite for the audience they were shooting for, and by the fact that Greg Dulli always seemed a bit too impressed with himself.

The funny thing about this song is that by the time it’s over you really start to wonder if there are such things as detachable penises. That’s truly effective story-telling.

We’re all sick to death of all the singles off of Siamese Dream so have a dollop of "Mayonnaise" on your musical club sandwich. Better yet, have a live serving of it, from the same show that gave us the staggering 'Bury Me' performance in our 1991 blowout.

Tears for Fears were a one-man band by 1993, Curt Smith having quit and marking the occasion with a blistering essay about how much being in a band sucks (he's right: it does). I think it ran in Details, which I read cover to cover back in the day. Maybe in Pulse.

Either way, this is a great song and a nice return to form after the bombastic, bloated Boomer bait of The Seeds of Love.

We’ve talked about The Posies’ 1993 classic Frosting on the Beater and here’s the album’s closing track. No idea what the connection is to Basketball Diaries, but let’s just roll with it.

The Basketball Diaries soundtrack did boast this very tasty and obscure psychedelic biscuit. Spark one up and drift back to the faraway land of milk and flannel.

I need to dig out some more songs that straddled the border between alt.rock and pop, like this classic did.  This was part of a wave of mostly-female artists WDRE was spinning in between all the hairy boys. Refresh my memory if you have any suggestions.

We’ve talked about Stereolab before, so let’s just enjoy another killer cut off their 1993 album titled I don’t feel like typing out the full title.

White Zombie oozed up from the Lower East Side squatter scene to rock the world with this bitchin' little toe-tapper. Hopefully, Rob Zombie’s metal fans haven't seen this video on account of Rob dances just a little bit too well to pull off the redneck/biker tough-guy pose he stole from Al Jourgenson.

I hadn’t paid much attention to New Order since back when they still sounded like Joy Division, but I have to admit this is a top-rate bit of guitar pop which conjures up many happy memories.

Faith No More showed they were a bit ahead of the gender-agenda curve with the video for their cover of Lionel Ritchie’s Commodores classic, “Easy.” 

Soul Asylum did their classic R&B cover move around the same time, with an ironic cover of Marvin Gaye’s timeless “Sexual Healing.”

THE EMPEROR'S NEW PRODUCER

I know I give Steve Albini a lot of grief sometimes, but I actually believe he’s an Andy Kaufman-tier Situationalist genius. How else can you explain how he was able to get a lot of big stars to spend a lot of money for the honor of having him ruin their records? 

I don’t know how Albini got his weird and unearned rep for being the punk rock George Martin, but good on him for milking the suckers. I wonder if his scorching manifesto on the organized crime syndicate known as the record industry inspired him to infiltrate the Death Star and sabotage a number of very expensive projects as payback for the industry's sins.

That said, my admiration for Albini’s subversive superpowers stops whenever he got behind the desk with a real artist. Like with PJ Harvey and her ex-girlfriend-from-hell concept album, Rid of Me. 

I guess Albini’s super-compressed and equalized-to-death methodolgy might suit some of the many fake Fugazis he worked with, but producing isn’t just sliding a few faders and squelching everything into a gray paste. A good producer coaxes great performances from artists. And so it is that most of the live performances of Rid of Me songs have PJ sounding markedly superior to the recorded versions.

It also appears that it was Rid of Me that fueled Albini’s ascent from indie clock puncher to premier league prankster. He apparently sent it as a warning an indication of how he'd produce In Utero. Happily there were real producers waiting in the wings to clean up the mess Albini made of it. 

Well, as best they could.

So let’s enjoy a live version of my favorite In Utero cut, giving us a taster of what it could have been without a mad compressor junkie at the controls.

LET GO AND LET GOD MACHINE

The ways of Fate are cruel. San Diego’s alt.metal titans The God Machine were a band that all the serious musical heads I knew were talking about in 1993, but they were derailed by bassist Jimmy Fernandez’s untimely death from a brain hemorrhage and never recovered. 

A lot of people today have never heard (or heard of) The God Machine, so in the interest of Vita Brevis Ars Longa, let’s do a triple play of the ill-starred trio.

Caution: God Machine music may inspire spontaneous head banging. Do not operate while driving or operating heavy machinery.

TROUBLE IN (4AD) PARADISE

Sadly, Our Lady was not living her best life in 1993. She’d suffer a nervous breakdown while recording the Twins’ first major label album (Four Calendar Cafe), would give a number of interviews which had journalists openly fretting about her mental health, seemed to experience a slow-motion psychic meltdown onstage every night during the band’s seven-month tour, and would finally end up in a trauma ward in a psychiatric hospital when it was all over. 

Never envy those chosen by the gods. Tough job.

Despite all that, the El-Sibyl-Beth (בית אורקל האל) was still able to conjure a fresh batch of celestial melodies, even as she struggled to overcome the lingering wounds from the sexual abuse she suffered as a child ever since. Abuse, incidentally, that I believe was much, much worse than she's been willing to acknowledge. 

The Muses choose broken vessels, doubt it not.

Mark Clifford’s trance-dance outfit Seefeel made their debut in 1993 with the very fine Quique. Clifford would become a de facto Cocteau Twin, working with the band on the MDMA-fired Otherness EP and doing live remix sets on their 1996 tour. 

Rumor had it that the Sibyl and Clifford enjoyed each other's company in the wake (no pun intended) or her being cruelly and heartlessly thrown aside by the Shepherd Boy. I cannot confirm or deny that at press time.

In other 4AD drama, Tanya Donnelly quit Throwing Muses and The Breeders to form Belly. They’d offer up some nice estrogen-drenched pop before Riot Grrl declared such things unfashionable, and quite possibly, counter-revolutionary. 

Maybe Tanya should have hooked up with a big-name rock star who could ghost-write all her music. Then she could have had him murdered so she could inherit all his money. Then, and only then, could all the rock critics declare her a feminist icon.

Apparently believing one Belly was not enough, the City of Boston then coughed up Belly Jr., AKA Letters to Cleo. Melrose Place, then a huge hit on FOX, would make 'Here & Now' a hit. 

Sadly, that good fortune would not repeat.

Dead Can Dance were transitioning from Goth early music aficionados to just another rich-hippy world music collective in 1993 ( I saw them on this tour and they were absolutely insufferable) but it seems our kid Brendan still had some of the old fire in him.

 

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

I was going to post Urge’s version of “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” but somehow Pulp Fiction was magically released in 1994 under this new timeline. Curse you, Mandela Effect!

Blur was just another boring, baggy dance-pop band when I first encountered them, so this bit of trad BritRock was a surprise for me. 

Still preferred Oasis, at least their early stuff. I have a low-ceilinged tolerance for arch.

For some bizarre reason, the official video for “Pets” was scrubbed from the Internet a long time ago. This fan-vid will suffices it uses loopy footage from an old Raquel Welch television special. To call the rest of the P4P album "underwhelming" is to smother it in high praise.

HERE’S WHERE I PISS AWAY ANY REMAINING CREDIBILITY

I took a lot of crap for liking this album, but I shall not bend. I thought — and still think— it’s Jimmy Page’s best post-Zep work, and light-years better than the Page-Plant snoozer a few years later.

 

But my true badge of 1993 shame is buying Billy Idiol’s Cyberpunk. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a mind-bogglingly ridiculous record that I quickly sold before everyone else came in to sell their copy.  

But still: I did actually buy it. I must learn to live with the disgrace.

This song is about the LA Riots, wherein Billy offers these keen sociological insights to the thorny issues of race and class:

Yow!

It was a night

Oh, what a night

L.A., burning bright

Oh, what a night

Say yeah, come on

It made my world stand still

Ahh riot, rape, race and revolution, ah yeah

Here come the fire, and my world burns still

I say yeah

He says "yeah," people. "Yeah." Who needs Michael Franti with that kind of revolutionary insight?

Come to think of it, 'Shock to the System' is no stupider or more offensive than the drivel highly-paid sociologists ooze out like septic pus these days. Maybe Billy was charting the total systemic failure we are now seeing unfold nearly 30 years ago.

MY BRUSH WITH GREATNESS

OG Sunchromystics may be sick of this story, but this was my closest brush with rock stardom. 

Nudeswirl were called The Lawn Darts when I auditioned for them, and were just a good, solid punk/psyche-tinged Rock n' Roll band then. The leader (Shane) was a great guy and was very talented, but was also the most insane control freak I've ever met. 

Not long after joining, my role in the band was systematically whittled away as Shane decided he just needed a photogenic rhythm guitarist. I noped out after doing some recording sessions for their first album, but stayed on good terms with Shane and the band. Me and my crew used to go see them when they were playing around, and he put in a good word for when I was trying out for another band.

Anyway, 'F Sharp' was the single from Nudeswirl's 1993 Megaforce debut, but I wrote most of the parts for the original version on their self-released LP.  I was using an envelope filter, a kind of simplified wah-wah which Jerry Garcia used a lot in the 70s. Shane had his new guitarist Dizzy get one for the new album, but later told me after a show it was driving him crazy because Dizzy could never get the same sound.

I told Shane that it wasn't the pedal;  I wasn't just playing the straight chords, but was playing a Gbmaj7add9 and doing little pull-offs and such on the Gb-A riff,  because that's the kind of thing was I was messing around with at home at the time. I believe I actually threw a couple 13th chords in as well.  I remember Shane half-smiling at me like, "What the fuck is this asshole talking about?" Hey, I had Guitar George aspirations at the time. Fucker knew all the chords.

Anyway, Nudeswirl got their big break by landing 'F Sharp' on Beavis and Butthead, but vanished immediately after. I ran into Mike (Nudeswirl's drummer when I was in) after a show in Asbury Park, and he told me that Shane had been fired from his own band by Megaforce. He said they put some other guy in, but the band broke up soon after.

So much for independent labels and creative control, eh? So much to answer for.

So the moral of the story is get off your Butt and share your insanely great 1993 closet classics with us down in the comments. I'll be making a monster playlist with your suggestions, so fire away.

Don't forget The Secret Sun Institute of Advanced Synchromysticism, now holding classes in the highly strange. There's a ton of exclusive material up already and so much more on the way. 

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