Scratch My ‘90s
Which brings us to the ‘90s. After the ‘80s, the number of releases went up by several times again. The cassette deck got popular in the ‘70s, with the Walkman coming out in 1979. The CD came out in 1982, and soon, five years later, vinyl was fading fast. Around 1992, the Bottlecaps came to and end. Weirdly, however, I received hundreds of reel-to-reel recordings Dave Kulick had made of the Unholys and the Bottlecaps in the ‘70s and ‘80s (an album or two of Bottlecap covers only is/are in the works, Copycaps One and maybe Copycaps Two). We did really great covers. Later in the ‘80s, I started playing with Gary Lucas. We made a nice album with Mark Bingham in the mid ‘90s. A couple years after that Steve Weber, my original Holy Modal Rounder partner, returned from the West Coast after being thrown out of Portland (his fault; long story). We gigged for a few years, recording two albums in the late ‘90s, with only one being released (another long story). For more about the ‘80s and ‘90s, see my individual song notes.
To bring the 20th century to a close, I’m handing you over to Jeffrey Lewis. For those of you unfamiliar with Jeffery, I recommend his historical cartoon songs and music on YouTube. Start with Marco Polo for the historical cartoon songs and “Time Trade” for his songs. See also his comic book, Fuff. Also on YouTube, see his “History Of Punk Rock On The Lower East Side”. I witnessed the first live performance of this epic work in 2004 at a Bowery Poetry Club birthday party for Ed Sanders. We’ve been collaborating ever since. See his website for our first two albums (as The Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel Band), and quiver with anticipation at our soon-to-be-released double album. Jeffrey is far and away the best musical collaborator I’ve ever found. First, going back a little, here’s Jeffrey on the ‘80s:
I have a grudge against “the ‘80s”, and I have a strong revulsion when people say they’re into ‘80s “retro” dance nights and ‘80s pop, as if it were harmless kitsch. I was wounded, harmed, tortured by that culture, and at the risk of a grossly inappropriate metaphor, it is no more harmless kitsch to me than a casually-worn Nazi armband is harmless kitsch to a Holocaust survivor. I was born in 1975 and thus my entire youth and development was spent under the regime of ‘80s style, ‘80s pop, ‘80s politics, and to this very day I feel assaulted, molested and violated by the ‘80s. A child should not have to be exposed to those synthetic songs, with their synthetic instruments, synthetic atmosphere and synthetic morals. I never knew I had a choice. I danced to those songs at junior high dances, taped those songs off the radio and bought cassettes of those songs.
Here’s a weird thing: the first music that I really loved was Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the songs from that album that were on the radio. I still love that stuff. I had an early musical love for early rap: Whodini, Run DMC, Roxanne Shante. This was stuff I loved as a kid and still love now. It’s witty, it’s fun, it’s narrative, and––maybe most of all––it’s not sexual. I can’t stand Prince, then or now, ditto for Madonna, ditto for George Michaels, Boy George, Jefferson Starship, even Bruce Springsteen, etc. I hate “the ‘80s,” I hated them at the time, and my hatred is so deep, so ideological and so personal that it has not softened into nostalgia.
But, Jeffrey, why do you put those quotation marks around “the ‘80s”? Well, because eventually, about a decade later, I began to learn that there was an ‘80s beneath “the ‘80s,” and within that non-mainstream sub-strata there was actually much for me to love––much to passionately align myself with––as a college kid and later as an adult. Much to my surprise, I really can say I love the ‘80s as long as there’s absolutely no confusion with any love for “the 80s.” I love Sonic Youth, Camper Van Beethoven, Jonathan Richman, Husker Du, Bauhaus, Lou Reed, The Violent Femmes. These artists and many others made albums in the ‘80s—and of the ‘80s—which ended up among my most treasured discoveries many years later. And then there’s the Fall, which is among my top three favorite bands of all time, whose discography swims the waves of the ‘80s like Mao’s revolutionaries swimming among the people. If I were to try to mention the seismic impact of Daniel Johnston’s 1980s cassette output on my life, my heart, my brain, my soul, I would fail here. Suffice it to say, my life became forever after divided into the two eras of before-I-heard-Daniel and after-I-heard-Daniel (an irrevocable before and after split which happened to me around 1996, age 20-ish).
Gangster rap, another of the most poignant forms of ‘80s music, developing towards the end of the decade, is in another category for me. I hated it at the time, circa age 12. It was vile, brutal, scary and too close to the frightening reality of robberies and assaults that my friends and I had to navigate to get through school at the time. It put to death the pure innocent joy of the earlier ‘80s rap that I loved. However, when I finally returned to hearing gangster rap years later, I discovered I totally loved it and not out of nostalgia but out of a different kind of joy, joy at its wit, outrage, unique musicality, humor, defiance, transgression and narrative qualities.
And what about Metal, that other massive current of ‘80s music? At the time it only seemed uninteresting and unwelcoming, something for other kids, bigger kids. As a grown up I felt I shouldn’t ignore the stuff, so I set out to delve into it and learn whether I liked it. I discovered I don’t really care that much about it; I was too young for it then and too old for it later. I can enjoy a bit of Metallica or Anthrax or, especially, Slayer, but I missed the boat on a true connection to that stuff—probably for the best.
(It’s Peter, again.) Strangely, I saw a 21st-century European poll asking the best musical decade of the 20th century. The ‘80s won. I know, WTF? That’s why I said strangely. I did start listening to pop radio again in the late ‘80s, knowing our kids would be into it and wanting to be in touch when they were. I found an alarming style had grabbed pop radio by the balls or something: no one ever said the name of the song! Or who did it! Ever! There were a number of songs I liked, but they never told you who it was, except for indie and college stations. I forget the name of song, but there was one by the Cranberries. I finally heard its name three years later. I got the album and found that was the only song I liked. This was followed by a number of other groups in which this pattern was repeated. What eventually happened was, by the aughties my kids were my musical guides. Lily introduced me to Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, as I said, my most watched music video, and Zoe was a DJ on her college radio station. Jeffrey was in the thick of it in the ‘90s, and here he his:
Coming after the ‘80s, the ‘90s were an incredible relief. It was in the ‘90s that I finally heard contemporary music that I could feel cool about, excited about––it made me feel good, in high school, rather than terrible––as I slowly, painfully learned how to not be so uncool. I was 15 and 16 when I got totally into the rapidly-spreading sounds of Jane’s Addiction, Faith No More and Nirvana: the right things at the right time. I have to admit I got equally into a couple other groups at that time which were relegated to never-again-mentioned-embarrassments by my college years: Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I was completely at the right age to be 100% swept up in the magical 1991–1994 era of Phish, although Phish too quickly also became an embarrassment to me that I’d sweep under the rug by the second half of the ‘90s. Still, the early Phish albums have a creative brilliance that I can still respect and even enjoy when I listen with the right squint.
The ‘90s biggest importance to me personally was my discovery of classic rock, and the early years of the 90s were the perfect time for a broke teenager to get completely swept into the bargain bins of used LPs, a completely abandoned medium at that time, where the mind-blowing worlds of the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Floyd, Zeppelin, Dylan, Hendrix, CCR, Cream, Traffic, Santana, Airplane, Doors, and more were there for the discovering, for pennies on the dollar. So the ‘90s for me were all about the ‘60s really. I entered the decade owning perhaps one Rolling Stones LP and ended the decade with an encyclopedic knowledge of every obscure and amazing nook and cranny of classic rock, still hoovering up the Incredible String Band, Love, Syd Barrett, HP Lovecraft, Ultimate Spinach and the Fugs LPs, etc., etc., etc., for mostly single-digit dollar figures, plentiful and cheap, in 1999. I also became an early-mid ‘90s Deadhead in the final years where this was possible, hitting the road with my high school friends and racking up attendance at 50 Grateful Dead gigs all around the USA in the few years before Jerry died in ’95.
‘90s music itself? I wasn’t paying all that much attention, for the most part, although a few things eventually became incredibly important to me. I got into Yo La Tengo around 1996, in the wake of their Electr-O-Pura album and their devastating live gigs of the time. When people say “the 90s” to me, I mostly think of Indie rock, and to be found amongst the piles of albums in my collection are Pavement, Archers of Loaf, Sebadoh, Sonic Youth, Acetone, Luna. Still, Yo La Tengo’s albums from 1992 to 1997 reign supreme to me as the ultimate expression of ‘90s indie rock.
In addition to an absolute worship of ‘90s Yo La Tengo, I experienced the most worshipful musical devotion of my life, the closest I ever got to a real-life Beatlemania, when my friends and I in college fell body-and-soul in worship of Ween––the early ‘90s Ween of Pure Guava and The Pod mostly, although God Ween Satan (1990) and Chocolate and Cheese (1994) were also in our pantheon. We played those first four Ween albums, each and every one of those songs, with a beyond-religious devotion. We mimed every instrumental part; we discussed every possible meaning of the lyrics; we created group beliefs and fantasies about who these people were, where they lived, what went through their minds, what secret messages they were beaming to us. We invented a written language called Weenglish. By 1996 and the release of the less-than-half-assed 12 Golden Country Greats the spell of Ween was suddenly broken. Every subsequent Ween album continued to be a mere disappointment, a shell of a shell of what that band had meant to us earlier. The first album by Mr. Bungle was similarly devoured by me and my friends, worshipped, torn apart, reassembled, recited, a process of song-by-song devotion that I never experienced before or since. We’d spend a week or two completely obsessed with one particular song, ignoring the rest of the album, then move on to a different song, and in this way we devoted ourselves to that Mr. Bungle album piece by piece, thoroughly, richly. The second and third Mr. Bungle albums were pretty good in spots, but didn’t get worshipped.
The “alternative” music that the decade rode in on was soon watered down into crap, as far as I could tell at the time. The post-Nevermind deluge of shittier and shittier (and slicker and slicker) Grunge bands and videos was awful.
But meanwhile that weird ‘90s indie rock/folk stuff, which I eventually got into years later, that stuff that was over my head at the time––Palace, Silver Jews, Songs:Ohia, Cat Power. It all sounded insufferably pretentious and one-dimensional when I first heard those albums at my college radio station circa 1996. My ‘60s obsession allowed none of these poseurs and imposters to gain much traction with me at first: why listen to this hipster Will Oldham trying to sound “outsider-y” when I could listen to Skip Spence? Why listen to the pretentious strains of Broadcast and Pram when I could listen to the real source material, Silver Apples and The United States of America? Stereolab however escaped my ire; they didn’t seem like poseurs to me because they rocked so damn hard, using that same kind of magpie source-theft but putting it to killer use. I loved Stereolab almost immediately upon hearing them, and those early-mid ‘90s Stereolab albums remain favorite rock albums for me, despite being thick with rip-offs and allusions to ‘60s recordings. Special mention must be made of Movietone. They were able to take the retro urges of these bands and keep their sounds in a murky underground which never sold out, never got slick, but remained thick with proper indie-rock mystery
The ‘90s were, in retrospect, the last gasp and ultimate extent of the deep thrill of “lost” culture. I am filled with sorrow about this, but nobody else will ever remember or relate to this: the crate-digging, the going through music and films in friendly neighborhood used record stores and video rental spots. That cultural crate-digging that fueled the creepy retro vibes that were put to such incredible use in the ‘90s by Dr. Dre, by Eightball comics, by Pulp Fiction. This was all possible only because the ‘90s were the deepest, furthest extent of “lost” culture that ever was, and that ever can be. The Internet slaughtered “lost” culture. What has been lost from the ‘90s onward, seemingly irrevocably, is “lost culture” itself. But in the ‘90s, in the five minutes before the Internet took over, the “lost” vibes of the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s were as lost as they could ever get. By the time the ‘90s came these things had grown, and had gnarled, to become 20 years old, 30 years old, 40 years old. And then, suddenly, technologically, they never got any older. Instead they got younger, made shiny and new and easily digitally accessible. These things will never again be that old, that dusty. With the Internet, nothing will ever again be that old, that dusty, again. The ‘70s Funkadelic samples that Dr. Dre used in the ‘90s, the bits and pieces of grindhouse references in Pulp Fiction, these were dredged up from the bottom of a cultural Marianas Trench, smelling of dank pungent seaweed from the ocean’s floor of cultural time…then the Internet drained all the water out of that ocean, and those same bits and bobs are out in bright sunlight for all to see. The old records and films and comics are exactly the same…but they’re not, at all. They no longer have the pungent and evocative stink from the ocean floor, the stink that gives Eightball comics of the 1990s such creepy power that it’s the greatest comic book of all time, partially because it involves “all time” in a visceral way that can never be experienced again.
When Stereolab went “lounge” with Dots & Loops, circa 1997, they went downhill for me and never recovered. When Acetone went “easy listening” after their first incredible rock album Cindy, when even Yo La Tengo went “easy/lounge,” first with a few hints on I Can Hear the Heart, then fully on Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, it was like all of that great ‘90s indie-rock turned its back on rock, all at once, for some reason. Will Oldham went from weird lo-fi to country hi-fi, and so did Cat Power and Smog and everybody else. Was it the smooth sounds of Belle & Sebastian that castrated the VU-vibes of the entire indie-rock scene and turned it all into smooth indie-lounge almost overnight? Maybe. Was it the “post rock” sounds of Tortoise and Gastr Del Sol and the NYC “downtown” jazz scene around the Knitting Factory and Tonic that made “rock” itself seem out of date to all these rock bands? I really don’t know what happened. But it happened to just about all of them.
The later hi-fi country Silver Jews were still almost as great as the earlier lo-fi indie-rock Silver Jews, but that’s possibly just because great lyrics will elevate anything; the lesser lyrical powers of all the other bands made their later-period “smooth” albums just uninteresting to me. The mid-‘90s were the heyday of all that indie-rock, to me. Daniel Johnston, too, entered the ‘90s creating some of his most soul-renderingly powerful recordings, even including his major label album Fun in 1995, but after that it was completely downhill and never recovered, a combination of mood drugs and who-knows-what. He was probably happier and safer, over all, but his decline from devastating to toothless matched the decline of the other ‘90s indie culture that was near and dear to my heart. So the ‘90s to indie-rock are as the month of March: in like a lion, out like a lamb.
I don’t know anything about ‘90s pop, or ‘90s country, but regarding ‘90s rap I’m somehow not quite tuned in to certain things that other people seem to be. For example I still can’t figure out what’s supposed to be so great about Tupac or Biggie or Nas. I do love Ice Cube, Geto Boys, and their early-‘90s gangster gems––high watermarks to me of ‘90s greatness, especially the incredible Kool G Rap & DJ Polo album Live and Let Die, plus some stuff like Onyx, but the Tupac/Biggie/Nas icons mostly elude me still. Honestly, I still don’t even get why the Wu Tang Clan is held in such high regard. In later years I did become an appreciator of Jay Z, and it embarrasses me to say how much I love Eminem because I’m a white guy, so, of course, I love the white rapper, how stereotypical. But still, the Slim Shady LP of 1999 is just a demolishing masterpiece, though I didn’t realize this until about ten years later.
Strangely, Jeffrey calls Daniel Clowes’ Eightball the greatest comic book ever, while unbeknownst to him, I was asking Mr. Clowes for permission to use his art on the very CD Jeffrey is talking about. We even collaborate unconsciously.
Back in 2004 when this project was just two years old, I pondered on how to describe it. I came up with:
A basic grammar of 20th-century popular music––a song from each year, 1901–2000. It’s an incantation! It’s the fastest possible total immersion in the American 20thCentury on earth! It’s the Real American Songbook! A vain and unlikely attempt, a fine and daunting task: to summarize the 20th century of British/American popular music by recording one song from each year of that late, great century! It’s like pinching the butt of the whole damn 20th century and having it slap you back upside your head, kind of.
By god, that sums it up. Beyond that, this is an open-ended dialogue about this massively fine subject. I learned tons of cool shit while doing the research and learned a big bunch more from the responses I’ve already gotten from Elijah Wald. I’m asking Jeffrey to suggest two tracks each by the 15 musical entities he mentioned with which I am barely or not at all familiar, and I will be posting them here. Please join the fun! On, sail on!
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