Height/Weight: Re: [geeks] quiet

[Amy]

On Sun, 9 Jun 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> I didn't care much for Toad the Wet Sprocket, but the early to mid
> late 90s turned out a lot of stuff I like.  Hole, Nirvana, Smashing
> Pumpkins, Ballydowse, My Brothers Mother, Tori Amos, Grammatrain,
> Sarah McLaughlin.


The 90's sucked, period. Outside of some decent dance music, it was just
noise, bullshit, and overinflated politically correct feminine greenpeace
psychobabble pity-me-cause-I-was-raped whining.

But then, I laughed my ass off when Cobain offed himself. I think it was
one of the best things that ever happened for the music industry. It
single-handedly killed his wife's so-called 'music career' too, which
wasn't a bad thing at all, IMO. Those two bands were the worst that ever
came off the Sub-Pop label. Far better bands than they were out and
virtually ignored due to the sheer overplay of Nirvana/Hole.

> Things really slowed down in the late 90s, and have been slow since in
> my book.

Perhaps this is because MTV is no longer top dog (how can they be, when
they had to shunt all the actual videos over to another channel to make
room for their TV shows?) and fewer and fewer kids listen to radio these
days. That and VH1 had the nerve to say 'Slippery When Wet' was one of the
top seminal albums ever recorded.

> Overall, I thought the 80s was pretty bad, even though a lot of good
> music came from it also.  Metallica, the 77s, and Stevey Ray Vaughn
> being three things that I believe mainly got started then.

Try R.E.M., drivin' and cryin', B-52's, Guadalcanal Diary, Matthew Sweet,
Gang of Four, The Clash, The Cure, The Church, Sisters of Mercy, Lords of
the New Church, etc. Yes, SRV (and it's Stevie, not Stevey) was enourmously
talented and it's a shame that a lot of people never had the chance to
hear his stuff. Springsteen, Don Henley did some great stuff. Lou Reed
out out his best album in a long time in '88 or '89. Bela Fleck
did some excellent things in '89 along with Victor Wooten. I could go on
for days listing quality stuff.

The best of the 80's is found in the old Rolling Stone college charts,
before 'Alternative' became mainstreamed to death (1989, roughly)

> Still, the greatest time in many ways was probably the sixtys and
> seventies.  Hendrix, Muddy Waters, Daniel Amos, Larry Norman, and so
> many countless other groups that really paved the way for the rest
> since then.

50's/60's/70's? Elvis (shaddup), Kingston Trio. Velvet Underground, Sex
Pistols, Pink Floyd, Parsons, etc. That was several prolific songwriting
decades that have been munged together for some reason. The music on the
East coast ended up by the early 70's being the complete antithesis of the
West coast.

--a