90s Music

[chonies]

I remember the 2 Live Crew thing, and I thought it was a big, big deal. My parents were the sort to read the lyrics on my LP sleeves before I could listen to the music, and more than once I created an artfully convenient "printing error" of an ink splotch across the occasional bad word. At the time, I thought 2 Live Crew were daring and brave, but now I think they're losers and it was a turning point in popular music for the worse. Anyone else remember watching Jello Biafra on Oprah? [sigh] Good times.

[livviebway]

I was born in 87 and spent a great deal of the 90s ignoring popular music in favor of broadway, so could someone please enlighten me about this 2 Live Crew incident?

[Sukie]

livviebway said:

I was born in 87 and spent a great deal of the 90s ignoring popular music in favor of broadway, so could someone please enlighten me about this 2 Live Crew incident?

2 Live Crew were an early rap group that came out in the 80's. They were known for their raunchy and explicit lyrics. Upon release of their album "As Nasty As They Wanna Be", the album was declared obscene in Broward County, FL, mainly due to the hit single, "Me So Horny". 2 Live Crew actively courted the controversy and when they were in Florida, they performed the song on stage live. They were arrested after the show, and ultimately, both the obscenity ruling and the arrests were thrown out of court.

I was in high school at the time and it was a huge deal. This was at the same time that gangsta rap was taking hold and groups like NWA , Ice-T and others were super popular. Everyone was up in arms over lyrics and content especially of a sexual or violent nature. Of course, that just made all of us suburban kids want the records even more.

I still have my single of "Me So Horney" around the house somewhere, along with my bootleg copy of NWA's Straight Outta Compton. Yes, I thought I was a 15 year old bad ass in my day because I snuck this music in and listened to it without my parent's knowledge. I was hard, yo!

[chonies]

The 2 Live Crew incident was also seen in some camps as the natural progression of the Parental Advisory campaign. Then they released a horrible single called "Banned in the USA" with heavy samplage from guess where.

Now, I could still listen to Straight Outta Compton, but I can't listen to 2 Live Crew, who were really subpar, talentwise.

I was just thinking of all the happy sounding music from the 90s--The La's (hate that apostrophe!), Lightning Seeds, Voice of the Beehive, Miranda Sex Garden (sort of) and even the Cure albums were happy. I'm fully assuming a selective memory, but I like finding themes and leit motifs.

Wikipedia entry on the episode

[jenedreamer]

I think the early 90's had some of the greatest music, with a lot of amazing voices and good singer/songwriters and bands. Then something horrible happened around 95-96 when the onslaught of bubblegum pop descended upon us and they absolutely ruled the charts until about 2000, knocking all of the talented artists out of the top spots on the charts. It really was horrible, and I remember it coinciding with my freshman year of high school, when The Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, N Sync, Jessica Simpson, Britney, Mandy Moore, O Town, Blah Blah Blah Boys, etc. all had multiple songs on the charts at once. Those great musicians were still out there but that boy band/girl pop thing was so huge.

[chonies]

jenedreamer, I beg to differ--bubblegum pop is kind of a staple in pop music. Leif Garrett, Martika, Paul and Paula. I was in college in 1996, but I was big into college radio, so I might have been able to tune out a lot of the pop radio. I went to Ghana and my host sister was listening to the Fugees, who I hadn't heard of yet. My hatred of grunge and industrial leads me to conclude with extreme bias that the outpouring of unflinching emotion and rage and the death of irony, humor, lyrical presentation, and innuendo was what caused the downshifting in music. Don't get me wrong--I love angry music, but there was something so insufferable about Pearl Jam/Nirvana/Alice in Chains/Soundgarden that drove me nutso. There was also that weird swing revival thing that was alternately painful and interesting. What happened in the world that let the Squirrel Nut Zippers exist, and do well-ish (and I was a giant fan)? What caused the ska revival?

[jenedreamer]

Chonies, I agree that the bubblegum stuff has always been around and I'm not a huge fan of some of the other genres like you mentioned at the time, but it was such a noticeable barrage of young pop artists that it was really hard to ignore. I think one or two here and there is warranted, of course there's a market for it, but it was overload. I was 14-17 at the time and I actually listened to a lot of pop country music which was decent at that time, but I just remember waking up to VH1 and it was dominated by those young artists. Everyone tried to jump on the bandwagon and push out more and more young girls like Britney and groups like Backstreet Boys, but they seemed to ignore talent completely and they became less and less able to sing, and just stood there and looked pretty. There will always be a market for teen pop but it seems to have dwindled a bit, at least to a tolerable level, and now most kids at that age that I know are more into bands.

[chonies]

That makes sense; I guess I just didn't remember it that way. What I remember as "unfortunate music" of the mid to late nineties was nu-metal. The glut of young, unevenly talented popsters does seem strange, and I wonder if it was just the first spasm of a newly defined marketing niche, or if there was a sociological thing happening in the background. I also seem to remember a lot of record companies consolidating, so maybe they weren't interested in a diverse catalog and instead just marketed the "sure thing."

[starskin]

I asked this in the literary forum, but this might be a good place too. My next research paper is going to be a subcultural study of the hip hop and grunge scenes. My uni's library has a decent selection about hip hop, but nothing on 90s alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations?

[chonies]

The only thing that I could think of was Touch Me, I'm Sick. I haven't read it, but it came up in something else I was reading. The "other people also bought" feature lists other titles by the author.

I did a brief search and it seems that hardcore and even indie trump grunge in scholarship volume. I guess...search the footnotes, references, and the indexes of the ten zillion Kurt Cobain biographies available? The archives for The Stranger[/color] may generate some information, either through reviews or providing you with keywords for searches, such as how the murder of Mia Zapata affected subculture, or what was going on in the background that caused grunge to happen.