THE NINETIES---THE BEST AND THE WORST

by Simon Reynolds

.A partial (subjective; incomplete) inventory--- mostly, but not exclusively, in the realm of dance music....

THE PEERLESS, THE PIVOTAL

UNIQUE 3 -- "The Theme/7-AM" (Chill)

As their old skool name suggests, Unique 3 were a British B-boy crew who turned onto acieed, and in the process invented bleep-and-bass, the North of England style of bleak house minimalism that owed as much to electro and dub reggae as to Chicago. Kickstarted by the hilarious Vocoder-ized declaration "we are the original acid house creators/we hate all commercial house masturbators," and driven by a miasmic bassline that subsumes your consciousness like malevolent fog, "The Theme" was the anthem that inspired Warp Records to set itself up as an independent label. But its flipside "7-AM" was the real prototype for bleep-and-bass, paving the way for Warp's brilliant roster (Sweet Exorcist, Forgemasters, LFO, Nightmares On Wax) and fabulous if now forgotten outfits like Rhythmatic, Original Clique, Energise, Ital Rockers, Nexus 21, Xon, and Ability II. Cold and cavernous, "7-AM" ---the name probably evoking the moment in the all-night warehouse party when the six hours of drugs and hypnotic beats and flashing strobes has got you feeling kind of eerie---has just one hook: an ultra-minimal percussive/melodic motif which sounds like it's played on a marimba made out of ice or a stalactite vibraphone. Beneath this shockingly empty soundspace throbs the ribcage-crushing pressure of the seismic sub-bass. You can still hear Unique 3's influence in the gamelan-like chiming xylo-bass riffs in current UK underground garage.

SAINT ETIENNE--"London Belongs To Me" from Foxbase Alpha (Heavenly)

Britpop's pinnacle arrived four years before that concept was realised as the Blur/Oasis hegemony of nostalgia and parochialism. "London Belongs To Me" offers a vision of Englishness inclusive enough to encompass the dream-hazy dub-reverb cascades of A.R. Kane, the poignant piano vamps of Italo-house, and the winsome wistfulness of Sixties French girl-pop.

PUBLIC ENEMY -- Fear of A Black Planet (Def Jam)

Militant hip hop's final blast, before gangsta/playa/thug rap combined false consciousness and ghettocentric hyper-realism to build a hugely profitable, spiritually bankrupt--if frequently sonically startling--entertainment industry.

BELTRAM--"Energy Flash" (R&S)

Techno's equivalent to The Stooges's electrifying "Raw Power", although heavy metal fan Joey was aiming more for Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" or Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love". Probably the one track "we" can all still agree is an eternal classic, the absolute bomb.

WORLD OF TWIST-- "Sons of the Stage" (Circa)

The greatest anthem of the post-Manchester indie-dance crossover era. Analogue-synth freaks influenced by Hawkwind and Human League, Roxy Music and Northern Soul, World of Twist were also into acid house and had a club hit with their first single "The Storm", also terrific. The lyrics to "Sons of the Stage" are the best evocation ever of what it feels like to be inside an Ecstasy-ravaged crowd: "The theme is up/And the kids are high/I've seen them move/And it blows my eyes/ The floor's an ocean and this wave is breaking/Your head is gone and your body's shaking/There's nothing you can do/Cos there is no solution/Gotta get down to the noise and confusion." The music's a bubblegum apocalypse of future-shlock Moogs and acid-rock wah-wah guitar, a kitschadelic fantasia that feels like swimming through a Sargasso Sea of man-made fibres--tentacles of polyester, dralon, and orlon enfold your limbs. If Add (N) to X had been ravers....

NIRVANA--"SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT" VIDEO

Rebel rock's glorious last gasp--after this, there could only be bad faith, necrophilia, and the dogged undead persistence of a museum culture recycling its own myths.

BELGIUM

For about 14 months in the early Nineties, this tiny Lowlands country ruled the world of techno. Even Underground Resistance copped the Belgian style (Jeff Mills had been a fan of EBM, Front 242, etc, anyway) and they paid tribute with their World Power Alliance track "Belgian Resistance". So all hail Belgium's forgotten behemoths of brutalist stadium rave: T99, 80 Aum, Cubic 22, Frank DeWulf, Incubus, Meng Syndicate, Set Up System, Ravesignal/Ceejay, Outlander, Techno Grooves, Human Resource...

LONDON PIRATE RADIO

From hardcore rave through jungle to speed garage and two-step, London's constantly mutating hybrids (house X hip hop + reggae -:- R&B = ?!?!) reach their multiracial audience via a swarm of illegal radio stations. Rallying the "vibe tribe" with drug-damaged doggerel, neo-Dada sound-poetry, and patois-rich chants, pirate MCs surf the DJ's turbulent flow, and together catalyse the most exhilirating cultural phenomenon I've ever witnessed--what anarcho-mystic philosopher Hakim Bey calls a "power surge" against consensus reality, an insurrectionary sensation that feels like being plugged into the national electrical grid.

SECOND PHASE "Mentasm" (R&S)

HUMAN RESOURCE "Dominator" (80 Aum/R&S)

THE PRODIGY "Charly" (XL)

NASTY HABITS "Here Comes The Drums/Dark Angel" (Reinforced)

CYPHER "Marchin' Into Madness," from the Doomed Bunkerloops EP (Cold Rush)

VARIOUS ARTISTS--Torque (No U Turn)

COMMANDER TOM--"Are Am Eye" (Noom)

These tracks are just a few of the stops on the trail taken by the "mentasm sound," second only to the Roland 303 acid bass riff as rave culture's most insidiously proliferating audio virus. Hatched by Second Phase (Joey Beltram & Mundo Muzique) in 1991 and given an appropriate brain-storm/head-rush name, then almost immediately intensified further by Human Resource into the demonic dirge-like drone of "Dominator", the mentasm sound went on to infect the UK's hardcore/darkcore scene, establish itself as gabba's primary building block, and make its presence felt in the harder kinds of trance, before being dramatically resurrected by the techstep school of drum 'n bass in 1996. Why is it so pervasive, compelling, undeniable? Because the "mentasm" sound captures that edge-of-darkness point at which Ecstasy's bliss becomes shadowed by foreboding, its warm glow turns into a cold rush. Abusers of stimulants like amphetamine and cocaine often suffer from "crank bugs", the delusion that insects are crawling under the skin; the swarming rush of the mentasm sound feels like the bugs breaking through your skin and gathering in a gigantic buzzing locust cloud.

CASTLEMORTON COMMON RAVE, MAY 1992

Anarchy in the UK's rural heartland, this six-day, 40-thousand-strong illegal techno festival-- instigated by free party collectives like Spiral Tribe and Circus Warp--actually provoked government legislation to ensure nothing like it happened again. Beat that, punk rock!

SEEFEEL--"Time To Find Me (AFX Fast Mix/AFX Slow Mix)" (Too Pure)

Post-rock's early (1993) pinnacle, "Time To Find Me" and similar tracks from Seefeel's first phase such as "Plainsong" are the missing link between My Bloody Valentine circa "Soon"/"To Here Knows When" and Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 1985-92 (which is why Richard James remixed "Time to Find Me" with unusual tact and sensitivity--he actually keeps elements of the original track, believe it or not!). "Time To Find Me" is a billowing tapestry of heart-in-mouth euphoria, a swoon machine that makes your brain purr and your goosepimples glow. Seefeel stretch the moment just before orgasm into an environment, a honeycomb space of tingles, shivers, pangs, spasms. Paved the way for the likes of To Rococo Rot and Mouse On Mars.

DARKSIDE, a/k/a DARKCORE

My darkside-theory epiphany occurred listening to pirate tapes in early 1993 while reading Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaux. Suddenly I realized that this roiling bitches brew of mashed-up James Brownian motion and voodoo-bass was basically a guttersnipe version of Can's rhizomatic funk; that darkside was the black sheep bastard child of the avant-funk family tree that runs from Tago Mago through Eno/Byrne's Bush Of Ghosts to Skidoo/Cabs/Ratio/et al. Being avant-lumpen and fueled by bad drugs, darkside was simultaneously more primitive, more advanced, and more derangedly disturbing than any of its art-house precursors. At the extreme, darkside was just a delirium tremens of convulsive breaks and insectile percussion, a queasy sub-bass drone-quake at the lower threshold of audibility that wobbled your intestines, some ghostly/ghastly sampladelic ectoplasm, plus an Nth-generation video-nasty soundbite. Tracks like Andy C's "Something New," Flex's "Ya Buzzin'" and Hype's "The Chopper" emitted the pulsating infernal infra-red glow of a muggy, murky, body-congested basement as the snowball kicks in and your sense-impressions get uncomfortably vivid. It was death-disco, for real--riddled with the su-E-cidal nihilism of a rave culture discovering that the Ecstasy experience can be literally mindblowing (as in a fuse burning out, rather than psychedelic transcendence) yet not being dissuaded, not at all--rather continuing the headlong heedless mission to the end of the night. That was the real revelation, the real reason that darkside is the most astounding, mind-and-ear-boggling music culture I've ever witnessed birth itself--that shift from plinky-piano-vamp-and-squeaky-diva happy-rave to samples about death, delirium, brain damage, psychosis. The fact that the dancefloors didn't empty, that people lapped it up, that any kind of intensity was better than feeling nothing, feeling numb. In hindsight, you can see the precursors in '90-91---the proto-dark vibe of Eon's "Inner Mind", "Spice", "Basket Case (White Coats Mix)"; hardcore's playful imagery of insanity; the edge-of-hysteria in Nightmares On Wax's "Aftermath" and Genaside II's "Narra Mine". But at the time, nothing prepared for the shock as the shadow fell.

APHEX TWIN-Selected Ambient Works Vol. II (Warp)

Less lovely than Volume 1, but deeper--as lustrous and near-immobile as crystals forming in solution.

OMNI TRIO--"Renegade Snares (Foul Play VIP Remix)" from Vol 1: The Deepest Cut (Moving Shadow)

Remixing their own earlier and utterly fantastic remix of "Renegade Snares", Foul Play somehow injected even more ballistic ferocity into Rob Haigh's machine-gun breakbeats, squeezed even more heart-pumping euphoria into his exquisitely sentimental arrangement of mellotronic strings, poignantly naive one-finger piano melodics, and explosive soul-diva passions ("t-t-t-t-t-ake me UP!!!!"). Sheer hardcore E-lation, this was Number One in the U.K. for six weeks--in a parallel universe, dummy.

TLC---"Waterfalls" (LaFace)

If not the beat of the Nineties, then the beat that kickstarted the second half of the decade for R&B and in its wake other forms of pop--where the drums basically become lead voices on records, and compete with/distract from the singer for your attention. In the case of "Waterfalls", the creativity of the multi-tiered rhythm programming (by Organized Noize, who never did anything quite as amazing since) completely eclipses TLC. A couple of years ahead of Aaliyah's Timbaland-produced "One In A Million" (see later in this inventory), this was one of the very first nu-R&B tracks where you wanted to sing or whistle or hum the drum patterns--that schlurpppting fibrillation of clusterfunk beats at the end of the bar--as much as the putative melody. It must have been about 15 or 20 listens before I even bothered to pay attention to the lyrics. The beat is so invincible it even holds its own against that special FX crammed ultra-expensive video.

TRICKY ---Maxinquaye (Island)

Although all but one of its tracks were recorded in London, Maxinquaye has everything to do with Tricky's home town Bristol. Mark Stewart, ex-frontman of avant-funk legends The Pop Group, traces trip hop's hybrid sound back to the city's subcultural "interbreeding" in the early Eighties. "In Bristol, all the different ghettos were mixing-- we'd go to reggae 'blues' parties, industrial punk events, and hip hop jams at this club called The Dugout. Back then, Bristol was actually more connected with New York's rap scene than even London was."

Through his friendship with The Wild Bunch (the DJ collective that evolved into Massive Attack) Stewart became a mentor to Tricky. It was Stewart who first pushed Tricky onstage (at a Smith & Mighty show), and who encouraged him to start a career outside Massive Attack. "He's my chaos," says Tricky. "When people say I'm weird, I say 'you've got to hang around Mark'. See, he's not in society--he lives out of a suitcase which contains, like, a jar of mayonnaise, cassettes, and articles clipped out of magazines. He lived with me for two months and got me chucked out of my flat!" It was while they were room mates that Stewart persuaded Tricky to scam funding off Massive Attack's management for some solo recording. "His idea was to spend most of it on booze!" laughs Tricky. "So we got them to send us 600 quid, drank half of it and used the rest on studio time." The result was "Aftermath", a downtempo drift of "hip hop blues" that eventually became Tricky's debut single. Stewart was "executive producer, really", says Tricky. The track came together haphazardly; Stewart remembers the session as "just me and Tricks messing about on an 8 track," building a groove out of looped beats and samples that Tricky pulled from "some guy's pile of records". Outside his house, Tricky saw Martina Topley-Bird--then a schoolgirl in uniform--waiting for a bus, and on impulse he invited her to sing on the track. "I laid down a guide vocal for her to sing over, but we decided to keep my voice in, 'cos it sounded haunting." This slightly out-of-synch pairing of Martina's dulcet croon and Tricky's bleary rapping became the model for much of Maxinquaye. There was a fourth collaborator on "Aftermath"; Tricky believes he channelled the post-apocalyptic scenario lyrics from his mother, who died when he was four. "I found out later that she used to write words, poetry, but never showed them to anybody."

Tricky offered "Aftermath" to Massive, who were still pulling together their 1991 debut Blue Lines. But, chuckles Tricky, the band's 3D "told me 'it's shit, you're never going to be a producer". "Aftermath" stayed on cassette for three years, unreleased; Tricky also fell out of touch with Martina. After Blue Lines came out, Tricky was in limbo, living on a retainer wage from Massive but doing nothing. "All I did was smoke weed and drink, hang around in bars, and go to clubs from Wednesday to Sunday." He sank into a torpid slough of despond, aggravated by marijuana-induced paranoia; after an all-night session, he'd sometimes see demons in his living room.

This dark period inspired Tricky'd next recording, "Ponderosa," with lyrics like "I drown myself in sorrow" and references to "different levels of the devil's company". "Ponderosa" was one of a number of tracks recorded in London with engineering wizard Howie B, after Tricky had procured some demo time off Island Records. "Tricky was living with me and my girlfriend Harriet for a while," remembers Howie. "Kippers for breakfast, and him kipping on a couch in the front room." The drunkenly swaying, metallic percussion of "Ponderosa" was "inspired from Indian music, bhangra, that sort of tabla feel," he says, while the song's ultra-morose atmosphere, he speculates, stemmed from "Tricky being in flux with Massive, not knowing if he was in the band any more".

Howie B. believed that he was set to be Tricky's partner in the album project, but management conflicts led to "a legal nightmare" and resulted in almost an album's worth of tunes being stranded in limbo. Although "Ponderosa" helped clinch Tricky's deal with Island, Howie was left in the cold. "I got shagged, I walked away with a sour taste in my mouth." Meanwhile, Tricky bought a home studio and started work on the album in Harlesden in North West London, where he and Topley-Bird were ensconced as house mates, although they barely knew each other. "It was a spacy time," Tricky recalls. He'd moved from Bristol to a town where he knew hardly anybody, and "I got so into making the record, I cut people off, stopping using the phone." Aggravating his desolate Harlesden surroundings and isolation, Tricky was listening to a glum soundtrack--Billy Holliday, The Geto Boys and his boyhood favorites The Specials. The "concrete bleak sound" of Specials classics such as "Ghost Town" is just one thread in Maxinquaye's tapestry. There's the obvious rap ancestry: the cinematic hip hop noir of Erik B & Rakim's "Follow The Leader", Public Enemy (Tricky hailed Chuck D as "my Shakespeare" and got Martina to sing a gender-bending indie-rock makeover of PE's "Black Steel"). But Maxinquaye is also steeped in the influence of English art-rock and post-punk weirdos---Bowie, Gary Numan, Japan, Peter Gabriel, and Kate Bush ("I think she's in the same league as Bob Marley and John Lennon," Tricky gushes). Even more unlikely, Tricky claims that the gorgeous aural malaise of "Abbaon Fat Tracks" got its curious title because "it reminded me of Abba-- Abba fucked up, and with phat beats."

An enigmatic tribute to his mother Maxine Quaye, the album's title was originally intended as Tricky and Martina's collective band name until the rapper capitulated to record company pressure and agreed to record under his nom de microphone. Released in 1995 to massive acclaim, Maxinquaye worked simultaneously as an autobiographical account of one man's struggle and as a wider allegory; the record captured the era's pre-millenial tension and sociocultural deadlock without ever making an overtly political statement, let alone anything as crass as a protest song. Evoking the orphaned drift of the Nineties just as Sly Stone's 1971 There's A Riot Goin' On expressed the caged and curdled idealism of the post-counterculture moment, Maxinquaye seemed to be about the inability of Tricky's generation to imagine utopia, let alone reach it or build it. "We're all fucking lost!", Tricky told me at the time. "I can't see how things are gonna get better. I think we have to de stroy everything and start again. I can't pretend I've got the answers. Bob Marley, he could write songs about freedom and love. I'm just telling the truth that I'm confused, I'm paranoid, I'm scared, I'm vicious, I'm spiteful." Yet despite it's unrelentingly gloomy vision, Maxinquaye is ultimately a redemptive experience. The best album of the decade?

WAGON CHRIST -- Throbbing Pouch (Rising High)

Trip hop's finest hour, not counting Maxinquaye (which is really the first and possibly only great British rap record, rather than downtempo mood-food like most trip hop) . Over moonwalking mid-tempo breakbeats and fudge-sticky bass, Luke Vibert wafts a humid fog of samples: keening strings, jazz-fusion woodwinds, E-Z listening orchestration, film-noir incidental themes, etc. It's cheesy, but eerie too--the wavering sense of pitch and fluctuating dub-wise mix make you feel downright queasy at times, like listening to some bizarre fusion of Schoenberg and DJ Shadow. At times, the effect is like you're drowning and the entirety of late 20th Century music is flashing before your ears, grotesquely mingled and mangled. "Phase Everyday" flits from jazz- funk nonchalance to acid-house pulsescape to dubbed-up desolation within the space of a minute, while the astral doowop vocals and maze-like intricacy of beats in "Scrapes" makes it the most indescribably peculiar slice of trip hop to date.

GREEN VELVET--"Flash" (Relief)

Sick, fucked-up Chicago darkside that brought back the I'm-losing-my-mind vibe of acid house but without resurrecting the specific Roland 303 sound. The Sleezy D-style spoken-voice monologue depicts a hilarious scenario in which concerned parents are taken on a guided tour of clubland, shown all the things their raver kids do for fun (e.g inhaling from big balloons of nitrous oxide, "laughing gas--but this is no laughing matter" warns the guide). The "Flash" of the chorus is meant to be the parents' taking photographs of the "naughty little kiddies" in the murky club ( it's designed to play on the wired paranoia of the ravers who hear it on the dancefloor--"fuck! me dad's in the party! he's gonna see me all fucked up!!"), but it's actually more suggestive of a drug-induced "flash," or whole-body rush. Especially as the command "cameras ready, prepare to flash!" triggers a double-time battery of clangorous snares, pounding like a heart in spasm after too big a sniff of amyl nitrite.

TODD EDWARDS remixes of ST GERMAIN's "Alabama Blues"

New Jersey garage's great renegade, Todd Edwards developed a technique of cross-hatching extremely brief snatches of vocals (blissful hiccups, gasps, moans, splinters of yearning and smears of melisma) along with little bursts of guitar, horns, and other instruments, all from old soul, funk and blues records. Using sometimes as many as 60 micro-samples (some of his early tracks were released under the name The Sample Choir), he weaves these fragments into melodic-percussive honeycombs that are so burstingly rapturous they're almost painful to your ears. That bittersweet quality may also have something to do with a curious microtonal quality to his tracks, where the dense web of samples often seem slightly sharp in pitch or semitonally smeared. At any rate, Edwards's compelling blend of organic and mechanistic, "songful" and "tracky", was hugely inspirational to the burgeoning speed garage and 2-step scene in Britain, where house music has always been more involved with sampling and digital FX than its American deep house precursors. My pleasure in Todd's records was only enhanced by finding out that he was deeply influenced by Enya's use of sampling and digital technology to multitrack her own voice into densely layered, feathery-sounding tapestries of harmony. Enya!.

AALIYAH--"One In A Million" (Elektra)

Produced by Timbaland, vocally arranged by Missy Elliott, this hypersyncopated ballad revolutionized R&B. Call it "lover's jungle" (even though Tim'n'Missy still steadfastly deny ever having heard a drum'n'bass record, let alone being influenced by the genre). 'Cos like jungle, the drums on this record--and everything that came in its wake--is the lead voice, eclipsing even the lovely Aaliyah.

PILLDRIVER--"Apocalypse Never" (Cold Rush)

This 1998 track is arguably the career zenith of hardcore crusader and original darkraver Marc Acardipane. A prophet without honor in his own land, whose internal exile is consoled by the fanatical loyalty of Holland's now dwindling gabba army, Acardipane is Germany's most forgotten boy, searching only to destroy prissy, insipid notions of good taste and connoisseurship in music. "Apocalypse Never" is a gabba blitzkrieg that feels like surging through a cloud of flame, limbs slipstreamed with silvery sparks, subcutaneously incandescent.

HERBERT--Around The House (Phonographic)

Sensuously spongy audio-tactile textures and exquisitely jazzed vocals (from Dani Siciliano) reveal the myriad shades of mood latent in the cliche "house is a feeling." A voluptuous summation/condensation of the texturhythmic innovations of Deep Dish, Mood II Swing, Masters At Work, Sneak, etc, but with a quirky humor and charm that's uniquely British.

OTHER UNREPEATABLE CRACKS IN THE SPACE OF MODERN SOUND, 1990-98...

MOST OVER-RATED OF THE NINETIES

a very incomplete list--apologies!

The Notorious B.I.G.

The odd nifty catchphrase and deft rhyme, but c'mon, this man was a pig---Notorious P.I.G. more like; Piggy Smalls, heheheheh-and with a little help from his buddy Sean he almost singlehandedly set rap down its current path of spiritual bankruptcy. And he had the most unappetising vocal timbre in all of rap- asthmatic and adenoidal and mucus-bunged-up and fat-fuck wheezy all at once.

The video for Beastie Boys's "Sabotage"

The video for "Praise You"

The Charlatans

Extremely limited singer, mediocre songwriting, zilch "to say", band that can neither rock nor funk.... Yet in the U.K., Madchester sentimentality and "survivors" kudos has made this nonentity outlast the decade.

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

The Quention Tarantino of rock.

Quentin Tarantino

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion of film.

Autechre

The Dead C and all who sail upon her stagnant waters

Guided By Voices

In this age of cultural overload and aesthetic surfeit, GBV is monstrously, disgustingly prolific. The band averages about 24 songs per album; singer/songsmith Robert Pollard has a backlog of some 2000 tunes, but is still planning to write a 'Tommy' style rock opera. Who among us has a life empty enough to accommodate such a glut of undistinguished creativity? GBV is basically America's very own Oasis. Both bands are led by incorrigibly incontinent songwriters morbidly obsessed with English rock of the mid-to-late Sixties. If you're gonna stick with a craft as quaint as songsmithery, you should at least make sure you have something compelling or uniquely idiosyncratic to say. Oasis don't, but are at least shameless about it: Noel Gallagher's lyrics are a jumble of doggerel and epic-sounding phrases that allow fans to read whatever they like into them. But with Pollard, you can't be absolutely sure he has nothing to say, because every expression is convoluted and coded; he gets in the way. Titles like "The Official Ironmen Rally Song", "Bright Paper Werewolves" and "Rhine Jive Click" are the most daftly, wilfully oblique titles since Amon Duul II (who at least had LSD as an excuse). Another similarity with Oasis is GBV's relentlessly upbeat mood: a neo-mod, bright-eyed poptimism that proclaims "it's 1966, the future is wide-open!". In England, such empty triumphalism elevated Oasis into a huge pop phenomenon, by tapping into young kids' desire to fly in the face of grim present reality. In America, GBV's Anglophile/necrophile quasi-anthems made the band a hit only with rockcrits and others steeped in the canon of classic rock (and thus able to appreciate the reverence and the references). All their songs are tuneful in that deja vu, Tom Petty/Sebadoh way, while the riffs trigger your kneejerk-reflexes, conditioned by years of exposure to classic rock. Can I be the only listener for whom half-liking a GBV song is unavoidably accompanied by a queasy sensation of shame and lameness? GBV is just one more fat fly crawling over the dungheap of rock history, sucking it up and pooping out endless additions to their copious trail of disgrace.

The Muzik Pantheon of Middlebrow

Slam, Carl Cox, Sabres of Paradise, Dave Clark, Speedy J, Lionrock, David Holmes, T. Power, Laurent Garnier, Leftfield (except for "Disco 3000"), Sven Vath, Darren Emerson, Silent Phase, Two Lone Swordsmen, Faithless, Groove Armada, Bedrock...

OTHER MALIGNANT TUMORS OF THE NINETIES

Loaded and the resurgence of lad culture

Fever Pitch/High Fidelity versus Bridget Jones (it's okay to be a neurotic gender-trapped fuck-up so long as you know you're one, lets you off the hook vis-a-vis the challenge of changing)

The trenchant opinions, lyric-craft, vocal ability, and "sexual charisma" of Louise Wener in Sleeper

Oh, and Echobelly too

Gene

superclubs

supermodels

Ibiza

"label culture"

The notion that structure-lessness = freedom

purists

eclectics who expect applause for combining this + that and getting the sum of their parts.

Genrephobes a/k/a music journalists who use "so-called" as a prefix, e.g "so-called trip hop" or "so-called post-rock", or (the temerity of these guys!) "so-called jungle", "so-called gabba" etc. These are critics who wish to discuss the putative scene/genre in question while squeamishly distancing themselves from the term (which is usually the pretext or buzz-hook for the piece, and the cheque they'll be getting in the mail from it), by insinuating that it's somehow bogus or imposed against the will of its designated objects. Of course, they don't have the guts or the acuity to come up with a new term that's more accurate, but they still want to trade off (literally: make money from) the taxonomic efforts of others (journalists; the massive that constitutes the scene itself), while striking a pseudo-ethical stance of aloofness from the discursive fray: an (im)posture of in-credulity--i'm un-swayable by hype, i'm not so easily fooled. These smallminded, ostrich-headed dullards stoutly insist: there's nothing new here that warrants--god forbid--the atrocity of a new name. As if it really offends them that the mutational on-rush of music might generate new styles that cry out for fresh language, and thus confuse their mental maps and made-up minds. As should be obvious, I could ruminate and rant about this topic for pages, and will do so in a forthcoming epic, 'Genrephobia: Profiles in Cowardice', due to be posted on this site in a few months.

Detroit-pietists (crypto-fascists all: an editor at a German magazine killed an interview with me about the book 'cos he felt my opinions about Detroit techno were insufficiently reverent!!!)

The British music press during Britpop, and since

Gilles Peterson/Straight No Chaser type acid-jazzbo downtempo West London pseudo-kulcha bizness'n'ting--Brand New Heavies, Jamiroquai, Galliano, Morcheeba, D-Note,

Proto-emocore: Superchunk, Buffalo Tom, etc--James Taylor with a fuzz-box, innit?

Centrist politics

Celine Dion trying to "rock out" on stage

Product placement- they can digitally insert brand-name products into old repeat programmes now!

People clinging to the high/low distinction in culture -- whether they do it from outside (quality art versus mass culture: Jesus do we still have to fight these battles?--apparently so!) or from within popular music ("intelligent"/"progressive"/"serious" pop versus commercial/lumpen/"mindless" pap--you haven't really advanced from the old Shakespeare's better than Dylan position by making Dylan into your own generation's Shakespeare).

People who try to simply reverse the high/low polarity and big up all pop and diss all unpopular/marginal/hipster/highbrow/academic music simply for being un-popular. What was it the man said about "he who fucks nuns will somebody join the Church?". Perhaps every camp/ironic/slumming male thirtysomething frothing about the pure pop magic of Spice Girls/Britney Spears/Backstreet Boys will somebody end up back in the arms of Bach...

Judge Jules, Tall Paul, Seb Fontaine, Dave Seaman, Dave Ralph, John Digweed,etc

Gwen Stefani and her mutant sprog Bif Naked

The return of the disaster movie

The American rock critic herd, who, faced with the choice: Moby OR rave culture, chose Moby. Why? Because it was more convenient.

Rap-metal and the testosterone resurgence

American stadium-rock mob psychology: Woodstock 99, obviously, but this has been brewing for years--the Lollapalooza in I think 1996 was where I noticed it first--just before the headliners Hole came on, the people on the ground started throwing half-full waterbottles and shit at the people in the stands, it was like WWW1 or something, trench warfare, looks of homicidal hatred on the mob's faces as they rained this stuff down on us, Joy's forehead got split open by a full water bottle, must have been spinning, the torque left the imprint of bottle cap in her forehead, blood everywhere, we had to go to casualty under the main stage (directly under Courtney Love's crotch, actually), there were kids with broken arms or trembling head to toe with fear from being crushed in the mosh-pit, it was an ugly revelation let me tell you, the mechanics of stadium rock, the machinery in place to routinely deal with the expected casualty rate. But Woodstock 99 was the pits --like fascism without the consolation of nice uniforms and ideological focus, Kristellnacht with genocide replaced by gynocide.

Puff Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You"--not only did the melody come from The Police, the words--heartfelt paean to his dead best buddy--were ghostwritten by another rapper (Sauce Money). Can you believe the nerve of this guy?!?

Nadir of the Nineties--Anthony Kiedis, balladeer. "Scar Tissue" was horrible, but the wordless i'm-so-soulful vocalese bit in "Under The Bridge" gets my vote as the most unpleasant sounds to emanate from a human throat in a decade where the competition was hardly thin on the ground.

Evaporating word-counts

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