Now on to entry #4 of my attempt to review every song in every Triple JJJ Hottest 100, from 1993 to the present day (not counting the first few, which were beautiful catalogues of classic alternative music taken from multiple different years, and which tended to repeatedly leave the same songs clustered toward the top each year). This is is a response to the cyclical whinge about the Hottest 100 having lost the plot at some vague point in the distant past (usually since the mid-90s - my vote would be between 1997 and 1998). The idea is that by actually examining each song in detail, I would learn more about the cultural moment and general range of music when many of us believed the Hottest 100 to be actually good, and also about my own tastes and the degree to which they may or may not be informed/affected by nostalgia.
So far in this series, I have been both positively surprised by the depth and variety of music in 1993's countdown, with more reggae than I remember being on the radio during the period and a lot of interesting alternative rock (like #71 on the last post). However, there has also been an unfortunately sizeable contingent of unpleasantly of-its-time pop-EDM, and a Cruel Sea, if you will, of soft, upbeat alt rock, comprised of various shades of creamy beige mediocrity. What exactly did twenty-something Gen Xers get out of this, I've often found myself thinking, while trying to regurgitate a couple of paragraphs about some proto-indie R&B-rock zephyr that blew in and out in less than three minutes, like a splash of acid rain on a carpark somewhere in Adelaide. And also: will anyone actually read this, apart from the struggling indie musicians from the list in question, who are now in their fifties and sixties and have a bandcamp, trying to remind contemporary audiences of their existence while probably working as a SOSE teacher in high school or something?
70: "Sleepy Head (Serene Machine)" - Ed Kuepper
This is a good, deep, melodic indie rock song. I would put it a couple of notches ahead of the standard indie rock I've covered in this series so far, mainly because its tone actually has depth and isn't completely flat and upbeat, and also because (perhaps as a consequence) I actually enjoy listening to it. I've never heard much by Kuepper before, or from the Saints, and Sleepy Head is a pleasant surprise. His slightly off-key singing voice reminds me of the affectations in a lot of indie rock from the early 2010s, but there's more depth and heart-feeling in his delivery here. It doesn't feel put on. Lyrically, there doesn't seem to be much going on here, just some embittered ruminations directed at an ex, maybe some vague sociopolitical commentary. He sings about "sweet talkers with gems for eyes" and "two cent friends with their pretend faith." There's enough cynicism to give the song depth, but it's vague enough to keep the general tone of the song cerebral.
Musically it reminds me a little of REM in the verses, very stripped back and earthy/acoustic. The chorus has a literal chorus backing Kuepper and this gives it a lot of power. It's like a more rustic, country-ish version of the quiet-to-loud Nirvana/Pixies song structure. It's been imitated enough in Australian music that it sounds familiar, though I don't have direct recollections of hearing this specific song on the radio. Credit where credit's due though, unlike a lot of the indie rock on this list, Sleepy Head actually sounds fairly timeless. I could almost imagine this being a new release on Triple J today. Mainly because the base of non-confrontational acoustic pub rock that still feeds into alternative music still produces an audience for this sort of music. If anything separates it from music produced now, it might be the sense of earnestness behind it, and the sense of the person performing it being not completely disconnected from the world. I can imagine Kuepper actually reading the news and having an informed understanding of the world around him. The vague metaphors in this song probably correspond to things happening in the real world. The Gen Y rectangle beard folk musician who would play an equivalent song today in a bar somewhere (going from personal experience here) would be more likely to treat the lyrics as complete abstractions. Just vaguely expressed emotions. Maybe very literally about someone they don't like. Sleepy Head allows you to comfortably imagine it is actually about something (unlike anything by, say, Bon Iver).
69: "Animal Nitrate" - Suede
This is a more raw, direct and less headache-inducing song than the previously-covered The Drowners by Suede. Brett Anderson isn't as annoying, though his singing is still very mannered, and this feels like it comes from a more direct, more conscientious place. The verses are strong, sort of lightweight grunge/authentic alt rock from the period, with a great distorted guitar solo (by comparative standards - maybe I've heard so much mediocre indie rock so far that I'll take anything vaguely exciting that I can get that has a bit of an edge - also apparently the riff was inspired by Smells Like Teen Spirit, no surprises there). The music video seems to be set on a council estate somewhere in London, intercut with studio shots involving some vaguely transgressive sexual content (you see someone with a natural body shape in a leopard-print bikini, with their face covered, I guess that counts as transgressive). Anderson actually sings about a council estate, and the song seems to be about unhealthy sexual transactions in that millieu. I don't feel knowledgeable enough to comment on whether or not the lyrics are gay-coded, but I have suspicions. He croons about how "in your broken home he broke all your bones," and now "you're taking it time after time," and then asks if anything else turns you on after he's left, "now you're over twenty-one." It also apparently has a lot to do with drugs, more ecstasy and cocaine than the amyl nitrite that the title refers to. My early twenties were less interesting than what's presented here, but Anderson gets the overall miserable tone correct and relatable.
Seriously though, the riff in the verse is really good. It's like Nirvana a bit, but with the jangly, treble-y refrain from a Smiths song. It plays well loud. The feedback and Anderson's high-pitched wailing croon also mixes together into a miasma of white noise, you can sink your teeth into this. It's a bit less of end-of-history than the Drowners (though the chorus pushes it in this direction). Any ironic detachment that might be present is offset by the authentically-expressed viciousness, the pure hate directed both at the subject matter behind whatever's going on in the lyrics and the world at large. It's refreshing to listen to, and to know that people here thirty years ago apparently appreciated it too. I don't dislike Suede as much as I did before.
68: "Mr. Vain" - Culture Beat
Right, I know this one straight away. This was everywhere in the mid-90s. In the shops, in gyms, on the radio in the car. I'm pretty sure it was used in advertising for a little while, while it still sounded contemporary. I suppose I'm supposed to laugh at how dated it sounds, and to reduce whatever complexity it might have to some artifact of nostalgia that I can safely appreciate with ironic detachment. In reality, when you take a few steps back, it's an interesting bridge from the similarly synth-laden dance music of the decade prior to the underground dance music scenes that had begun to expand rapidly in the early nineties, themselves drawing from other underground genres - including the ultimate, primal form of electronic music, dub - and I guess this fact of having feet in both rooms gives it a little depth, more oomph than, say, a Madonna single from five years earlier.
But the synth sounds good, the beat is good. The synth in particular is unrelenting, its spread over the entire song like a thick condiment. The drum and bass is solid, the low end is nice and aggressive. Tania Evans has a great voice. Not sure about Jay Supreme's rapping, but it sort of works. Evans's mournful crooning gives it a little more depth - it's not Barbie Girl by Aqua. This is a kinetic, angry sort of dance track. The overall tone isn't carefree. And there are a lot of little touches that back that up, including the faux-orchestra synth that kicks in during the last verse. I get the feeling that Culture Beat took this seriously during production, there's no self-referential ironic laughter at their own corniness. Which is what gives revisiting songs like this a genuine sense of appeal that transcends nostalgia.
67: "Boom Shack-A-Lak" - Apache Indian
From a very poppish dance track that actually has a fair amount of disguised depth to another which has compltely the opposite quality. This is complete trash. "Apache Indian" seems like a weird misogynistic dick. His faux West Indian inflection is as offensive as his slack attitude toward women. He throws in a few 'jah jahs' and says 'pon' and 'in ah di', and this contrasts so markedly with the fakeness of the song itself that the whole mix just feels like pure novelty. I'm not even sure that it's actually reggae at a technical level. It sounds like Tom Jones attempting ragga. The beat sounds more like fifties throwback rock'n'roll - a Britpop version of a Grease number performed by a British Asian bloke pretending to be Jamaican. The most dystopic final outcome of multiculturalism imaginable. Enoch Powell probably would have secretly enjoyed this. Imagine a 97-98% white party (the social kind, not the political kind) playing this today as part of a 90s-themed nostalgia playlist, and everybody dancing to it in somebody's garage, though its late in the night and one guy is throwing up in the corner, and you can hear someone else crying in the bathroom. This may sound unnecessarily specific, but it's what I imagine purgatory to resemble.
My negative reception to this song isn't completely related to my enthusiasm for British reggae and dub. This actually just sounds really bad and bland. What I've found writing these columns so far is that alternative music, and popular music generally from this period, wasn't a homogeneous, integrated whole. There were multiple channels, or streams of music that became popular at different times, for different reasons. These roughly corresponded to different ideas about what good music is, and should be. Boom Shack-a-Lak (a disrespectful reference to Russ Bell-Brown's reggae label) represents the primordial dregs of a type of fake, empty, attitude-over-substance commercial music that was developing in this period in response to grunge. This song is overtly offensive, but there's no subtext to speak of. It almost feels absurd to talk about the possibility of one, in much the same way as you wouldn't ask where the subtext lies in most of Limp Bizkit's music. Or in Linkin Park's. You would be missing the point. I think the same's true here, this is an early, pioneering example of that kind of obnoxiousness which eventually overcame the attempts by alternative rock musicians in the beginning of the decade to bring rock music back to life and to make it in someway meaningful. If you feel like I'm just whinging and it's actually a good, danceable song, I can only ask that you listen to a bit more of the roots reggae and dub that apparently inspired Apache Indian and see how much more depth that particular creative field has in comparison to what's on offer here.
66: "Something Good" - Utah Saints
I'm not sure what to think of this. On the one hand, the piano and synthesiser are very easily identifiable artifacts of the early nineties. Superficially, it sounds like a characteristically tonally schizophrenic dance track of the period. There's a touch of TISM in the way the upbeat tone is contraposed with an unpredictable, aggressively artificial tempo. Kate Bush's vocals (making this the second Kate Bush track on this countdown) don't really add much. If anything, the Utah Saints used the quirkier, more alien qualities of Bush's voice to contribute to their song's artificial texture. None of this sounds especially human. But, at the same time, none of its components completely add up, and listening to it I feel somewhat compelled by the contradictions this creates.
The opening enlightenment faux-string quartet gives way to an adolescent scream of the bands name, which is quickly accompanied by a very obvious and artificial-sounding synth line. It actually reminds of specific video games I played in the mid-nineties (Desert Strike house), and it never reaches of the point of being reconciled into the rest of the composition. The seam-lines between this song's constituent components are very audible, they never dissipate. It's what I imagine a Timezone rave would have been like. It's barely even a song, though it does have a song structure (I think I heard a bridge at some point). But I've listened to it twice now and it doesn't sound in any way cohesive. It's the nostalgic equivalent of white noise. I'm sure this was on TV, maybe Rage, when I was a kid, and I guess it sounded contemporary and normal then. From an adult's perspective, I don't have any ecstasy on hand so I'm not sure that I can fully appreciate this as originally intended. But it's an interesting experiment. Weird to think that most of the people in the music video's rave would be in their fifties now (at least).
65: "Regret" - New Order
I might have been wrong when I suggested in an earlier post that New Order were past their prime peak of popularity by 1993, given that they had at least two singles with wide play on alternative radio during this year. This song and World above both have an eighties dance-pop meets nineties indie rock feel, though - especially in the case of "Regret" - not necessarily in a good way (if that were possible). Regret isn't as good as World, it's milder and less passionate, and sounds (in retrospect) more like the type of TV commercial music that would eventually adopt and iron out the rough edges of the light, jangly early 90s indie rock that this countdown has produced so many examples of thus far. Regret sounds like Wham! trying to do indie dream pop. Bernard Summers still has a very 1980s Patrick Bateman corporate pop-rock sound, which mixes uncomfortably with a soulless attempt at actual alternative rock. Squint your ears (supposing that's possible) and it almost sounds like the Smiths if Morrissey wasn't depressed and self-hating. Maybe Joy Division, if the name wasn't ironic. It sits on the fence tonally, alternating between being just slightly uplifting and very mildly melancholic. Consequentially, it feels weightless and leaves you feeling little beyond the vague sense of disgust at having listened to a three-minute long advertising jingle.
The lyrics are completely empty. How do you write lyrics when you have nothing to say, and are not aggrieved about anything tangible or specific? I'm not sure if it's a love song or a breakup song, it's too vague. Being called 'Regret' would indicate break-up, but at multiple points Summers says "you used to be a stranger, now you are mine." It feels calculated and professional, like it was put together in an office, at a desk. It has a tangible aura of fakeness. Even the music video somehow looks like it's had Instagram filters applied to it in 1993. The synth just underlines everything, giving a subtle whiff of soap opera opening credits. If Johnny Marr did the score for Full House. The dance-music pre-programmed drums are okay, I guess. Lightweight. At some level I'm trying to understand the context in which music like this was made, disseminated by radio stations and appreciated by an Australian alternative music public. I guess people found it uplifting, it's hard to tell.
64: "Nearly Lost You" - Screaming Trees
This is a good song, but sort of flat. It starts off just sounding like non-confrontational loud rock music without anger (I'm not quite sure I've heard enough of this specific type of music to sketch out a sub-genre, but my gut feeling is that this is something that exists). After a while, though, some of "Nearly Lost You"'s better qualities come through - it has some nice touches of psychodelia (the guitarist is clearly a Hendrix fan), there's plenty of feedback, and as mentioned the song itself is loud. It's still sort of upbeat, but there's a good rhythm to it, I like the refrain and I found myself getting into it by the end.
The late Mark Lanegan is going for a sort of Vedder/Cobain-esque growl (he was friends with the latter up until his death), though unlike those two he doesn't sound sharp or threatening. It doesn't sound affected either, though. The lyrics are poetic and nuanced enough to hand-wave their vagueness. Unlike Regret it seems as though there's actually some substance here, a healthy amount of inner turmoil and self-hatred. The instrumentation is fairly complicated as well, and in conjunction with the lyrics the song itself isn't boring to listen to. It's not the kind of thing I look for in grunge or alternative rock - my aesthetic priorities demand a bit more oomph, more harshness than Lanegan is willing to give. But I can accept the value of what the Screaming Trees put out and that we're on parallel tracks (this is the first song by them that I'm conscious of having heard - the name doesn't ring a bell).
63: "Scratch My Back" - The Sharp
This is easily the clearest case of attitude over substance so far in this post. It's not quite at the level of "Delivery Man" by the Cruel Sea, but it's obnoxious and self-involved and ultimately empty enough to have inspired its own contemporaneous parody (which, going by Youtube videos, is more popular than the original). Superficially, you listen to this at first and think 'that's a pretty bold, pretty solid beat, it's kind of danceable, it sounds decently raw.' But then you quickly realise that the beat is a gimmick and never really goes anywhere, and you never really feel anything from it. The chorus solidifies any suspicions your might have about its fundamental boring-ness. I initially thought it sounded like a bold combination of the Beatles and the White Stripes (I have no idea if the White Stripes were around in 1993, not going to look it up either), and while the call-back to the Beatles is very obvious, after a while it just sounds like a gimmick, and blends into the gimmicky character of the rest of the song. It almost sounds like they're trying to be catchy, but it never quite works.
Curly-haired lead vocalist is very annoying, and of all of the song's components his voice grates the most. His whiny, hyperactive falsetto never sounds good, and you wonder what he's doing there after a while. The guy with a blonde pompadour is apparently the music teacher for a lot of Youtube commenters now. The lyrics are trying to be raunchy in a way that's simultaneously blunt and vague. The whole product kind of sucks, it reminds me of what Spiderbait eventually became - the quirky, loud, attitude-enriched meme that Triple J could play endlessly, boosting their alternative credibility by sounding weird enough to be vaguely described as artsy, and without having any actual substance or perspective that could cause controversy. Or at least they're a pale antecedent of that - Scratch My Back makes Black Betty sound interesting (ew). Though, in fairness, I should give the drummer some props, he really gave it his all, and his contributions are more dynamic and sound more interesting than everything else in the song.
62: "Easy" - Faith No More
Just terrible. I didn't know that Faith No More covered Easy. Possibly this is because their cover doesn't differ from the original in substance, it's just worse. I'm not a huge fan of Lionel Ritchie's version either, but you could at least say it sounds earthy, it didn't sound fake in the way this one does. I've heard this played so many times - on the radio, in advertising, referenced in movies, etc. - but I can't tell if the version I've heard is the original or Faith No More's. It's just a gooey mess of adult contemporary, crisply-produced status quo post-soul. It couldn't possibly offend anyone. On the one hand, it's not Lionel Ritchie's fault that his song developed a horrifying afterlife as a sample to employ whenever a creative person decided that whatever they're working on isn't trite enough. Aural mayonnaise. On the other hand, however, you could argue the seeds for this grand misappropriation were contained within the original composition. Marxist-Leninists have been having this debate for decades. What I think is ultimately uncontroversial, however, is that Mike Patton is clearly Stalin, and his cover is a conscious act of malice. I shouldn't hate this as much as I do, the song is pretty unoffensive on its own terms, but its continual existence in popular culture - in perpetuity, like tinnitus - has turned this particular version into CIA-grade torture.
I don't hate Faith No More. I used to kind of like Epic when I was in high school. Mike Patton has a decent voice, it's just a shame he wasted it on dreck like this. There's a sort of fake, cheery irony behind it. Like they're superficially making fun of something, but they're not actually making fun of it, don't worry, they actually really like it. There should be a word for this, because it's common (particularly in Australia, so the fact that Easy did so well here isn't surprising), but I don't think there is. Performative sympathetic sardonicness. The reverse you can see in something like Cake's cover of I Will Survive, where it's not immediately clear if John McCrea isn't taking the piss. There could be some contempt just under the surface, if not for the song itself then in the way it was originally sung. You can see the evidence for that in the amount of hate that cover received by fans of the original. I don't see any of that discord in the audience for Faith No More's cover of Easy. In a way, it flatters egos instead than challenging them. I think you see similar qualities at work in many of the attitude-over-substance indie rock tunes I've covered so far in this countdown, particularly the Australian entries - superficial obnoxiousness, tempered with a non-threatening subtext. Aural mayonnaise. The fact that Mike Patton recorded this cover specifically so they could play something that would cause fans to flip them off at concerts isn't surprising. Neither is the fact that people actually ended up liking it. Either we (in this country) didn't get the joke, or our Gen X was ok with an alt metal band from the US making fun of them. The fuzzy guitar solo adds nothing.
61: "Last Train (Master Mix)" - Christine Anu & Paul Kelly
The thing most dated about "Last Train" is the fact that a contemporary reggae single got wide radio play. This is instant nostalgia for me, R&B-inspired modern-sounding (for 1993) reggae. Last Train Christine Anu's first single, and she has a great voice; Paul Kelly isn't too bad in it either. The music video is interesting too, and teases some subtext out of the song, which doesn't give much away on its own. The original song by Kelly (a relatively lightweight bluesy reggae album track) that he and Anu re-imagine here was pretty spartan lyrically, but there's a feeling of consciousness that carries through, even if it isn't explicit. MC Opi's toast provides a bit more depth, she's good in this too. It did quite well at the ARIAs the following year. The production gives it a kind of chill-out sound that reminds me of a lot of alternative music that came out in the mid-to-late 90s, the kind of music that sounded contemporary then. It reflects pretty strongly the relationship between reggae, dub and dance music. I can feel the same imprint from alternative IDM in Last Train that I can in Mr. Vain, the other song in this post that Last Train most closely resembles.
The bassline is great, the percussion is well put together. It's hard to nail down what genre Last Train actually is. The beat is certainly reggae, and this carries through from the original, which was a pub rock-rendition of reggae, complete with a harmonica (which is sampled in this version). But it was clearly produced with the intention of being released as a dance track, and you can detect a lot of the stylistic trappings of early 90s dance music in it, though all are employed in a way that accompany and enhance rather than subtract from the song. There's also an element of soul in the way it's performed, you could probably read funk in it too. Ultimately it's comes across as a genuine fusion, it doesn't sound artificial to me at all. Nor saccharine and upbeat and empty, like many of the other entries in the post, so I'm happy about that. As Mad Professor has said, reggae has a way of uplifting you, of instantly improving your mood and giving you strength from within.
Review
I did not quite suffer the emotional terrorism in writing this post that I had experienced in previous entries, which I consider a victory and an overall sign of better things to come. The balance - of enlivening, dynamic songs, from a variety of genres (with a strong EDM contingent) that offer a window into my own nostalgia from the time without themselves being necessarily immediately recognisable, and the bland cocktail of middle-of-the-road soft indie rock and offense-over-substance post-grunge - is decidedly in favour of the former category this time. There was a lot of middle-of-the-road, superficially quirky or creative or abrasive, but fundamentally dull and conforming indie rock, more than I remember - and I'm beginning to get a sense of the kind of sound Triple J, and the Australian music industry generally, tended to market, and how certain bands fit the marketing mold, either proactively or incidentally. But within this political economy of alternative music there was clearly room for a range of more interesting music to get exposure, to develop a fan base and inspire similar bands to do the same. I don't think this lasted, however, and the question I still have is when specifically did this window of opportunity narrow? At what point did the Silverchairs and Spiderbaits and Savage Gardens take over, feast on our innards and leave the entrails for the Animal Collectives and Angus and Julia Stones, etc. (and so until until today)? Maybe there were structural changes in the music industry, perhaps cultural changes changes as well in terms of taste (listen to a band like the Killers and then to the Smashing Pumpkins, and ask how exactly did we get from A to B). I hope to find the answer to this in maybe another 100 posts.
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