Tuesday, 14 November 2023

Triple J Hottest 100 Countdown Countdown: 1993, #60 - 51

Welcome to another entry in my JJJ Hottest 100 Countdown Countdown series, in which I attempt to put both my own personal nostalgia and our collective nostalgia under a microscope, with the intent to see when exactly the titular Triple J flew the coop and became the subject of general hate and mockery that it is today (amongst many of its former listeners at least - I assume there are a few people who still listen to it and enjoy the music they play). To do this, I plan to review every single song in every JJJ Hottest 100 from 1993 until the present day. My hope is that this will prove to be, at the least, an educational experience for anyone who wants to know about the development (or chronic spiral, depending on your perspective) of alternative music in Australia over the past thirty years, and to provide a means to clarify why exactly so many people complain about the countdown each year. You can find the previous entry here, in which I review songs #70 to 61 in the 1993 countdown.

So far, I've been pleasantly surprised by the variety of interesting, thoughtful, dynamic alternative genres represented in 1993's countdown, including many smooth genre-fusion efforts. It has been a sort of rediscovery of music that made an impact on me personally during that decade, but which I never kept track of (probably because I was in kindergarten and Napster didn't exist) and which disappeared from my conscious mind until resurfacing now. However, there has also been a lot more mediocre, up-tempo soft indie rock that I remembered, often so absent of weight or solidity that I struggled to commit it to memory immediately after listening to it - which is a problem when you're trying to write a couple of paragraphs about the songs in question. At the very low end (and not the good kind of low end) I have identified - taxonomically, you could say - a sub-sub-genre of attitude-over-substance loud, overtly offensive but subtextually barren alternative rock music, and each post so far has dealt with a few of these. It's clear that the Limp Bizkit impulse - to react against the popularity of grunge by taking the anger and removing its target - was well and truly bubbling away by 1993, well before Fred Durst had emerged from the swamp. Needless to say, I'm hoping the latter two categories recede and the first moves forward in greater prominence as we get closer to the singles that the alternative music-listening Australian public actually voted for in 1993.

60: "Distant Sun" - Crowded House

 


I feel like my standards, when it comes to music, have definitely been lowered over the course of this series. After listening to boring, upbeat, depthless indie pop-rock single after single anything remotely deep and thoughtful brings forth an immediate sensation of relief. It's still lightweight upbeat indie-rock (at the Things of Stone and Wood end of the spectrum), but there's a bit more nuance, more tonal complexity. Which is what you would expect from a band like Crowded House, which has a fair amount more critical respect and cultural cache than many of the nameless one-hit (or not even a hit) indie wonders I've covered in this countdown. Lyrically, despite the fact it is, at it's core, essentially a mopey love song, it's complex enough to not be off-putting. "Seven worlds will collide whenever I'm by your side, dust from a distant sun will shower over everyone" strikes me as pretty impressive poetry. Today, it's easy to imagine it being oversold by the vocalist - imagine the Killers singing this - but Neil Finn undersells it and the song doesn't sound overly dramatic. I'm not going to compare Finn or this song to grunge, he was a good ten or so years older than most of the grunge musicians who were his contemporaries on the charts at this point, and he was clearly doing his own thing, borrowing bits and pieces of what made it into the charts along the way.


"Distant Sun" seems to clarify a certain sub-genre of 90s Australian indie rock that I've encountered quite a few examples of on this list so far. It involves a lot of major chords, a sort of treacly, soulful (very white) crooning (you could call it pre-Australian Idol, it isn't the vocalist attempting to dominate the whole song with their range), sunny acoustic guitars and crisp, clearly-recorded (compared to the music of the preceding decade) live instrumentation. And very little, but not entirely absent bass. Blue skies and billowing curtains. At the better end of the spectrum, as you see here, you get vague hints, subtext of an outlook on life that isn't entirely positive and uplifting. On the the shallow end it's pure home loan lifestyle jangle. I can tolerate the treacly, lovey-dovey lyrics, the ostentatiously non-confrontational up-tempo acoustic rhythm section and the mummified barely-soulful vocals when they're tempered with some ambiguity, some creative drive to make music that sounds complicated and different from what they've heard before. The Australian alt-music pedigree is also worth respecting in this case (unlike, say, Nick Cave, who I'm not sure I respect at all). From what I understand (which isn't much - I didn't grow up with much exposure to this musical tradition), these guys are considered on the same level as Paul Kelly. And they at least sound like they're trying to communicate something in earnest, outside of the usual cliches about rock music and hedonism. I'd rather listen to this any day than anything by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It's pleasant. It helps to blur your eyes (your ears?) a bit and not focus directly on it. Sounds like recently-spilled beer. Like at a bar counter that isn't unhygienic. And the outro is nice too. A good example of a type of music that doesn't speak directly to me, but which I can appreciate from a distance.

 

59: "You're Just Too Hip, Baby" - Dave Graney 'n' the Coral Snakes

 




Ideally, a song like this, with so many internal contradictions, should be complex, or at least interesting. Unfortunately it came off the bat sounding incredibly boring, and layers of boringness build up - like plaque - on top of each other as you get through it. Since I've already been defining new sub-genres based on the music I've heard from this series, I'll tentatively offer a new one here: neo Australian fifties rockabilly/pub-rock blues. There are various flavours of this - from light and sunny imitations so inoffensive they became cringeworthy (like everything I've heard by the Badloves), to deeper and edgier varieties, with forced attitude that contrasts awkwardly with the crispness of the production (i.e. the Cruel Sea). 'Dave Graney' (itself a failed attempt to make an extremely boring name sound cool - at least Michael Spibey doesn't go by Mike) and his more respectably named Coral Snakes occupy an awkward middle-ground between these two extremes, with Dave pulling more towards Michael Spiby's sunburn-soul end of the spectrum and the broader talent of the Coral Snakes giving the song a bit more oomph. The whole, on the balance, is pretty embarrassing though. It sounds incredibly stale to me, today, partially because I can hear how contemporary it would have sounded at the time. The production sounds as clear as you could get for 1993 (which still sounds pretty crisp today - In Utero, which came out the following year, doesn't sound old by any means), there's no feedback to speak of, probably because Graney and his crew reasoned there wouldn't have been any in the 1950s rock and roll they were calling back to, and probably because they were trying to create a marketable, adult-contemporary product. There's an element of forced sophistication, of which the terrible, vertically-striped collared shirt Graney wears in the music video is emblematic. It sounds like an accountant who had dreams of fronting a Blues Brothers cover band, but without any of the irony the Blues Brothers had. With a kind of pub-rock Australian sheen.

Which is a shame, because the Coral Snakes are actually quite good at what they do, and the song sounds ok when Davey Graney's lack of personality isn't breathing into my ears. The breakdown midway through is great, it sounds a lot like the Doors, and it brings back a fair amount of the energy that Graney sucks out. But when we get back to a verse it becomes incredibly stale once again. This is partly because, for all of the forced attitude, the musical touches like the deep, looping bass, the song still sounds completely unthreatening and as light as a feather. There's no resonance in Graney's voice, and no grit either. He probably didn't even smoke. It doesn't sound fit for purpose. It makes me wonder if part of the disjuncture comes from a man with an Australian accent trying to sing very American-sounding music. I wonder if he grew up in the fifties, was this sort of music nostalgic for him? If that's the case then being too critical feels unfair, and him and his band clearly have their own niche in the Australian music scene. He's still active, and still plays in blues festivals, venues and the like, and has a core group of followers. But in the context of the time it came out, with the other music that was also being played on alternative radio, "You're Just Too Hip, Baby" sounds too smiley, too fake and limited in its expressiveness.

58: "Jesus Was Way Cool" - King Missile


 

There's not much to say here. Clearly some edgy 90s Gen X atheists succeeded in getting this Tom Green youth pastor-esque a capella some radio play. The piano line is instantly recognisable to me, so I think it got some exposure. The lyrics, which are spoken by a guy who sounds like he wants to grow a 90s goatee but doesn't have enough facial hair yet (a eunuch Tom Green) [edit: apparently John S. Hall was in his thirties and wore a fedora], are sort of a piss-take, but are also surprisingly restrained. The monologue is pretty one-note, though with patches of brilliance ("he walked on the water and swam on the land"). Upon repetition it sounds a little more innocent, more a teenager expressing his earnest love of Christ rather than a youth pastor trying to cynically convert him. It's altogether pretty non-confrontational - though I guess it would still piss off plenty of people regardless.

Musically, I'm not sure I would enjoy listening to it on the radio. It's very short, at least, but also kind of empty. It's just a piano and some guy talking. The production is nice. But it's not really music. Weirdly it kind of reminds me of Moby. That's really just about all I can write about it. The bit about Jesus turning innocuous things into drugs is kind of funny.

57: "Choppers (Koppelman Mix)" - Headless Chickens


 

This one manages to feel both unfamiliar and predictably bland. Another Frankenstein's monster of genre-blending made possible by advances in digital music technology, less so by the talents of Headless Chicken. It's definitely a distinct genre, and a familiar one if you grew up in this time period - techno beats with funk-ish synthesised instrumentation, crooning female vocals and one white man rapping terribly. I'm pretty sure that by 1993 this genre was already being used in adverts targeting younger demographics (that's where it resonates the most). 

 I don't hate the whole thing, only parts of it. The seam-lines where different body parts were used to construct the new being are irritatingly visible - you almost go through whiplash listening to it from start to finish ("this isn't very good-god this is awful-oh okay Fiona McDonald isn't a terrible vocalist-those horns are excrutiating" etc.). The good parts definitely involve McDonald's vocals, a good pop-ish early 90s croon, backed by a catchy guitar riff. The bad parts involve the guy rapping and the evil synthesised horns (perhaps part of a broader sub-genre of early 90s music called 'terrible synthesised instruments and beats that give you a headache'). The beat itself goes from being appealing to repulsive depending on which of the aforementioned elements it accompanies. 

Altogether, an interesting cultural artificact, and maybe 30% of a marginally listenable song. Not exactly an inspiration to seek out more early-to-mid nineties New Zealand electro-funk. Also there's a terrible faux-Middle Eastern breakdown in the coda.

56: "Can You Forgive Her?" - Petshop Boys


 

 Another vaguely alternative-sounding techno-pop love song, though in this case sung by a man with annoying nasally English accent (Neil Tennant). I can see how a single like this would make it into JJJ's rotation during this time period, it's filled with various samples layered on top of each, bordering on being discordant, but ultimately resolving itself more harmoniously than Choppers above. Like many other tracks I've written about so far, it incorporates enough compositional novelties to project a sheen of alternative indie-ness, but is ultimately conventional enough at its core to feel like a bit of a let-down (see also - 90% of what was played on JJJ during the early 2010s). This is still an awkwardly naive love-song, of sorts, presumably oriented towards clubs. 

The Petshop Boys had been around for about 10-15 years at this point, so I would be curious to know how they related to the rise in prominence of dance music and techno in the mainstream in the early 90s. They sound like outsiders in this track, the attitude they project feeling like something much more from the previous decade when compared to, say, the Prodigy. I wrote about a single by New Order in the previous post which came from a similar perspective - a techno-oriented band popular in the eighties trying to find a niche in nineties EDM. My feeling is that New Order had the correct attitude (perhaps the ghost of Joy Division hadn't completed disappeared by 1993), while the Petshop Boys here feel vaguely backwards-looking. The pow-pow-pow of the symphony sample in the bridge almost sounds powerful, but ultimately the whole thing doesn't excite me in the way a lot of electronic music I like does, I think because it's essentially an innovation incorporated into an older, less interesting structure. It's very safe. The early 3D animation in the video is kind of cool.

55: "Alive and Brilliant" - Deborah Conway

 


"Alive and Brilliant" is a smooth, easy to listen to indie rock song with an interesting looping bassline. I don't have much to say about it because I'm probably not the intended audience, and I don't have a solid grasp of what sort of similar music was getting airplay in Australia at this time. Like other songs I've covered in 1993's list so far, it sounds contemporary to me and thereby falls slightly beneath the tide of consciousness, but this may well be because I grew up with similar-sounding music on the radio, and there probably isn't much music that sounds like this being released today. So there's definitely an element of nostalgia muffling potential criticism.

Conway has a good voice, albeit a voice that sounds like the voice of many other rock vocalists I've heard (particularly from Australia). It's definitely part of a genre. Listening to it now, I wonder if she was influenced by Patti Smith. Alive and Brilliant has elements of 70s folk rock, though with enough distance from themes of peace and love and counterculture generally to sound solidly like 90s contemporary lifestyle rock. This is more music about making yourself a better person than making the world a better place. But in that creative field it still sounds good to me, and the bass-line has a looping quality to it that gives the song a semi-complicated beat. Actually that could be another running trend I've noticed - indie rock incorporated elements of techno and rap by adapting non-standard basslines. Which gives a lot of alt music from this time period a kind of headache-y miasma. Though that could just be me subconsciously associating this type of music with long car-rides. Altogether, this is fine, it doesn't stand out, and it's still somewhat unchallenging (like a lot of other Australian indie rock singles I've covered so far), but at least it's not offensively saccharine.

 

54: "Holy Grail" - Hunters & Collectors


 

"Holy Grail" would be easier to stomach listening to again if it hadn't been taken up in various capacities and played absolutely to death across multiple forms of media. Instead of simply appearing inoffensive, its ubiquity encourages you to ask what particular qualities of inoffensiveness it possesses that lend it so heavily to being widely adopted in various settings. Five seconds in and I recognised it immediately, even though I hadn't previously known it was by the Hunters & Collectors (who have had lots of representation on this year's countdown already), and spent the new few minutes trying to figure where I'd heard it. I gave up and looked at the Wikipedia article, which points out that it was taken up by the AFL (and presumably used extensively in their marketing). It's not hard to figure out why - despite the lyrics that seemed vaguely antiwar at first to me, it's not really about anything (Mark Seymour read a book about the invasion of Russia by Napoleon and was inspired to write a song about it), and while it's loud and shouty/whiney it's still unwaveringly upbeat. 

Holy Grail, to me, is one of the main archetypes of Australian corporate alt-rock - the fact I had barely even thought about it before now seems to reflect how effectively it sits at the subconscious where advertising's idea of 'normal' operates. All of the attitude of Gen X alternative rock without any of the anxieties, or the danger of depressing anyone who listens to it. Homeowner Gen X rock. It's so overplayed and fundamentally uninteresting that you barely even hear it played on the radio anymore - there's no so-bad-it's-good quality, or anything other aspect to it that stands out enough to give it cultural value enough to encourage people to mockingly appreciate it. Conversely, you'd have to be one of the most boring people alive to listen to it today and really get into it and take it seriously. The more I write about it the less I like this song. It's like a checklist of every shitty non-confrontational filtered-water early 90s Australian indie rock song I've written about so far: attitude without depth, looping bassline, crisp production, where did those last three minutes go, what is there to write about, etc. Compared to grunge that came out at around the same time, it sounds sonically flat - there's no loud-to-quiet structure, it's all the same volume: the image of loudness, rather than actual loudness. Though I don't mind the horns section.

53: "Taillights Fade" - Buffalo Tom


 

Another song I've heard heaps but never put a title or band to before now. The fact its so representative of a certain type of (particularly Australian, though these guys were from the US) rock that reached saturation point and is now permanently out of fashion overshadows the song itself. I don't hate it though, and it feels a bit less calculated than some of the tracks I've whinged about so far. It actually modulates its volume and does quiet-to-loud, which makes it a lot more involving to listen to. And there's something to be said for Bill Janovitz being unafraid of being labelled as depressing - "I feel so weak, on a losing streak" is part of the riff, and comes across as refreshingly direct. 

You can make comparisons to better rock music from the same period though, and I'm not sure how well it stands up. It's angry, but it's still very safe and radio-friendly. It's interesting to see how, only two years after Nevermind was released, alternative rock bands were using the new oxygen they were given on the radio to carve out a more non-confrontational version of the music that had broken into the mainstream. There are more cynical attempts at using the attitude of grunge to create corporate relationship rock, and I'm not even sure if I would call Taillights Fade corporate (it may not be a love song either), but I feel like it's closer to something like Holy Grail than it is to Today. And, in a way, you can draw a straight line from music like this to bands like Nickelback in the late 90s, which formalised the transfiguration of 90s alt rock into 2000s commercial radio product.

52: "Runaway Train" - Soul Asylum




 

In a way, since I've spent the last couple of entries complaining about bland, soft, non-confrontational dilutions of better alternative rock, I should keep it going and tear "Runaway Train" down as well. But I'm not going to do that because this is actually a good song. It doesn't feel calculated at all, Dave Pirner's vocal sound unique and affecting, and the song is legitimately about something, however vague lyrically. The music video is known for featuring the names of missing children, different names for each region it was shown within, and apparently contributed to several of them being found. I've seen it referred to occasionally on the Unresolved Mysteries subreddit, where lists are often posted of the missing children mentioned with updates about their cases, though I've never actually sat down and listened to it before now. I'd heard the song in other contexts before, and there's some melancholic nostalgia associated it with, but I hadn't put two and two together. In the comments to the Youtube video there are lots of people expressing their affection for this song as runaway children themselves in the past, which gives it some credibility.

Musically, Runaway Train is very pleasant to listen to, with lots of surprising creative touches. The acoustic guitar in the bridge is particularly beautiful. It's just melancholic enough to offset the sing-songiness of its chord progression, but at the same time it might be these qualities which have meant it hasn't been replayed as much over the years. I can see it grating if I had to listen to a couple of times in one day. And I can see people complaining that it's depressing as well. Altogether, I would consider it a positive example of what could be achieved by alternative rock bands that wanted to play softer, easier listening rock than grunge, without creating (intentionally or unintentionally) background music for TV advertising.

51: "Would?" - Alice in Chains


 

Finally, a 1993 single that sounds 90s-y. I saw Alice in Chains at the bottom of this part of the countdown and breathed a sigh of relief. And I was right to do so - "Would?" closes off this post with something that isn't cloyingly or earnestly upbeat. I've been growing warmer to Alice and Chains while writing this blog, perhaps through becoming aware of the context in which their music was released (i.e the amount of middling indie pop on the Australian charts at the time), but also through just actually paying attention to their music. Compared to other grunge bands they've always sounded a bit tinny to me - like they're playing through a PA. But in practice that seems to be their version of sonic 'noise' and feedback that allowed them to fit within grunge. And calling their sound 'tinny' isn't fair either, there's a solid, satisfying low end in this song, made all the more powerful by its speed and aggressive rhythm section. I saw an interview with the bassist of the Exploited where he talked about how most good punk bands he knew of had a strong rhythm section - decent bass and drums. I tend to agree, for anything punk or punk-adjacent (like grunge) a 'weak' overall sound isn't satisfying (which is also why I'm partial to a lot of the electronic dance music that entered the mainstream in the early 90s, both have a similar level of oomph produced by strong underlying rhythms - Wattie from the Exploited has said he also listens to happy hardcore). Would? demonstrates this precept clearly. There's a lot of sonic depth that's masochistically satisfying to discover through the surface-level murk. It shifts between a kind of menacing, resonant beat during the bridge to a faster, clearer chorus, and ends quickly and sharply. 

Jerry Cantrell's lyrics don't at first leap out at me as being direct and meaningful. 'Drifting body, its sole devotion, flying not yet, quite the notion' came across as poetically obtuse, not in an objectionable way. However, according to Wikipedia, Cantrell wrote it about the death of his friend, the vocalist of Mother Love Bone, and with this knowledge in hand the lyrics become much clearer. It's kind of a reflective euology, while also lashing out at people who judged and criticised its subject. Deep, serious, mournful, it doesn't feel anything like a calculated attempt to produce broadly relatable, life-affirmative pop music. Which pits it against virtually everything I hear on the radio at the moment.

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Triple J Hottest 100 Countdown Countdown: 1993, #60 - 51

Welcome to another entry in my JJJ Hottest 100 Countdown Countdown series, in which I attempt to put both my own personal nostalgia and our ...