90's Alternative Rock

In the 90’s, alternative music became the norm, the popular. Teen angst was at its peak in the music industry. I’m not a sociologist or an anthropologist, so I have no idea why, but all of a sudden, popular rock was edgy. It was slower or harder or louder and therefore much much better (raise your hand if you need to grow up like me, because that sentence sounded way too much like sexual innuendo).

CANNONBALL- THE BREEDERS

This is probably the most powerful bass line since “My Generation” by The Who. I love a band with a strong bass. It plucks the heartstrings and whatnot. Not to mention the intro is siiick. It’s like religious meditation, and then something clicks in your mind with the clicks of the drumsticks (I don’t know exactly what clicks, that’s personal I guess). All the elements come together in exciting and surprising ways and yet the song sounds exactly the way it’s supposed to sound, the only way it could.

CRIMINAL- FIONA APPLE

Fiona Apple was like 18 when this song came out and she sounds like a smooth and sophisticated 25-year-old jazz singer. She has so much soul and her low voice is absolutely effortless. The music is like being on acid at carnival (I presume) as the piano and some kind of wind instrument combine to create a shady scene in the mind.

IRIS- GOO GOO DOLLS

The short string section really makes this woe-is-me tune socially acceptable and almost classy. Why not use the techniques that make people cry at a symphony orchestra to make people cry in an alt rock song? This kind of synthesis is why rock and roll is ever-evolving.

SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT- NIRVANA

The biggest song to burst out of the Seattle scene, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” is a celebration of destruction. Like punk rock before it, grunge rock and it’s leaders exploded on to the scene and then burned out. This kind of blind passion is great for the audience that gets to feed off of it, but not so great for the musicians who end up dead. The soft-to-loud technique of the guitar and the drums is most likely stolen from the pre-grunge band, Pixies, but is extremely effective nonetheless. Nirvana often repeats words, and I hate repetition, but I certainly don’t hate Nirvana. When Nirvana repeats words it’s as strong as the emphasis and reinforcement that blues singers produce when they duplicate the first line of a song in the second. Repetition becomes powerful instead of annoying when it’s repeated with a purpose, with strained emotion, rather than a loss of words and the need to fill a melody.  

SEMI-CHARMED LIFE- THIRD EYE BLIND

Much popier than rockier, “Semi-Charmed Life” belongs on this list for it’s irritated undertones. Between the easy rhythms and “do-do-do-do”s there’s a quiet but determined double strike of the electric guitar. Lyrically, nothing is subtle- unless you’re 8 years old. I thought that this was the most pleasant pop song on the planet until about 2007 when it was pointed out to me that what they’re saying in those quick rhyming lines is stuff like “Smiling in the pictures you would take, doing crystal meth will lift you up until you break.”

BASKET CASE- GREEN DAY

With the lack of intro, loud voice, quick, quiet guitar building up to soft cymbals, and then heavy drums and bass at once, the song is a bit reminiscent of The Ramones and similar punk rock sounds. 

EVENFLOW- PEARL JAM

I fucking hate Pearl Jam, and so did Kurt Cobain!! Pearl Jam wants to be Nirvana, but their hair is too long and their sound is either too metal-head-banger or wayyy too Nickelback to be appealing. This song I like. It employs the speed-talk lyric style that many 90’s songs embrace, like Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” or Savage Garden’s “I Want You.” It’s funky. And it’s just like a racing mind. And it doesn’t sound like Nickleback.

LOSER- BECK

Not to be confused with Radiohead’s “Creep, ” “Loser” isn’t an unhappy song. It’s a “that’s the way it is” song. Beck breaks down borders, throwing some spontaneous Spanish and German lyrics into the mix. “Loser” sends an international message. That guitar riff sounds like a saloon in the wild wild west and it’s like SHOWDOWN: Beck versus the world; This town aint big enough for the both of us; I’m a loser and I kind of sound like Kermit the frog, but that’s okay, either shoot me or go away. Crap. I'm watching "100 Greatest Songs of the 90's" for the billionth time and it turns out that Beck is a devout scientologist. I just lost all respect.   

GIVE IT AWAY- RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are so funky. Fun fact: my dad used to jam with Chad, the drummer, and he held me as a baby in L.A. Their first album was much lesser-known than those that followed, and I think it’s because it was basically straight hip hop. But really white, and lame. Later on, like in the song “Give It Away” they took the hip-hop / early rap and fused it with funk, rock, and reggae. The bass and drums are heavier and the pauses and shouts make for a more raging sound.

NARCOLEPSY- THIRD EYE BLIND

Darker and more obvious in it’s message than “Semi-Charmed Life,” “Narcolepsy” sounds like narcolepsy and being really pissed off. The electric guitar starts sleepily and gets angrier and more pensive as the song progresses. The sound builds up to a boiling point, and then ends where and how it began, hopeless.

COLORBLIND- COUNTING CROWS

This is probably the saddest and most beautiful song I’ve ever heard in my life. The repetition of the line “I am ready” and the literally shaking voice on the word “shook” makes me chilly.

LOSING MY RELIGION- R.E.M.

This is a superpopular song and it features a mandolin- how cool is that? It just goes to show how 90’s alternative made it’s way into the mainstream in an unparalleled way.

UNDONE (THE SWEATER SONG)- WEEZER

This was emo before emo was emo. Weezer were a bunch of nerds with instruments. Nowadays emo music is about greasy choppy ratty hair and many tears. "Undone (The Sweater Song)" uses keynote sounds like amp feedback and pre-show chatter to transport you to another space in the mind, to really paint the picture of a rock concert. The nee-nee-nee tune implies a scoundrel of some kind, stealthily sneaking up behind you to pull at your strings. 

DUMB- NIRVANA

Different from Nirvana’s radio hits, “Dumb” has a defeatist attitude in the chords and the voice that portrays more of a passive self-loathing than an active self-destruction. People argue that such “depressing” music causes kids to act like rock stars, doing heroin and committing suicide, but I’d rebut with the theory that the music is the effect, not the cause. Kids are plenty fucked up without Kurt Cobain’s help, he just gives them a public figure to identify with, helping, spreading the message of “you’re not alone.”

WHERE DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT?- NIRVANA

This is a cover of an old grassroots song by Lead Belly. It could (and probably has) been said that grunge rock brought back for the first time the anguish and soul that folk and blues used to convey. In this rendition, Kurt substitutes the original line “black girl” for “my girl,” probably to eliminate any suspicions of racism. Other than that small adaptation, the resemblance between his cover and the original song is uncanny. Both singers belt out such a rough groan it makes me cough up phlegm. Somehow the sound doesn’t seem uncomfortable, it sounds like truth. The acoustic guitar and barely-audible drums are so eerie. Here, the band again employs the soft-to-loud dynamic that frequents their original songs. At the end, Kurt literally screeches out the last syllables like he’ll die if he can’t get them out. That’s really the difference between pop and rock. Rock music, grunge rock in particular, has a raw quality that pop music never will (nor want to) achieve.