The early 1990s were an amazing time to be alive. The Cold War was over, the internet was changing the world, and the economy was booming. And the music! Grunge was pumping new life into the American and British rock scenes, resulting in an alt-rock renaissance. I’ve already written about many of the great bands of this era, but there were a lot of great smaller ones, too.
One of my favorites was Belly, which was the creation of a young genius named Tanya Donelly. In 1991, Donelly was already an established rock artist, having co-founded the band Throwing Muses with her sister when they were both still in high school. (She had also formed another great band called The Breeders.) Donelly’s influence was all over the college-rock radio stations in that era, and Belly’s first album, Star, was one of my first purchases after grad-school when I finally got a real job (and, shortly thereafter, a real stereo).
The biggest hit on Star was this little gem, “Feed the Tree.” I like it because it’s slightly atonal, off-kilter, and yet very beautiful. More importantly, it overflows with the two emotions that are essential to any good rock song: desire and anger.
It’s too bad we don’t have a good, portmanteau word for this combination, kind of the opposite of lovingkindness, because I think it is the essence of rock-and-roll. But I digress…
Ever since Kurt Cobain’s tragic suicide in 1994, Courtney Love has gotten a lot of hate from the bros. I don’t know why. I always liked her and her music. If Kurt Cobain was my generation’s Jim Morrison, then she was our Patti Smith.
I say “was” because Love hasn’t released much music recently. I hope that changes. I’m particularly fond of this song, “Malibu”.
The 1990s had so many great, iconic bands–Nirvana, SoundGarden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and on and on–that it’s easy to forget that there were lot of other, damn good bands around that were scrambling for attention. Third Eye Blind was such a band. They broke through a few years after the grunge wave had subsided, and their pop-inflected, rap-inflected brand of rock almost seems like a response to grunge. A reaction. A means of cleansing the sonic palatte.
I didn’t really listen to much Third Eye Blind at the time (the late 1990s and early 2000s), but thanks to the magic of Pandora and its sublime algorithms, I’ve been getting them in my play list quite a bit. And that’s a good thing. I was shocked to realize how much I liked them, then and now.
Unfortunately, they only had two big records–Third Eye Blind and Blue–before fissures between lead vocalist Stephan Jenkins and lead guitarist Kevin Cadogan caused them to partially split up. Even so, the band has a great legacy. This is my favorite of their songs.
I have written about the band Collective Soul before. They were one of my favorite bands of the 1990s, and not just because they hailed from my part of the country (Atlanta isn’t too far from Gainesville, after all).
I remember when their first big singles hit the radio back in the day, and how their sound struck me as both rooted in a deep tradition of Southern Rock but also entirely new and current (grungy, even). Band mastermind Ed Roland’s great voice and edgy lyrics were complimented by Jesse Triplet’s brilliant guitar work. On FM radio (yeah, there was still radio then), they stuck out a mile from all the other hard-rock knockoffs of the age.
This is one of their best songs.
Rock on…!
BONUS: Here is a great inteview of Ed Roland by Rick Beato…
I just watched a great inteview by Rick Beato of Ed Roland, the lead singer and mastermind of Collective Soul. I enjoyed the interview so much that I decided to re-post an essay I wrote on my old blog some years ago for my on-going “Battle of the Bands” series. Enjoy…!
The 1990s were a strange time. It was the decade between the two George Bushes—after the Gulf War but before 9/11—but it was also the first decade of the Internet and cell phones. The first truly digital special effects began to appear in films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. The Soviet Union had fallen, only to be replaced by a globalized Russian mafia. Genocide was being committed in both Africa and Europe, all televised via the 24/7 global news cycle.
In short, this was the time when technology and social chaos really started to put the zap on our collective brain. And no bands were better at capturing this zeitgeist of psychological disintegration better than these two—Collective Soul and Garbage–although each did so in its own way.
Strangely, my concept of the “The 90s” didn’t really form until almost mid-decade. This was about the time that the amazingly vital Grunge movement began to fade from the scene. In its wake came a more diverse and accessible series of alternative rock bands. At the forefront was a five-man ensemble called Collective Soul, which had its first big hit in 1994 with “Shine.” While not their best song, “Shine” is an ambitious and even inspirational bit of rock that displays the band’s two great strengths: hard-edged, soaring vocals from frontman Ed Roland, and a vicious main riff from lead guitarist Ross Childress.
But the really cool thing about “Shine” was that despite having a very modern alterna-dude vibe it felt extremely retro. As Jon Pareles wrote in the New York Times, “Collective Soul breaks old ground. Its songs are comfortable where Southern-rock overlaps folk-rock, with solidly serviceable riffs in the usual places.”
Collective Soul was not trying to be Nirvana. It was trying to be Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Just one year after Shine, a band from Madison, Wisconsin named Garbage released their first album, Garbage (a.k.a. Garbage I). When I first heard the band, I was struck by lead singer Shirley Manson and her fabulously expressive voice—at times monotonal, at other times growling. This pale goth girl from Scotland had somehow tailored her vocals to exactly fit the manic-depressive zeitgeist of the 90s.
Indeed, I would argue that the band’s premier song, “Stupid Girl,” is the definitive song of the period (yes, even more so than Nirvana’s brilliant “Smells Like Teen Spirit”). In the song’s now-famous lyric, the narrator accuses an unnamed girl of being…well…stupid. In fact, the aspects of her stupidity are those evidenced by practically every person under 40 in modern urban America: vanity, self-absorption, consumerism, nihilism.
And fakery. Especially fakery. “[I] can’t believe you fake it…” as Manson sings portentously to the stupid girl in question. What is she faking? Being human.
Garbage I firmly established Garbage as the pre-eminent art-rock act of the decade, much as Collective Soul had ensconced itself as the pre-eminent hard-rock act. Collective Soul quickly cemented its position with their follow-up album (also eponymously titled), which included some of its greatest hits: “December,” “Where The River Flows,” and “Gel.” “December” went on to become the band’s second biggest hit (after “Shine”) and it remains my favorite, with Roland’s soulful lyrics counterpointed perfectly by Childress’s diamond-edged guitar work. I tell you, the Allman Brothers couldn’t have done better.
The song was so successful, in fact, that it engendered an almost immediate backlash which continues to this day. As far as I can tell, detractors of the song (and of Collective Soul in general) are upset by the fact that it not very Grungy. But wasn’t that the point? Grunge was a great period in American music, obviously. But in the end, it was just Punk’s Second Act. Like Punk, Grunge ran out of gas rather quickly. This is not surprising. Rage can only sustain an artist for so long; at some point, you have to write a song that works on multiple levels, and I think Collective Soul achieved that.
As for Garbage, the band was able to build on its initial success with the album Version 2.0 (which was produced under the delicious working title of Sad Alcoholic Clowns). The album has some good songs—I especially like the trippy and propulsive “Temptation Waits”—but none quite achieved the sublime level of “Stupid Girl.”
Ultimately, both bands were able to sustain themselves through the rest of the decade and beyond. Collective Soul suffered a near-fatal rift when Childress left the band in 2001. Even so, it has fared better than Garbage since the Millennium, producing some really fine albums especially 2004’s Youth. From that album come two of my favorite songs, “Better Now” and “There’s a Way”, which pick me right up whenever I am feeling lazy or down.
And yet, whenever I think of the 1990s, I remember “Stupid Girl,” with its techno-crazed background noises and jangly guitar riffs, all overlaid by Manson’s dirge-like vocals. To this day, “Stupid Girl” warns us like a klaxon just outside the entrance to hell: Don’t fake it…
Okay, it’s a been a few days since the solar eclipse, but I’m still gonna go for the low-hanging fruit; this week’s Friday Night Rock-Out is Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.”
When this song came out in 1994, it was the first time I really became aware of Soundgarden as a band (and, more directly, Chris Cornell’s awesomely powerful voice). It didn’t hurt that the song came with a trippy, nightmarish music video that, like the song itself, seemed to capture the country’s mid-90s dread that everything was quite literally flying apart. (Not like now at all.)
This Thursday will mark the six-year anniversary of Chris Cornell’s death, and I am still pretty messed up about it.
Apparently, his friend Alice Cooper referred to him as “The Voice,” a moniker that, as some students of pop culture might recall, was also given to Frank Sinatra, back in his day. It makes sense. Cornell was my generation’s Sinatra.
Actually, with his four-octave range, Cornell was my generation’s Freddie Mercury. Whoever you compare him to, he was a genius, not just for his voice but for his ability to make you feel something, to strike deeply at some hidden spot in the soul. Like the other two titans of the grunge era, Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder, Cornell’s singing made you feel unhinged, as if he was doing the hard work of going mad so that you didn’t have to. Only more so.
Anyway, here’s one of my favorites from Soundgarden…
Ash Clifton, Writer 