I wasn’t really thinking much about music in 1998. I was trying to navigate the uncertainty of living completely on my own for the first time, and the entire last half of the ’90s felt pretty rootless. A lot of crappy stuff happened that year, the worst of which was a burglary.
I thought 1997 was tough, but 1998 mopped the floor with 1997.
I wouldn’t really discover a lot of the titles on this list till the year after, when life started to suck a bit less. There’s a significant Austin slant since I was trying to figure out how much I liked what passed for cool among the city’s cognoscenti. I would later learn the popularity of Bob Schneider and Los Lonely Boys demonstrates Austinites can have terrible taste in music as well.
It’s weird enough for the first quarter of the year to yield some really strong contenders for the year-end favorite list. It’s weirder still when many of those releases came out in January, a traditionally slow month where releases are concerned.
Something tells me some of these releases were squeezed out of the fall schedule. I think the fall schedule would have been much more interesting if some of these titles had been pushed up.
I don’t have very high hopes for the second quarter, but I very much enjoyed this first quarter of 2008.
The first version of this list, made at the end of 1997, looks vastly different from its current incarnation. Four titles from that list remain — everything else is a revisionist addition.
1997 was a transitional year for me. I wrapped up the final semester of working at the school newspaper, and immediately following, I moved to Austin for work. The lists from this year onward contain far more titles than ranking slots, on account of a disposable income. A regular paycheck does wonders to fix a collecting jones.
As a result, I would acquire a number of 1997 titles in subsequent years, but I’m ranking them anyway, regardless of when I first discovered them.
As a year in music, 1996 was ambiguous. Alternative rock was starting to run its course with grunge evolving into nü metal. Labels were scrambling to find the next cash cow to replace alt-rock’s diminishing returns, and many started to look to underground dance music.
I can’t say I paid much attention. 1996 was my senior year in college, and I was up past my eyeballs with college newspaper stuff. Most of the titles in my collection from that year were follow-up albums by artists to whom I had already been listening. I didn’t really have time to discover anything new.
This year marks the tenth Japan Nite I’ve attended. My first was 1999, and that evening introduced me to MISSILE GIRL SCOOT, eX-Girl, NUMBER GIRL and Nicotine.
I saw something in my RSS reader stating Utada Hikaru’s First Love album will turn 10 soon. It had me wondering what other albums by Japanese artists are reaching their their 10th anniversary.
The fact I can’t make a full list of ten indicates how far off my judgment was in 1995. I bought a lot of music that year, no doubt, but I also let a lot of it go.
John Zorn launched Tzadik Records that year, and he promptly reissued a number of albums released only in Japan. Burgeoning student composer that I was, I snapped up a whole bunch of those initial Tzadik releases hoping to glean something instructional. It didn’t quite work out that way.
Emmylou Harris also released Wrecking Ball late that year, and it pretty much squeezed out everything else. Combing through my collection, I noticed a number of greatest hits collections from that year. I kind of remember going through a nostalgic period right around that time.
I thought about shoehorning one more title, but that just felt dishonest. Why rank something for which I don’t feel any real passion? So a list of nine, it is.
Over the weekend, I made a purchase from Amazon MP3 Downloads that I would have found unimaginable in the 1985 — Meeting in the Ladies Room by Klymaxx.
Back then, I was a seeeeeeeriously arty kid, and from my youthful perspective, the amateurish, frivolous lyrics of the album’s title track barely rose to any semblance of artistry. I had to be taught that was the point — "Meeting in the Ladies Room", the song, was not aspiring for anything lofty, and for something fun and silly, it’s really quite excellent.
I still remember the emblematic image from the video of Fenderella’s lopsided hair, which turned her into a cyclops. Her spoken word contributions had all of the attitude and little of the rhythm of hip-hop, but it still felt musical.
I’d hate to come down to the level of becoming a BW, a Basic Woman, but if they don’t stop it’s going to get scandalous. (Uh-ooooh!)
It’s all in the delivery.
Sometimes I’ll take a peek at music blogs not in my RSS readers, and I never get the sense that music writers really own (what could conceivably perceived as) their poor choices in listening. I’ve worked with people who bristle at the idea of listening to something as innocuous — or in their eyes, milquetoast — as Enya.
Before 1993, Tower Records and Honolulu-based Jelly’s were my primary sources for music, but my demands as a customer were … specialized. A lot of music about which I was curious just wasn’t carried at the local stores.
Then I was told about online music shops available through telnet. Yes, before there was ever an Amazon.com or even a World Wide Web, there were merchants leveraging the power of the Internet. For a time, I did a lot of selling and buying on rec.music.marketplace.cd, while CDConnection, Music Boulevard and CDNow were accessible through telnet before each launched a web presence.
Because I lived in Hawaiʻi, shipping costs tended to offset any discounts these sites offered, but the ability to bypass the limited stock of local shops felt empowering. It seems passé now, especially in a post-Napster/iPod era, but even the hint of greater access to a world of music was thrilling. A few of the items on this list wouldn’t have been acquired any other way.
Deutsche Grammophon launched its music download service in 2007, and I bought two titles to see how the user experience compared to other such services. I ended up really liking both albums — Osvaldo Golijov’s Oceana and Emerson String Quartet’s American Originals — so I bought them on CD.
Then I realized I fell for the classic trick of the music industry — make consumers buy titles multiple times between different formats.
It reminded me of the late ’80s, when I moved from vinyl to cassette tape, then finally to CD. At first I thought I would dub my vinyl albums to blank cassette, so that I may listen to them on my Walkman. (Remember those?) But I ended up buying pre-recorded cassettes because the sound quality was better than what my aging boombox could capture. Then I got a CD player, and the dubbing option became moot.
With each format change, the question remains the same — what makes the leap to the new format and what doesn’t? It applies as much to new purchases as to catalog.
In 1993, the classic rock station in Honolulu changed to an alternative rock format. A station that in the past could barely accommodate Duran Duran now had promos touting them on their playlist. Literally overnight, history was swept aside. Now it seemed as if Honolulu was always so cool to have a radio station that played Björk and R.E.M. Right — and I didn’t spend my senior year of high school cursing KTUH for not being able to broadcast more than three miles from campus.
The classic youthful response was to grumble, and grumble, I did. My siblings and friends looked at me weird when I played albums by bands with strange names. Those bands became standard fare, so I had to look elsewhere to elicit the same reaction.
So it was serendipitous timing that the Internet came into my life that year as well. Back then, only science majors were granted Internet access. Exceptions were made for certain courses not part of the science departments, and my way in was through a political science class.
Usenet allowed me to delve deeper into the downtown New York scene, and while the next couple of lists only show trace evidence of such, I went through a mean Celtic period from 1993-1996.