Of the past 20+ years in my music fandom, 1992 is the toughest to quantify. Only 17 titles in my CD collection bear a 1992 copyright date. Oddly enough, 1992 could be considered the emblematic year of that decade’s music. The year before, Nirvana ushered in what major labels would call "alternative music", a descriptor I find ridiculous to this very day. 1992 would signal a gold rush for everyone — listeners seeking more of this "different" type of rock, labels signing up grunge clones in a mad dash to fill the coffers.
I had hopes that if ’80s college rock crossed over, it would sound like Camper Van Beethoven, All About Eve or In Tua Nua. Instead, it sounded like 4 Non Blondes and Stone Temple Pilots.
The list for 1992 consists of only five titles. I’ll also list a number of titles I used to own that year and why I let them go.
Macromedia Flash has enabled you to put a lot of bling on websites. Just about every musician’s website I visit employs Flash in some manner, and it makes sense. Flash is incredibly useful for music and video playback. Hell, I even use a Flash player on the website for my own music project.
But please — just because you can paste an <embed/> tag onto your site does not mean you should. Nor does it mean you should design an entire site in Flash.
Among web design professionals, accessbility and usability issues with Flash are well documented. Just a quick Google search on "flash abuse" returns a link to a very good blog post detailing many ways Flash can break. Don’t think, music industry, you are above any of the problems detailed in the article. If anything, you’re one of the biggest offenders.
How many times have I encountered web sites that don’t show all the content in the viewport? Or web sites that don’t allow me to navigate without waiting to load? Or web sites with useless splash pages? Too many to count.
My current pet peeve are Flash sites which open links in new windows. Web browsers these days disable pop-ups by default. I’m not about to go through the hassle of unblocking your site because you don’t trust me to leave your site. If you rely too heavily on Flash, I’m not inclined to stick around anyway.
Then there’s the matter of being an asshole, something easy to do given all the big egos in your industry.
No, I was not immune to the grunge craze, but thanks to prolific magazine reading back then, I picked up on it about six months before it took over the world. I bought Nirvana’s Nevermind because an article mentioned Butch Vig produced it. I was already digging Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish, also produced by Vig, so I thought that was reason enough to check it out. A friend of mine thought the album cover was weird. Months later, he’d be listening to the album himself.
I find it funny that Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion and Nirvana’s Nevermind were released in the same year. The two albums pretty much bookend different eras — ’80s hair metal and ’90s grunge.
1991 was also the year I discovered the joys of anime theme songs, the root of what would be come a major source of coverage on this site. And my classical interests started to blossom as well.
1990 was the year when my fandom of Nonesuch Records exploded, a fact demonstrated by the top three ranking albums on this list.
All three albums have a lot of overlap — John Zorn composed for Kronos Quartet. Bill Frisell and Wayne Horvitz were members of Naked City, but both also appeared on Robin Holcomb’s self-titled debut. Horvitz and Holcomb are, of course, married. That overlap got me curious about other releases on Nonesuch, which is how I ended up with a number of albums from Frisell, Horvitz, Kronos, John Adams, Steve Reich, Philip Glass and the Bulgarian Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir. Many of those albums are my favorites to this very day.
I crunched some numbers with my music collection database, and Nonesuch takes up the most space with 60 titles. Most of that are Kronos Quartet albums. Speedstar comes in second with 56. Cocco accounts for most of that number.
Major labels are pretty much indistinguishable from each other, but Nonesuch has maintained a very recognizable identity in all the years I’ve been listening to them. I don’t buy everything the label releases, but I’m more inclined to check them out.
From junior high throughout high school, I went through phases. I would listen to a particular style of music exhaustively — much to the dismay of my family — then move on to something else. 1985-1986 was my New Wave period. 1987-1988 was my jazz-pop and radio hit era. 1988 was the year I discovered Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim. 1989 found me getting into college rock and classical music.
When I started college, my listening habits "stabilized", and I didn’t listen to one type of thing at the expense of other stuff. That doesn’t mean I still didn’t have my phases, each of which will become apparent as I compile more lists.
1989, though, was the year that would establish the foundation of my listening habits today. It’s heavy on what would become alternative rock, with other genres providing some needed contrast.
OK, this idea of making favorite edition lists for years past is turning into a weekly series from now till the middle of May. I don’t think I really published any year-end lists on the old site, and I certainly abdicated the responsibility of compiling one for 2005. By the end of this endeavor, I’ll have covered 20 years of overview.
I’ve already set aside the entries, and I’ve compiled all the lists. I just need to write about them.
From 1985 to 1990, I developed this superstition along the lines of the Star Trek movies — the odd-numbered years were good, the even-numbered years not so much. (1990 broke that pattern, but we’ll get there in two weeks.) 1988 didn’t impress me very much — I think I was still discovering 1987 releases well into the following year. Like 1986, the resulting list just about represents many of the titles I still own from that year.
I may have to retool my perception — my current exploration of the catalog has unearthed a number of quality titles to which I had little access, and in one case, little interest.
I wasn’t impressed with 1986 as a year in music. It seemed all my favorite artists were floundering. Duran Duran went through a drastic membership change. Eurythmics were making great singles but not great albums. As iconic as Robert Palmer’s videos were at the time — and stillare — Riptide didn’t rock as hard as the Power Station. And follow-up albums from artists I liked at the time — should I really own up to listening to Lisa LIsa and Cult Jam? — fell flat.
The albums listed here pretty much represent all of the CDs from 1986 that I own. And I didn’t even include The Whole Story by Kate Bush.
I had fun listing all the reasons 1987 is my favoriteyearin music that I wanted to make Favorite Edition lists for other years. When I started compiling the lists, I ran across a number of problems.
First was the urge to revise history. I remember ranking a number of albums as year-end favorites, only to let them go as my tastes changed. (1997 and 1999 are very indicative of this.) As I’m exploring more catalog these days, I’m faced with the option of including titles I probably didn’t know about or wouldn’t have listened to at the time. I don’t think my high school self would imagine a day I would listen to — let alone like — the trio album by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris.
So I’m throwing context out of the window and concentrating on two criteria — when something was released and how strongly I feel about it now, keeping in mind how strongly I felt about it back then. It’s an interesting exercise because there are albums I didn’t like in the past that I’ve grown to love, which is a situation that seems to be rarer than it should.
I’m starting with 1985 since that’s the first year I actually acquired enough music to craft a list of ten. Given my junior high and high school allowance, it’s not the bounty that a disposable income can provide. Nonetheless, I present …
A friend of mine at an afternoon work break mentioned how she’s been swooning over Joshua Bell recently. She read the Washington Post article where Bell busked at subway station and looked up his photo when the article mentioned he’s one of the babes of classical music. She said he’s got the Captain Jack thing going for him, referring to the gorgeous John Barrowman, who, by the way, has a new album out. My friend and I rarely ever agree on hot men, which surprised the rest of our friends.
So when we all went back to our desks, I continued the conversation in e-mail, directing said friends to Nathan Gunn, a favorite of the opera blog The Standing Room. Someone asked whether he poses for romance novel covers. Of course, I also had to point them to other "barihunks."
I mentioned my fondness for Kronos Quartet’s cellist, Jeffrey Ziegler. Another friend kind of thought David Harrington wasn’t bad looking. It’s too bad I forgot to mention Nico Muhly, who was featured in the Out 100.
In all the dire reports of classical music’s impending death, a lot of excuses seem to be bandied about the genre’s perception — it’s effite and elitist, saddled with a museum mentality, et cetera, ad nauseum. One thing that doesn’t seem to be mentioned is how sexless classical music can seem. My friend under the spell of Bell summed it up: "When I think of classical music, I don’t think of hotness."