Welcome to Part 9 of my “100 Favorite Albums of the 1990’s” list! This part covers the fall of '97 through the summer of '98 - encompassing the entirety of my freshman year of college and most of the summer thereafter. By this point in time, electronic music and rave culture had totally captured my heart and imagination. I'd been a little too young or too isolated to experience grunge and hip-hop's golden age firsthand, so, for the first time, it seemed I was experiencing and participating in a musical revolution in real time. Electronic subgenres like techno, house, trance, IDM, big beat, and trip-hop were in my rotation, but jungle and drum & bass took precedence. Jungle and its immediate stylistic descendant drum & bass (though both subgenre terms often were and still are used interchangeably) had bubbled up from the UK underground and, with only syncopated breakbeats in a 160-174 bpm range forming its connective tissue, styles and moods within the ...
Welcome to Part 8 of my “100 Favorite Albums of the 1990’s” list! This part covers the spring of '97 through early fall of '97 - part of my final semester of high school through part of my first semester of college, and the summer in between. Really fun times, and probably the most musically diverse and intense six months of my life. During this time, I saw so many great bands, artists, and DJs perform live - among them, Sneaker Pimps, Radiohead, and Aphex Twin at the 9:30 Club; The Prodigy, Beck, and Jamiroquai headlining HFStival at RFK Stadium; Jamiroquai again at JMU's Patriot Center; Wu-Tang Clan and Rage Against the Machine at Merriweather Post Pavilion; Foo Fighters in the parking lot of Tower Records in Rockville, MD; Josh Wink, LTJ Bukem & MC Conrad, and Rabbit in the Moon at my first rave, Ultraworld Ritual, at the DC Armory; and countless DJs at Buzz, the weekly rave night at DC's Capital Ballroom (later, Nation). When I got to college in Central PA tha...