Sound Obsession

Welcome to Part 10, the final part, of my “100 Favorite Albums of the 1990’s” list! This part covers the late summer of '98 through the end of '99 - encompassing the first semester of my sophomore year of college through the first semester of my junior year of college.  The entirety of my teens were spent in the 90's and the final couple years of that decade were, in a word - different. A new millennium was just around the corner, and it was a time of significant cultural transition. My musical obsessions over the course of ten years had evolved from alternative rock and grunge, to hip-hop, to electronic music and rave - styles that sprouted up from regional, independent, and underground scenes to infiltrate and shape the mainstream.  However, by late '98, it was starting to feel like music was coming from the top down - a torrent of boy bands, pop singers, Latin pop, pop-punk, nu-metal, etc. Rock was getting soft, and even hip-hop seemed to be losing its way. Corporate...

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 ...