Sound Obsession

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 ...

Part 3 of my "100 Favorite Albums of the 1990s" list covers my freshman year of high school and the summer that followed.  This was a major transition period for me musically.  Fall of '93 was peak grunge before a steep drop-off the following year. I'd owned a cheap electric guitar for a while by then (a metallic blue Yamaha Pacifica with a black pick guard and Floyd Rose tremolo), but played it poorly.  The full extent of my prowess on the axe was banging out some Nirvana riffs and stumbling my way through the intro to Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze."  Truthfully, by early '94 I was losing interest in rock music and the dreary elitism it seemed to demand, not to mention the skill and patience it took to learn how to play the guitar.   Kurt Cobain's suicide and the inevitable disbanding of Nirvana in the spring of '94 felt like the end of an era.  The rise of Beck and the Beastie Boys shortly thereafter felt like the start of another.  A summer ...

The first few months of any given year often feel a little slow for new music to me, especially during a pandemic when album release cycles are out of whack, live venues are shuttered, and most normal social activity remains in stasis.  I haven't been to a live show in over a year.  Maybe that's why I've been feeling a little introspective and nostalgic lately, like Clark Griswold in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation locked in the attic passing time by digging through old heirlooms and home movies.  For me it's thousands of albums accumulated over three decades and reacquainting myself with old favorites.  I heard somewhere that most people don't explore new music too long past their teens.  Apparently their tastes calcify and the stuff they liked in high school or college is pretty much it, forever.  That hasn't been the case with me but it's probably true that the bulk of album...