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 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 Capitol Ballroom (later, Nation). When I got to college in C...

Welcome back to my “100 Favorite Albums of the 1990’s” list! I didn’t think it’d take me five years to get to Part 4, but here we are. As a reminder, this 100-album list is broken into ten parts comprised of ten albums apiece, ordered by release date. Some parts might represent one year's worth of music, others might represent several years. Two rules still apply - First, I must have acquired the album in the year of its original release, inclusive of a retroactive four months into the previous year (corresponding with a fall school semester). Second, each album must have made a real impact on me in the timeframe of its initial release. Part 4 covers the time between the fall of 1994 and the fall of 1995 - the entirety of my sophomore year and fall semester of my junior year of high school. At this point, I was beginning to step away from American alt-rock and grunge and moving onto electronic music, Britpop, and falling deep into hip-hop music . . . At first, it was the popular G-...