This is in honor of Ed, a manager at one of my clients. We had a long talk last week about how the ’90s changed music for the better.
You can look up plenty of articles singing the praises of 1991: Metal had its swan songs in Guns N’ Roses’s Use Your Illusion and Metallica’s Black album. Alternative went from college radio to MTV with R.E.M.’s Out of Time and Red Hot Chili Peppers’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Some of my favorite bands released some of my favorites: Blur’s debut Leisure, U2’s about-face Achtung Baby, Elvis Costello’s Mighty Like a Rose (featured on this blog) and Crash Test Dummies’s debut The Ghosts That Haunt Me. Getting further away from rock, A Tribe Called Quest and Massive Attack released key albums. And we have to mention grunge’s main-stage debut: Nevermind, the Smashing Pumpkins’ debut, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Temple of the Dog, Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger. All of this (and much more) in one year!
This week’s song really speaks to how weird things got after 1991. Cake’s breakthrough album featured the following. Remember, this was considered the “Alternative” genre:
- A Willie Nelson tune
- The goofy hit anthem “The Distance”
- Gloria Gaynor’s disco hit “I Will Survive,” covered in a very non-disco way
- “Stickshifts and Safetybelts,” an overtly American, romantic, country song
- This Cuban jazz standard, perhaps most famous at the time due to Doris Day’s sultry version featured in the film “Strictly Ballroom”