This weekend my family was busy with a variety of stuff in our kitchen, which is a very large room including a separate island and our eating area and is generally abuzz with activities related to food, homework, computer use or who knows what else! We have a decent set of computer speakers on one counter that we generally hook our into our iPods. So I had my iPod Touch hooked up, and wanted to find something for all of us to listen to … so I pulled up the MOG streaming music app, searched Pearl Jam and then checked out the playlists (user submitted playlists containing the artist show up easily accessible on MOG … more on that another day!), and came upon one called ‘The 90’s’ which looked pretty good.
As we listened and went about our business, we were all singing along (or humming tunes, in the case of those who don’t care about lyrics much), and my older son made the remark “there is a lot of really great music that was popular and really rocked in the 90’s …”. That really struck me, so I saved the playlist for later use.
But it made me pause and think about how, for a brief period in the 1990’s we had another ‘golden era’ where creativity was rewarded and groups made music that they loved and were free to do so. You had attractive female singers like Alanis Morissette or Dolores O’Riordan who were not T&A like Katy Perry, but proud and strong women who were not ‘woman’ rock singers – they were ‘ROCK singers’! You had statements being made about relevant events in the world, people were not afraid to openly state their disgust or disdain for things, and the music was powerful.
Of course, I could make some cynical observation about how music sales during these periods – the 90’s and the 70’s era dominated by Elton John, Stevie Wonder, and other creative geniuses – far outpaced those during the subsequent times when record companies throttled creativity for greed.
This includes the post-disco early 80’s when sales nose-dived despite top-selling records like Thriller, Purple Rain, Like a Virgin, and so on. I COULD make a comment about the implications of that … but I won’t.
Here are just ten of the great songs from that playlist:
The Offspring – Self Esteem
Soundgarden – Black Hole Sun
Pearl Jam – Jeremy
Alanis Morisette – You Oughta Know
Hole – Doll Parts
The Cranberries – Zombie
What were your favorite rock songs of the 90’s? Chime in with a comment!