Defining the ’90s Music Canon
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
Taking the most popular songs at the time is not a recipe for finding the best songs/songs that will be remembered in the future. A good percentage of the songs listed were crap then and not worth remembering now.
The other 'big thing' to consider is that Gen Z are still quite young, and sometimes it takes time to pick up on a lot of music. We hear tracks in films, living in other conditions.
Also seems like Gen X has pretty good musical knowledge overall! But probably due to being the 'right age' for having been able to listen to a lot of stuff.
Finally, dismayed by the 90's top-charters. I couldn't fathom listening to most of that even back then.
I wonder if UK and canada might be more similar to europe, where disco (as a popular culture which belonged to all those ethnicities) never really died in the same way it did in the states, killed by spontaneous popular uprising?
Maybe HN'ers with young children should try and convince them that the world really was low-rez back then and only achieved current resolution this century?
From a 80's born Spaniard all I can say the Spice Girls/Back Street Boys were like a plague here. Diito with Brit pop bands.
All of that with techno-trance dominating everything until the Reaggeton cr- music imported from Latam.
It's the generation defined by having watched MTV from the first broadcast to when it stopped showing music videos.
Taking "music video" to be an edited video with footage distinct from a studio performance, and not part of a larger work (to avoid musicals), I find
1984: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJApqjVuGb4
1983: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXEPghBgTXA
Anyone have 1982 or earlier?
The only thing this mess could kill is my will to listen to anything until Western electronic and grunge stuff finally became widely available.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYChcUNYy7U
Even better because I collect clips involving libraries, and so it goes on a very short list including:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G6QDNC4jPs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N9C2JS9mWc
(singing hand? I'm getting some cool ionophone stuff, as well as a seductive western agent with wardrobe malfunction, but I doubt either of those were the reference... In other news, TIL the russian sign language for "officer" mimes epaulettes. I wonder how the plural is conveyed, maybe duplication?)
So I guess it doesn't conform to the criteria for your previous search. But the film supplies material if you have similar collections for other architecture.
However, you can easily count e.g. this clip from '60, though the production value is probably not what you expect: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FeK62wesICk
The ‘singing hand’ is a term for how the microphone-free hand often was the most animated part of a Soviet singer, being waved around while the rest stays in place.
BTW, the Russian spelling is “эстрада” (you won't need “музыка” since that's the primary meaning). Unless you had some other Cyrillic spelling in mind. The videos in your previous search have “эстрада80” as a hashtag.
P.S. The real impressive part in ‘Marian the Librarian’ is whatever the hell is going on with everyone's hair.
Москва в нотах still has its echoes to this day, even if the music[3] has to be imported from the west: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGfuorTdEZg
Is the hair much different from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6bRxLzFLv0 ? (it appears that costume musical comedy often tells us almost as much as the era in which it was filmed as the era which it depicts)
[1] especially the singing hand. I see from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dExwT_pEr9w
how soviets (even young athletic komsomolka!) were allowed to either sing xor dance, but never both at the same time.
[2] very slightly related: "Над Москвою дожди моросили" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKxd6HJW8sQ
[3] somewhere there is an excellent Lolita/Gazmanov interpretation of Felicita which I can no longer find.
Can't find a higher-res vid aside from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmYdwyiO0Zg
The trick riding is relevant to my interests; I always find it amusing when a (presumably minuscule) minority of US conservatives seem to spend a great deal of effort in proclaiming the superiority of caucasian culture, yet show no apparent interest in either learning to dance lezginka or ride dzhigitovka[2] (let's not even mention adopting one of the caucasian religions!).
The bouffant of товарищ Шаврина, singing on the metro, isn't exactly realistic, but it is period. Сompare the earlier fashion mag cover: https://picsb.meshok.net/pics/169585507.jpg?1
(she may have been a bit fashion-forward; https://mega.ru/megastyle/article/istoriya-laka-dlya-volos/ claims hairspray wasn't usually a soviet thing until the 1970's. The last picture[3] reminds me of Shurik and Zinaida's apartment in Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession. Did soviet apartments normally have that dorm-suite aesthetic, or was that characterising Shurik as a botanic?)
Also funny to see latin characters on sails, but I guess that's an international standard? The motorboat isn't obvious (as with greek license plates?) which character set it's been registered with.
Since someone mentioned earlier that we don't have enough dancing[4] on HN I'll recommend the space monument sequence as containing a variety of styles[5].
[1] I suspect that of the parts I'd find familiar if I ever visited Moscow, most of them would be within a few metro stops of Mosfilm's studios...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJhexbRK9tw
[3] https://mega.ru/megastyle/upload/iblock/3d6/1466269590_ivan_...
[4] TIL Marian the Librarian ended with a dance number. Since "boogaloo" has been Streisanded, I've also recently learned about an Astaire reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ93GNHBHsE
Oh, most excellent, The Memories of Casanova @ 4:46! (the folio is Romeo and Juliet) When did US movies switch set dressings from cultural placement to product placement?
In the overhead @ 6:00, note that Harold Hill wears co-respondent shoes. If Marian falls for a guy like that, she'd better be confident that her "aisle, altar, hymn" game is strong.
[5] Leningrad "Music Hall" ensemble. They don't include Apache, but Bender does a nice parody of that genre in Двенадцать стульев.
Not sure if you're serious here, but I had to rewatch the scene—and I wouldn't get too many ideas from it about a typical household. The apartment there is about as lifelike as a 50s interior decoration advert in the US. I'd say it does somewhat reflect Shurik's character as dedicated to the study, but a) somehow is completely devoid of artifacts of everyday life or work that the dude would leave all over, b) has no trace of the wife's influence other than the wall pictures. Not well thought-out. Shpak's apartment is way more elaborate, though of course that's largely done for the contrast.
I came to this same conclusion. Growing up, I heard a little '40s music from my grandparents and a lot of '50s, '60s and '70s from my parents. Hip-hop, new wave, alternative and grunge all came along during my lifetime.
I suppose the whole thing is US-centric, but at least those 2 I'd have missed as well.
That seems like a pretty bad criteria for a list like this, because it's heavily biased towards "flashes in the pan" and exudes "steady fires."
They should have probably used a "total" metric or at least augmented the list based on it. I think something like total airplay or total sales in the 5 years after release would have caught many of the songs people thing they should have included.
Hip-hop and alt-rock, for example, had massive trends that defined the 90's in their own way, but it's possible one wasn't really following both.
Then you had popular undercurrents in tandem - e.g. in the beginning of the 90's a bit of industrial, rave, and techno and at end electronica and nu-metal.
You did have the top-40 stuff that at least in Chicagoland would play the dance-oriented stuff and pop-R&B in the beginning of the decade.
Looking back it's hard to unify the 90's musically as one popular trend unless you're confining it to specific "super-genres" like rap/hip-hop, alt-rock, or top-40.
Not sure about the US but in the early to mid-1990s MTV Europe was playing groups like Nirvana or Soundgarden in heavy rotation, all day, it was glorious. I was telling my SO just yesterday how interesting those times were, when a 13-old kid like I was back then could have a video like "Black Hole Sun" playing in the background on television at 12 in the afternoon while doing homework, just before going to school (we were studying in the afternoon).
Random story that's apropos of nothing, but to this day, when I hear that song, it still transports me to that time and place. I never really drank grape soda. Not before and not since. Not sure why I had it that day. But damn if I don't taste it when Black Hole sun is playing.
Coincidentally, Bruce and Brandon Lee are buried in a cemetery next door to this park.
The Sound Garden is another sculpture in another Seattle park.
> Not sure about the US but in the early to mid-1990s MTV Europe was playing groups like Nirvana or Soundgarden in heavy rotation, all day, it was glorious.
I was a bit too young and didn't have cable back then to see for myself, but my understanding was MTV in the US played a lot of alternative rock in that time period, too. Those bands even set the fashion trends for a time (e.g. flannel, and lots of it).
Where I grew up, there were basically three radio stations teenagers listened too: one "pop" station that played the stuff in this list, and two contemporary rock stations that played the rock and alternative music that was omitted from this list.
I still see young kids walking around with the same Nirvana t-shirt with the yellow smiley face that I wore in middle school. So I imagine Smells Like Teens Spirit is recognized by teenagers today. I've heard a lot of people say that's the song that started the 90s.
Also, it would be interesting to normalize this by noting whether or not the song appeared on Glee. I'm fairly certain that's the reason for the Losing My Religion being so recognizable, I wonder how it compares to a song like It's the End of the World.
It's garbage in, garbage out. They should have sanity tested their song selections before they started collecting data.
And even if they wanted to stick with an "unbiased" criteria like peak chart position, with 2,925,295 data points, they could have probably broadened the criteria to account for some of the problems.
It would also be interesting to see how the location might affect the numbers, since popular local radio and TV stations might have aired different songs, some movies and series were popular in some countries and not in others, etc. Tom Scott did something similar with Jingle Bells [1].
Something else to note: I missed Hey There Delilah and La Bamba, songs that you can recognise easily if the most recognisable part of the song is played.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KXXR
They played it over the whole weekend. I was in high school and we all talked about it Monday morning. The replacement station then played it as it’s first track. Later, the station came back at a different frequency. Then the two stations swapped, and when they did, the replacement station played it on a loop on their final day.
https://images.kerrangcdn.com/KurtDiaryPage.jpg?auto=compres... for the rest of the list.
https://pudding.cool/2017/03/timeless/index.html
Nirvana are waaay out in front.
"The Final Teen Spirit Mashup (Nirvana vs Europe)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr06IyWMf4Y
The approach of taking what was most popular at the time and intersecting it with what is most recognizable now doesn't seem like the right way to define a canon. A canon in art is usually meant to identify those works that, with the benefit of hindsight, were the most important or influential on the development of the art form. This list is heavily weighted towards R&B & pop-rap that has had virtually no lasting impact on subsequent works and I suspect many of these songs are only listened to today either out of personal nostalgia or in humorous contexts.
I am wondering if looking at sales one year after the song came out, or radio transmission after a while, would be a stronger predictor of staying power than what peaked at a given time.
There's also plenty on the list that I recognise but I can guess why they've faded. Most obvious are followup singles that charted well despite being pretty bland (it was some previous song by the artist that was good). There's also a couple movie tie-ins that were only popular alongside the movie. Some, like Bryan Adams' "All for Love", manage to tick both those boxes (I don't think I'd heard that song in 25 years).
And Winds of Change by the Scorpions was gigantic in Europe in the early 1990s but it is literally a song about perestroika. It's about as entrenched in a specific era as a song can get.
Edit: wow, same website has an article discussing why "No Diggity" is the most timeless song. Shows what I know?
Some covers:
Hackney Colliery Band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKHtfjXrUzs
Aphrodite (drum 'n bass): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20SezMmyE6w
Chet Faker (downtempo): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIfFA8-RaHQ
Boeboe (trap): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qqw18evmVA
edit: This made me curious what comes up on a search for "radio 1 no diggity" - here's Backstreet Boys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg8vknZ9L0M
Ed Sheeran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uijKNxpRCQ
edit: it seems it only ever peaked at no.6 on the billboard top 100, even though it probably sold a lot more than some songs on this chart.
When we grew up (I'm 36 and at the tail end of this) we couldn't easily find the music we liked and exclusively listen to it (unless you had rich parents who bought you all MCs and later CDs you wanted), we kinda had to listen to the radio and experience the whole spectrum.
This is even more true of people in the 35-50 age bracket.
But people who grew up with Napster or even later with streaming on demand don't even have to dig a lot. If they like one artist, they can just listen to them and the (very closely related, surprise) recommendations. No more begging your friends to make you a tape copy of some songs on CDs.
Also afaik the amount of music published goes up every year. So if I actively remember, say 100 songs from the year 1994 that is a much more meaningful representation than 100 songs that came out in 2019.
Other sources for discovering good music included friends' record/CD collections, live shows, publications of varying quality, and (I hate to say it) MTV.
Some of these sources were controlled by the music industry, but there were ways for some really interesting and great music from unknowns to float to the surface.
Bigger stores often had listening stations where they would feature CDs with headphones so you could hear them before you buy. I got introduced to some amazing albums via that process.
though to be honest you could still be specialized, for instance I was quite a lot into EDM and you could listen almost every day (at least in Europe through 90s, especially in middle 90s) at least 1-2 hours just purely EDM shows, don't really remember other shows with focus on other genres
by end of 90s internet grew a lot, Winamp and MP3 were introduced plus songs through Napster, Direct Connect and I quickly turned away from radio and TV for most of my content and focused almost entirely on soundtracks while still listening to radio in work, still feel kinda nostalgic when thinking about our military dorm in beginning of 00s when we were listening every night in beds ballads like Hero from Iglesias to fall asleep
by the end of 00s I was either travelling or started to work in places without radio in background, so my knowledge of popular music after that dropped pretty much to 0, now you could play me anything from 2010< and unless it's megahits like Gangnam style I would have no clue whether it's popular unless I heard in shops or restaurants when passing by (and since I was out of western world for most of 10s part, good luck with western/US hits)
chart from article should clearly state it's American and I would like to see comparison between different continents, especially which western music would be recognizable in Asia, only then you know it's true global megahit
of course all of this is my personal observation and I'm sure it's also age thing with people having less time to listen the music and less focus on it as they age
Something has definitely changed in music (a few things) - at hockey games they are playing strictly rock up until 2000. Part of it is demographics, but there's just nothing to replace 'Welcome To The Jungle' by Guns and Roses that has enough widespread acclaim.
In other words: there's probably plenty of great stuff to replace/supplant 20th century hits, but unless you continually skulk random soundcloud pages you won't find it. All you get access to is undifferentiated pablum pop by default, which is amazingly less brave than it has ever been, musically.
The rest of music is very exploratory - production tricks, sounds, styles.
It seems that most basic melody and rhythm stuff is just to boring - but that is what sticks over the long haul.
So I think a lot of music today is too specific, and due to what big-pop is ... never sees the light of day anyhow.
We may in fact see a lot of 20-century music linger for a while.
That said, we don't listen to a lot of 1st half 20th century today ... though still tons from the 60's-80's. Top selling albums are consistently Queen, Metallica, Eagles.
Without these bands in radio 90s I remember would be silent half the time :)
Wind of Change
She Ain't Worth It
Romantic
Diamonds and Pearls
I'd guess songs which get covered, parodied, or sampled are more likely to last?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9CF1vXmtrQ
Side note but I'm surprised that Diamonds and Pearls rather than any other 90's Prince song charted in the Top 5, especially compared to other singles from that album.
Meanwhile, Wind of Change seems to only be known by Europeans, but may have been written by the CIA?! https://www.vulture.com/article/patrick-radden-keefe-wind-of...
Also, 38 years old. Born in 1982.
I was amused by: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2fNVztaC58 in which the conceit is a near future in which stars of the 90's moscow scene are living in the old folks' home[3].
[1] Is it wallowing in nostalgia if one hears many of the songs for the first time?
[2] Yes, this one includes Nirvana, as well as Mario.
[3] They're still popping pills at the bar, but presumably this time they have prescriptions.
On the other hand, I didn't know that "Wild Wild West" was by Will Smith! It was in constant rotation at the roller rink I used to go to so I've heard it a million times, but never knew where it came from.
It was from the Wild Wild West remake movie he starred in as well. I think they were trying to recreate the success of the Men in Black formula[0] but that song wound up being the only part of it that anyone remembered.
As European Xennial (more narrowed Millennial) I went through the chart in the end of article and I think this is first time I heard Baby Got Back (recognized by 84% millennials), No scrubs (89%), No Diggity (79%) and can guarantee recognitionr ate among my perrs would be way below 50% if I don't recognize it who was listening radio and going to cloubs all the time
also can't believe only 68% of Millennials would recognize Ice ice baby, that's completely insane, it was impossible to miss it as it was global hit in 90s, same with extremely popular rock ballad Always from JBJ with only 49% recognition among Millennials
also I don't see any mainstream eurohouse/trance hits like Robert Miles's Children, ATB's Till I come, Rhythm is a dancer, What Is Love from Haddaway, all even recognizable by my boomer father, let alone myself, none of them made it into chart while they must be recognized for sure at least by 50% of Millennials, which just again proves it's just chart for Americans who were not listening to house/trance in mainstream radio
Daft Punk never had any impact on the popular charts in the 90s. Top 4 in Belgium is the best they did according to Wikipedia.
Everyone’s just projecting their own personal tastes!
...in the US.
They did somewhat better in the UK: https://www.officialcharts.com/artist/25579/daft-punk/
I'm sure you listened to it, but doesn't seem to have made a dent at the time.
And the context of the article is the US.