Hegemony Bites: Annivyrsary 1994
Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994. He killed himself—and he did kill himself. Crazy the acrobatics our minds will go through to rule out the reality of suicide. Impossible! That life could be too hard to live? We’re more likely to see misogynistic conspiracy lurk around every corner.
Courtney Love endured public accusations of murder—the same year O.J. raced home in that white Bronco—and still her band Hole put out a masterpiece, Live Through This, which came out mere days after the discovery of Cobain’s body. It even topped the year’s Pazz and Jop list, a poll of all music critics by the Village Voice. Cobain, with Nirvana, also made the list, having recently recorded the monumental MTV Unplugged in New York, which softened even the staunchest critics to Kurt’s talent by peeling back the noise and letting his incredible lyricism speak for itself. He was enduring heroin withdrawal throughout the recording, but you couldn’t tell outside his usual melancholy—which one could hardly blame even the soberest soul for weathering throughout the wayward 1990s.
The fact is, alternative rock was no longer alternative at all, and the critics had been wringing their hands for months. The indie was the hegemony now; even freaks like Nine Inch Nails were making money for the bigwigs. X-ers had to dig to the bottom of the CD bin to find anyone that wasn’t playing the game these days. Slackerdom—that unfortunately loaded synonym for the erstwhile middle class, which was once supported by relatively humane public-service jobs and a college debt load that allowed for at least a little leisure—was forced to turn to the lo-fi likes of Bee Thousand and the borderline contemptuous (but masterful) Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.
But don’t get me wrong: these were the golden years, filled with gold soundz. For it was in 1994 that indie truly rose to the mainstream. This was the year Pulp Fiction became the highest-grossing independent film to date. Look no further than MTV, where cinema’s future auteurs were making some of the greatest music videos of all time for the weirdos and goofballs: NIN’s “Closer” (Mark Romanek), Massive Attack’s “Karmacoma” (Jonathan Glazer), and, most consequentially, Spike Jonze’s “Sabotage” for the Beastie Boys—there would no Adult Swim without it. It’s no coincidence that the generation that gave us Jonze and Malkmus also produced the likes of Heidecker and Wareheim.
While guitar rock was having its cake and shredding it too, the East Coast was also running the shit out of hip hop this year. Ready to Die and Illmatic both rocketed out of New York in ’94, while TLC, Usher, and Outkast planted early flags pointing to the South’s future dominance. Minus Warren’s G and Nate Dogg’s “Regulate,” the main thing California had to contribute to music in 1994 was the rise of the most derided—and best-selling—guitar-rock records of the decade: Green Day’s Dookie (20 million copies), The Offspring’s Smash (6 million), and Weezer’s blue Weezer (3 million, plus the “Buddy Holly” video coming preloaded with Windows 95—also Spike Jonze).
In Britain, suffering as they were under the oppressive legacy of Thatcherite policies, they tended to shroud their anger in electronic mystery, from Aphex Twin’s churning Selected Ambient Works II, filled with its slow and seeping menace, to Autechre’s insanely prescient Amber, to The Prodigy and Massive Attack’s rave rebellions, to a smoky masterpiece from Portishead. In fact, nothing’s ever sounded quite like Dummy, even to this day. Every year it reveals itself as further out of time—less a seminal work of trip hop than an extra-dimensional artifact entirely.
But speaking of truly unprecedented—nothing has ever sounded quite like the interstellar poetry of Iowa’s own Arthur Russell, who died of AIDS in New York in 1992 after a career of unfettered artistry and composition that might just prove to be imagination incarnate. As his loved ones soon discovered, Russell left behind heaps of music he’d recorded in his lifetime, almost entirely free from genre and convention—his electrified cello sounds nothing short of extraterrestrial, and his compositions always gesture further into the unknown, suggesting a mind that was both curious and courageous in its creativity.
It’s rare that I so sorely miss a soul I’ve never met, if only for all I’ll never get to hear from him. I feel the same way about Kurt.
I remember—I remember the first song I listened to for weeks. It was in 2004. I had loved a tune before, sure—your Cher’s “Believe,” your Smash Mouth’s “All Star”—but had never experienced that blissful hunger for one. That came with “All These Things I’ve Done”…
Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994. He killed himself—and he did kill himself. Crazy the acrobatics our minds will go through to rule out the reality of suicide. Impossible! That life could be too hard to live? We’re more likely to see misogynistic conspiracy lurk around every corner.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.
When I started gathering my research for this Annivyrsary back in January, one thing became clear—1974 was not a good year for music. This was very much a puberty period, an awkward personality vacuum that comes between shedding the old and fully realizing the new. This was to be my Waterloo.
Something preposterous happened in 1964: On the week of April 4, one artist had the top five songs on the Billboard Hot 100. It’d never happened before and it hasn’t been matched since. Mere weeks before, in the warming days of March, America found that no fewer than 60% of all records sold were songs by the Beatles.
Safe to say three of the most consequential albums of my life came out in 2013, and that list doesn’t even touch the dozen other nearly perfect albums from this year—Trouble Will Find Me, Modern Vampires of the City, Cupid Deluxe, Yeezus… 2013 changed music as we know it, and a lot of the biggest artists today cemented their status or debuted this year, from The 1975 to Beyoncé.
I do remember that this is the year I got a Nintendo Power subscription though. And I do remember one day, flipping through said Nintendo Power in the back seat of the family van, my parents slid a revolution into the CD player. That was the day I first heard Now!That’s What I Call Music! 14.
So for me, ‘93 was the first year of the 90s, and its evidence lies in several places: in the birth of the Riot Grrrl movement and third wave feminism with Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl”; in Nirvana’s dyspeptic final album before Cobain’s untimely death; and in Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the harbinger for the soon-to-be golden age of hip hop.
Some stories of note in 1983: the invention of Detroit techno, as embodied by the single “Clear” by Cybotron; the birth of English indie rock as we know it with The Smiths debut and follow up singles (“Hand in Glove” and “This Charming Man,” respectively); and the birth of American indie rock as we know it with R.E.M.’s Murmur.
If you want a little taste of what 1973 was like, go watch Licorice Pizza, the title of which refers to the old LP, a.k.a. the vinyl record—and boy, was this year firmly the middle of the Album Empire.
It’s time for the first of our Annivyrsaries, my favorite history class, and we’re starting with the sounds of 1963. So naturally, I want to focus on something that hasn’t been touched as much by scholars—the rise of the Surf Song.
It was the year the world was supposed to end. For music, in a own way, it did. As the 2009 class of indie darlings delivered underwhelming follow ups (Shields, Centipede Hz, Swing Lo Magellan—many now, in ten years time, seen as unsung greats), critics were reckoning with the rise of poptimism.
In 2002, I was listening to All That You Can’t Leave Behind from the backseat of a minivan while I flipped through the pictures in Nintendo Power. I thought all songs debuted through Now That’s What I Call Music! I was Coldplay’s perfect mark—I had no idea what a cliché even was.
I must’ve gotten my hands on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004, when I was 10 or 11 years old. Grand Theft Auto maintains a dual reputation as one of the greatest video games of all time as well as one of those Matrix-level Y2K-era youth corruptors.
The first time I went crowd-surfing was in a stranger’s dark living room to “Come On Eileen.” I remember being lifted on shaky hands and the warm breeze borne from the drunken crowd. It was during that thumping chant of the bridge, every foot moving to the brow-beating stomp. My nose scraped the ceiling as I sang along.
At the height of his fame, David Bowie forged Ziggy Stardust to help him withstand the heat of the limelight. He quickly came to resent it. He was starting to think that he was Ziggy. He even went as far as trying to kill Stardust off one summer in London. “That fucker would not leave me alone for years,” he once said.
Pretend it’s 1962. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring hits The New Yorker in June. In a month, heavy smog descends upon London; the first Walmart rears its head in Arkansas. Another month, and Marilyn Monroe is dead. The world could collapse any day now.
Summer morning doesn’t strike the Midwest sky so much as it subdues it. The sun will lay the night down gently—first with the grip of firm, pink fingers, then a whispered command in daffodil light.
It's 2001: CDs are excessive. Packing 1.4 million bits into a single second of stereo? In reality, we need only 128,000—a mere twelfth the size of what we were sold.
In 1991, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine spent three years making their second record, held up by perfectionism and his visionary sound—thousands of pedals to make the guitars shimmer, a mirage of pitch-bent tremolo effects.
She and I stood face-to-face—cheeks rolling as we chewed in calculated fury—in a bathroom flooded so many times you could see from peeling paint the location of each waterline. Moments ago, we’d scoured the concrete for bright strips of green between the rippling sheet of the Mississippi River and the faded auditorium where we now conspired.
At 11:59 p.m. on the first day of 1971, families watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson witnessed the last ad for cigarettes ever broadcast on television. 60 seconds dedicated to Virginia Slims. Those who preferred CBS’s Merv Griffin saw the same but for a different pack—Marlboros. Dick Cavett fans got Benson & Hedges.
1961 was what MAD Magazine called an Upside-Up year. It’s strobogrammatic, rotationally symmetric—flip it upside-down while no one’s looking and the number appears to have remained the same. If 1969 is the year that changed everything, we ought to christen 1961 as the year the world flipped upside-down, unnoticed; no one seemed to be paying any attention.
The real reason I had no time to write was I got so sucked in to making the damn playlist. It had to be longer this time, both because I had so much material (it was the year of my musical awakening) and because we could all use a longer escape.
This Valentine's Day, Hulu released a new TV version of High Fidelity. I told myself I wouldn't watch it. Its existence felt like a trick, its timing too convenient. It only took me two nights to cave. I set down the movie to watch the whole thing twice; some will disagree, but I think it's fantastic.
1990 was the year that the Pale Blue Dot photo was beamed back to Earth by Voyager 1—as it left the Solar System, Carl Sagan told NASA to have the craft turn its camera around and take one last photo of the Earth against the black canvas of space. In the shot, our planet is barely bigger than a pixel.
In 1980, a Japanese manufacturer of electronic instruments launched its first line of drum machines. Instead of pre-recorded samples, this machine made its own sounds—particularly, a booming bass drum that sounded like Flubber hitting a trampoline.
Ten years is as far as you can stretch in time while still holding your sense of self. Walk back through each week, however, and it's exhausting to see just how far time's canyon will reach. The decade is the standard unit of change.
In 1960, America was adjusting to being the empire. Our version of love was designed to support structures of power, and myths of supremacy reigned. Threatened by a liberated woman, male culture doubled down and curdled into the mess it is today.
When I was 21, I worked at Forever 21. I was the sole stock worker on any given shift, and I ran that backroom like a movie set—there wasn’t a single maxi dress I couldn’t echolocate.