The High Road

I was streaming a New York radio station (WFUV) earlier today and they played Cracker's 1992 song Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now). I hadn't heard it or even thought about that song in years, but it sounded great and brought back memories.  I cranked it up and sang along.

I'm not a big nostalgia fan of 90s music, although I know many who are. Don't let your mind go to the opposite extreme - I don't hate 90s music. I just don't post Facebook memes saying the 90s were the best decade in music ever, and my Spotify playlists aren't exclusively songs from those years. 

As someone who came of age in the '60s, I don't really understand it. Teen Angst was recorded 32 years ago, but I can assure you that no one in 1968 was listening to music from 32 years earlier (1936). "Squares," people totally out of it and completely uncool, were listening to music from the '50s - doo wop, surf, Elvis, and crooners. Music from a mere 10 years earlier. If you were listening to music from the 1930s back in the '60s, you were either a) a contrarian, b) an accordion owner, or c) Robert Crumb.

But today, I know many people in their 30s and 40s who absolutely swear by 90s music, and are relatively uninterested in anything post-Y2K. 

Personally, I think every decade had some great music as well as a lot of commercial shlock. Some decades just had more of one or the other than other decades.  To me, the greatest decade in popular music was probably the years between 2005 and 2015.

I  always felt that split-decades - measuring 10-year intervals between years ending in -5, made more sense.  The music of 1968 had more in common with the music of 1973 than the year 1963, even though both '63 and '68 were literally "the '60s."  The roots of a lot of '80s New Wave and post-punk can be heard in the late '70s. Similarly, the music of 2013 sounds more like the music of 2008 than it does that of 2018.              

From time to time, what composer Anthony Braxton calls "restructuralists" turn up in music and change everything - they alter the structure of music. The early '60s British Invasion bands were restructuralists and music was forever different after them than before. The punk bands of the mid- to late '70s were restructuralists - there's music before CBGBs and then there's music after CBGBs. 

But the reason that music from the 1990s still sounds relevant 35-odd years later is because there haven't been any restructuralists in popular music in the intervening years. Various musicians and bands, what Braxton calls "the stylists," have expanded on various styles of popular music and cycled through various modes and fashions, but no one's come forward and turned everything on its head and made the music prior to them sound irrelevant. There have been restructuralists in other genres - mid-60s John Coltrane in jazz, for example. Arguably, metal has had several restructuralists, but their impact has been limited to that specific genre. But there have been no resructuralists in pop/rock music since the punk rockers.

I feel we're due for something soon - we're right on the cusp of the next big thing. The pop divas are having their moment right now, but they sound more like swan songs than the torch that will carry things  forward. I have no idea what the next thing will sound like after the next restructuralists, but I guarantee you'll know it as soon as you hear it.