HSR '92: Sophie B Hawkins, L7 (I haven't heard this song in years...powerful unconscious recognition, but not enough to tick it); kd Lang (it feels like I still hear this song pretty often, following me into elevators and post offices. Actually, the closest post office seems to play a lot of Dionne Warwick, or maybe I just noticed more than one Dionne Warwick song playing there?). Also a special head-smack award for Ministry, if I'd been like two or three years older this might have been the Greatest Song Ever for a Ten Year-Old to Stomp Around To (I think my equivalent was probably "Three Little Pigs" by Green Jelly).
1992: My mother died of cancer in January, but we'd been prepared for it much longer. I thought I'd go into this installment not recognizing a lot of music from this point in my life, but I actually knew much more from this poll (at the time) than from any of the previous ones. In fact, I think Kris Kross is my first important real-life overlap, in the sense that I can claim to have "discovered" them myself. The only other concurrent musical influences so far (Paula Abdul, GN'R) came from my sister and her friends. "Jump" aired on Nickelodeon and Saturday morning TV constantly, also a roller rink staple along with follow-up "I Missed the Bus." Kris Kross established a sort of nascent cross-promotional scheme for future teenpop of the Disney/Hollywood era to follow, "bumpers" etc...I don't remember them showing many other music videos during children's programming.
My sister was probably listening to RHCP by now (she was ten), and "Under the Bridge" is one of those songs that's such an inextricable part of my childhood that choosing not to tick it simply because I CAN'T STAND IT would just feel wrong. "Lithium" is the first song I ever learned all the words to (no wait, that was "I Can't Dance" by Genesis, but I do remember learning Lithium by heart)...I thought the song was funny at eight or nine, this weird guy with friends in his head who was still so clearly cool. It also gave me the excuse to sneer and say "HORNY" and yell "yeeeeeeeah!" and my voice cracked just like Kurt's, except I was prepubescent.
I'm also realizing the impact "In Living Color" had on me as a kid around this time, maybe a year earlier...it was one of those shows I had to watch secretly when no one was around, like "Married...with Children" (which was the only flat-out FORBIDDEN show in the house, it drove my parents crazy just to hear even a second of it). My first memories of Vanilla Ice and "Rumpshaker" and "Baby Got Back" (pretty much any rap or hip-hop I can remember from the time...Digital Underground, too) come from that show. An enduring love of rumps and humps etc. etc. etc. (they'd have a field day with Fergie).
(Also, see post title. There's a scene in Last Days where "Kurt" just sits and watches the ENTIRE video to "On Bended Knee" and I had something like a religious experience, a profound Pavolvian response. Hate the movie for reasons I've still never articulated and won't start now, but that scene was incredibly powerful for some reason. "End of the Road" in '92 is where Boyz II Men got me first, even though "Motown Philly" was on "Full House" once. But I think I saw that episode after B2M were enormous and unstoppable.)
2. Skye boardies are currently figuring out how to extract Simlish "Boyhunter" from the new Sims game. Comments:
1. It has a hiphop/electronic/rock sound
2. Sounds like nothing Skye has ever done before
3. Skye even does a little playful rap a bit in the pre-chorus
4. By the sounds of the simlish the start of the chorus goes "Cause I'm a boyhunter, a boyhunter, a boyhunter"
5. This song is effing hot as hell
It'll probably be available by the end of the day, just in time for a very special SKYE FRIDAY "Boymuzzer" edition.
3. From Tommy2, HSM alum-pop continues with Lucas Grabeel, who's featured on some Disney soundtrack. When oh when will Zac Efron start his rap career? Aly and AJ on a daytime talk show tomorrow, might be able to watch this thing.
4. Great technical discussion of confessional rock over on the teenpop thread. Influences have obviously been discussed, but no harm in revisiting some of the conversation...Eppy tracks the rockfessional trend like this:
American teenpop is sort of the natural continuation of pop-metal if it hadn't gone industrial, right, and I think how it works is this: 80s pop-metal's big tracks were all metal sonics welded onto 70s rock ballad structures and maybe melodies. This stuff seems to be melding punk onto 60s/70s pop/soul-ballads, Bacharach/David sorta stuff. Lots of passing notes. Except in melding the two they've flattened the rhythmic structure, so chords and root notes change right on the 1 or 3 (beginning or middle of the bar) instead of changing right before or after beats as they did in Bacharach and, I dunno, I guess I've been listening to "Gone Away" way too much lately so that's in my mind. But yeah, I think it takes that sorta variagated chordal structure and chains it to the Ramones chug-chug-chug. I think the verses are almost 70s orchestral pop done with rock instruments and the choruses are 90s power pop, yeah? Sorta kinda? Pop-grunge?
Pop-grunge is an interesting way of putting it...Smashing Pumpkins have come up before (Ross links "1979" to "Everything I'm Not"...it's like the Martin/Gottwald formula without a sufficient climax, although Billy Corgan instinctively hops up an octave like something is supposed to happen there, like he's groping at a soarus in the dark), and I guess I hear something in the way that they try to find something like triumphalism, or maybe just theatricality and bombast (or maybe I'm just thinking of "Tonight"?) in gloom (but Corgan's voice is always gloomy, unlike Aly or AJ or...Linday? Is scorched grunge-girl innately empowering/triumphant?).
So one technical feature of a lot of rock confessional is that it's modal music where major/minor is in flux. That means that the use of thirds is crucial. "Rush" (pretending it's in C for now): "Don't let nobody tell you" gravitates around the fifth in the minor scale (in C minor it's G) and the major third in the major scale (in Eb major it's G). But when they come down to what should be the root (essentially V-I, traditional harmonic resolution), that Eb makes the resolution minor (V-i), because they hit the minor third.
"I Live for the Day" does something unexpected by setting the chorus in an indirectly related key, from B minor to E minor/G maj and carrying over the vocal melody. In the chorus, the vocal rhythmic pattern (and to some extent the melodic pattern, it's a third below Kelly C.) is "Since U Been Gone," "I-live-for-the-da-ay," with the second "syllable" in the extended "day" resolving in a similar way. Imagine what "Since U Been Gone" would sound like if, instead of blasting GOOOOONE, Kelly had patterned it like this: "Since U Been Gone! Since U Been Gone! I can breathe..." (she does do this with a double track at some point, but it's not the primary melody). It would be a bit more desperate, more frantic, less immediately cathartic. That's what Lindsay's doing here. And -- didn't notice this until yesterday -- there's an almost imperceptible key change at the end, up a whole step to F#min/A maj, so that the intensity has been increased considerably (it's the classic climactic modulation that takes the song over the top) but covertly.
Plus Lindsay KICKS ASS. Now where's "Boymuzzer"?
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