I’m working on a nostalgia vanity project, compiling the soundtrack to my 6th grade life. I remember this period vividly, and I remember the music vividly. I played junior league hockey, I went to sailing camp in the summer, I had crushes on approximately 9,000 girls, I was completely lost in the world of Goldeneye for N64 and Final Fantasy VII, and every night I would sit in my room and listen to B97 on my ancient SHARP boom box. Some of my favorite songs: Buddy Holly by Weezer, Kiss the Rain by Billie Myers, Tubthumping by Chumbawamba, Where Have All the Cowboys Gone by Paula Cole, I Am Barely Breathing by Duncan Shiek, I Could Never Be Your Woman by White Town, Lovefool by The Cardigans,Summertime by The Sundays (last week I put this song on a mix tape for my girlfriend and she loved it - unaware that it came out so long ago.)
I’m trying to compile a very thorough list of this music for my vanity project. Specifically, the thrust of the project here is centered around my idea that there is a mid-90s radio music that is very seperate and different from the grunge/alt-rock radio music of 1990-1994, and very seperate and different from the hip-hop/pop-punk radio music of 1999-2004. I’m not sure how exactly to classify it (I’d say “light pop” from my examples above) but I think that it has had an influence on the indie and “twee” music that is just now being created and listened to by my musical generation. As of now, this is all just a nebulous cloud of vague theories and ideas, but I’m trying to shape it into something coherent, and to do this I’m looking for comprehensive and thorough lists of the music that was played on pop radio stations during the mid-90s.
I have looked at the various hit charts from the time period (mostly this one) and I’m starting to think that the Billboard and other “top” charts don’t tell the whole story of mid-90s music, and specifically are a poor representation of the music that my peers and I listened to when we were kids. (Hence this being a vanity project.) Namely, looking at the charts, R&B, boy-bands and rap dominate in force, and this may have been the most popular music statistically, but it wasn’t what I remember hearing. It might have been because my radio station of choice was more “white.” It may have been because my young brain just filtered out the all the R&B and rap because I had been inundated with Beatles since I was five and so was conditioned to respond to British pop music. Whatever the reason, the point is that the bands that stand out the most from my 6th grade year were not the R&B and rap that make up the billboard hits, but the obscure pop one-hit wonders, which all the above but Weezer would classify as. I’ve been trying to come up with an extensive list of this kind of music, but I’m running into the issue of my memory. I just know that there are other songs that I listened to that are not on these billboard charts, but I just can’t think of them. Oh! I got one: Sex and Candy by Marcy Playground. See what I mean? There were all those songs on the radio that seemingly came and went in minutes, but many of them were distinctive and interesting despite that. And of course there were the standbys from the alt-rock era - The Cranberries, Alanis Morrisette, Natalie Merchant, etc - who were still coming out with new music after 1995. And newcomers like Fiona Apple (I’ll never forget the first time I saw her video for Criminal in 1996!)
This post may seem rambling and incoherent (well, it is - I’ve been up for about 20 hours) but the overall point is that as an amateur music journalist, I want to write about the music of my formative years, and now with iTunes and Ruckus I can easily compile a soundtrack to go along with this project of sorts. I want to know where (besides Wikipedia) I might be able to find in-depth lists of the pop music of the mid-90s. I also would love to hear what some of you remember about 90s music - good or bad - and particularly what you remember if you’re my age (20-24.) And if any of you have radio singles that I should add to this project, let me know, because I want to be really thorough.
