It may be more a reflection on you than the objective quality of the music. Their thesis is that most peoples’ musical taste becomes fixed to some extent in adolescence.
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[insert thatsthejoke.gif]
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I’m a late '80s early '90s music late Gen-Xer. I remember the horror of going to the gym one day in the early noughties and the PA was tuned to a “'90s music station” (mostly because I’d loathed the '70s nostaglia crap around when I was in college), which then played Nirvana followed by The Macarena.
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To be fair, neither do most USians. Sure, they know the, “ajdjfritififjsnsjfoffifkskkasnsn something something vanilla flavor” song that was in all those commercials but they don’t even know who does it.
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Not to mention their methodology leaves something to be desired. One of the things that happens with establishing a canon for music of an era is that we pick sounds that were relatively distinct to that era, which can often be prominent within a subculture, without being hugely popular at the time broadly. The music can end up getting additional prominence in later media and serve to stand in for a trend. Comfortably Numb and Dylan’s Blowin in the Wind, for example wouldn’t have made this list for their time, despite being clearly recognizable to a huge chunk of adults because they didn’t chart.
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[insert wilecoyoteonarocket.gif]
As long as we can agree that, objectively, ska-punk reigns supreme.
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I think you meant the theme song to “The Big Bang Theory”…
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I detest that show, so I don’t remember that.
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That’s a good point, see also Blister in the Sun or Loser, at least for GenXers.
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Sarcasm needs some kind of “tell,” otherwise people won’t know if you really mean it or not. I also thought you were being serious because there’s nothing you wrote that indicates otherwise. Just like no one knows you’re a dog on the internet, know one knows you’re being sarcastic on it either unless you tell them.
the 90’s is when i really started listening to music, and if that is the music that defines the 90’s then i must have been in a completely different 90’s. i don’t even recognize most of the artists, never mind the songs. did they restrict themselves to a particular genre or something? there’s many names i would like to see in there but i know are perhaps not as popular (no ramones, no greenday, no offspring), but how is nirvana not in there at all?
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Just turned the 19 yr old grandson on to Lords of Acid & Shreikback. He likes weird stuff I’d classify as EDM but they all have different names like cloudwave electro-ambient (I may have made up that one.) I tell him it’s all EDM, just like all rock is rock. Classification is beyond me now.
But he likes the stuff we used to dance to in the 90s. We were the old people at the club, bringing their newly-legal kids with them.
Everybody thinks that. No one born after 1975 can understand the joy that the thread Mystery cassette from thrift store - who is this 70s prog rock band thread brings to my heart.
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It clearly read as a joke to me. Not sarcasm, though. That’s a different thing.
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Yeah, I was about to say a similar thing about it being US-centric. I’d never heard of half those songs although I’m right in the right age range. Now the masterpieces @buddybradley posted, on the other hand…
I think that’s too simplistic. The lyrics aren’t important and consequently neither is the ability to understand them. Case in point: Dragostea din Tei. How many people speak Romanian and yet it was a huge hit (except in the US). Gangnam Style would be a more recent example. The fact that many of those lyrics are rather simple has more to do with the kind of music, which doesn’t really reward complex lyrics in any language. And of course sometimes they are deliberately stupid…:
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I’d be surprised if he hadn’t heard a remix of Dominator before. It seems like everybody does a remix of it at some point.
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I still haven’t forgiven Scooter for ripping off UltraSonic’s first two albums in the mid 90s and refusing to credit them as an influence.
Edit: Scooter might have credited them on Hyper Hyper, but it took looking at the lyrics to see it.
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I was a pathetic, mopey teen to twentysomething, and I still listened to this music and know it well.
Easily, not nearly as well as I should, and not anymore. That answers those questions for just about any 90s song.
aserejè ja de jè de jebe tu de jebere seibiunouva,
majavi an de bugui an de buididipi,
aserejè ja de jè de jebe tu de jebere seibiunouva,
majavi an de bugui an de buididipi
I think it peaked about 100 years before I was born, but that’s just my biased opinion.
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A lot of Euro Disco type tracks take off in the UK because people like them “as a joke”. But as we keep being reminded lately, liking something “as a joke” is still liking it. And there’s a bad smell to the implication that Garbage Islanders are the only people with a sense of humour.
(AFAIAA Dragostea din Tei got big, or at least got a second wave, via that early viral video of a chunky kid lip syncing to it. So that’s multiple layers of irony-hijacking)
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I’ve taken this silly test for all five decades.
- 1960s: Schmaltzy crap with actual fucken string sections
- 1970s: Disco
- 1980s: Easy listening
- 1990s: R&B
- 2000s: Hip Hop
Gonna take it again just to say I did, but they need more variety.
Also, out of all of these, I never listened to any of these songs, including the ones I recognized. Especially the ones I recognized. A bit odd for a GenXer to recognize all that schmaltzy crap, yet here I am.
EtA: if there were a button for “my cousin wrote it” I would have pushed that one once. Long story.
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