I Think I'm a Fish Girl...
Jul. 5th, 2006 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athersgeoSo; longtime (and observant) readers of this journal will have probably noticed a band popping up in my current music slot with increasing frequency. That band is Marillion. I now possess three of their albums, plus a couple of collective albums and I have to say, I think I prefer Marillion before Fish left the band than after.
This isn't to say I dislike Marillion after Fish left - I don't; one of my favourite Marillion tracks EVAR! is from after Fish's departure - I just find myself naturally gravitating towards the Fish years. Is it the lyrics? Is it the vocals?
It's funny; now I'm thinking about it, it occurs to me that only one of my favourite albums is from the 1990s and that (Stranger in this Town) is hardly a 90s album! The rest are either from the 80s or they're from much more recently, which is odd. I mean, I got into both Bon Jovi and Marillion during the middle 90s but the first BJ album I bought was New Jersey (1988). The first Marillion tracks I got to know and love (then loathe through too much radio airplay, then love again) were Kayleigh and Incommunicado (1983ish and 1987ish respectively).
What was it about the 90s that, looking back, provokes such apathy in me? I suppose it's partly that I never really 'got' the whole grunge movement or the whole Britpop thing and pretty much anything that was anything worth listening to either fell into those two categories or was trying to compete with it (check the Keep the Faith album by Bon Jovi, if you think I'm kidding!). It could also be that, simply, I overdosed on music in the 90s and it jaded me - and there's an element of that in it, too. Throughout the 90s, I had to watch MTV (yes, Virginia, it did actually play music in those days!), I had to listen to the chart on a Sunday, I had to know who was doing what. I now barely know what my favourite bands are up to, and that's thanks to being on relevant mailing lists.
But I don't think that's it entirely. I think there's one other thing at work here.
The 1990s was a bland decade and it produced an awful lot of bland music - and this is, I think, what I'm reacting to. There were good individual songs - Bed of Roses, Afraid of Sunlight, Jeremy, Smells Like Teen Spirit, November Rain, just to pick out the ones that spring to my mind without too much thought - but, and particularly after Kurt Cobain's suicide, everything turned to a uniform, safe blandness.
Just how many identikit boy-bands were there through the middle/late 90s? Take That, East 17, Boyzone, Westlife, Backstreet Boys, O, 98 Degrees, NKOTB (as they repackaged themselves)...all singing the same kind of songs, all of them looking much the same, all of them with the same lack of any kind of character*. There were all-girl groups too, of course - but the same thing applied.
Even the actual characters of the 90s became sanitised, cleaned up and packaged - unless they became so utterly outragous as to be self-parodies (Gallagher brothers).
There was no originality to any of it.
So I think I'll stick with my 80s music and my 00s music and pretend that maybe the 90s was just a spectacularly boring dream...
*Character meaning something interesting about them. Think Keith Moon, or Keith Richards, or Michael Jackson, or Madonna (before she turned into a parody of herself). The only person I can think of with any kind of interest from the 90s glut of boybands is Robbie Williams. One person!
Wow. That went a long way away from what I originally intended...
This isn't to say I dislike Marillion after Fish left - I don't; one of my favourite Marillion tracks EVAR! is from after Fish's departure - I just find myself naturally gravitating towards the Fish years. Is it the lyrics? Is it the vocals?
It's funny; now I'm thinking about it, it occurs to me that only one of my favourite albums is from the 1990s and that (Stranger in this Town) is hardly a 90s album! The rest are either from the 80s or they're from much more recently, which is odd. I mean, I got into both Bon Jovi and Marillion during the middle 90s but the first BJ album I bought was New Jersey (1988). The first Marillion tracks I got to know and love (then loathe through too much radio airplay, then love again) were Kayleigh and Incommunicado (1983ish and 1987ish respectively).
What was it about the 90s that, looking back, provokes such apathy in me? I suppose it's partly that I never really 'got' the whole grunge movement or the whole Britpop thing and pretty much anything that was anything worth listening to either fell into those two categories or was trying to compete with it (check the Keep the Faith album by Bon Jovi, if you think I'm kidding!). It could also be that, simply, I overdosed on music in the 90s and it jaded me - and there's an element of that in it, too. Throughout the 90s, I had to watch MTV (yes, Virginia, it did actually play music in those days!), I had to listen to the chart on a Sunday, I had to know who was doing what. I now barely know what my favourite bands are up to, and that's thanks to being on relevant mailing lists.
But I don't think that's it entirely. I think there's one other thing at work here.
The 1990s was a bland decade and it produced an awful lot of bland music - and this is, I think, what I'm reacting to. There were good individual songs - Bed of Roses, Afraid of Sunlight, Jeremy, Smells Like Teen Spirit, November Rain, just to pick out the ones that spring to my mind without too much thought - but, and particularly after Kurt Cobain's suicide, everything turned to a uniform, safe blandness.
Just how many identikit boy-bands were there through the middle/late 90s? Take That, East 17, Boyzone, Westlife, Backstreet Boys, O, 98 Degrees, NKOTB (as they repackaged themselves)...all singing the same kind of songs, all of them looking much the same, all of them with the same lack of any kind of character*. There were all-girl groups too, of course - but the same thing applied.
Even the actual characters of the 90s became sanitised, cleaned up and packaged - unless they became so utterly outragous as to be self-parodies (Gallagher brothers).
There was no originality to any of it.
So I think I'll stick with my 80s music and my 00s music and pretend that maybe the 90s was just a spectacularly boring dream...
*Character meaning something interesting about them. Think Keith Moon, or Keith Richards, or Michael Jackson, or Madonna (before she turned into a parody of herself). The only person I can think of with any kind of interest from the 90s glut of boybands is Robbie Williams. One person!
Wow. That went a long way away from what I originally intended...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-06 12:28 am (UTC)And actually NKOTB's last album wasn't bubblegum pop--it was bubblegum pop boys trying to get their longtime fans to buy into gansta-ish R&B with a few decent ballads thrown in to tempt you into buying the album.
I"m ashamed to admit it worked for me, but none of their CDs are on my iPod.
However, the popular music of the mid-nineties? So with you. Most of the good stuff I found was through friends in college. And those were few and far between. *hugs Moxy Fruvous CDs tightly*