Showing posts with label meat loaf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meat loaf. Show all posts

Monday, September 3, 2018

the top ten best hit songs of 1993

So I'll freely admit of the Patreon-requested years for which I cover the year-end Hot 100, we haven't really encountered a 'bad' year for the charts, the sort of years that even with the benefit of hindsight and nostalgia cause us to wince in the face of the memories. The closest that I've covered in this territory throughout the five years I've been on YouTube have been 2016 and maybe either 2010 or 2014, and even then, both of the latter have strong enough redeeming moments to knock them into quality.

1993 is not one of those years - perhaps not the worst the Hot 100 has had to offer, but definitely the sort of transitional early 90s year where the best stuff wasn't charting, most of the good stuff was starting to get overexposed, music legends were falling apart in slow motion, and the rest was a wasteland of formless mush. Thank god R&B and new jack swing were mostly holding up and that g-funk was cutting a swathe across hip-hop, because rock had lapsed into parody, the pop-rap of the early 90s was trying and failing to keep up, and punk and country were nowhere to be seen, despite the advent of riot grrl and the neotraditional country revival in full swing. Even grunge, widely hailed as the breakthrough sound by music critics of the early 90s, had little to no traction in 1993 - and before hip-hop can raise a triumphant flag here, there was no way in hell that the best of that genre was getting to pop radio in the face of an avalanche of easy listening pablum left over from the 80s and artists who should really know better! No In Utero, no 36 Chambers or Ain't No Other or Buhloone Mindstate, but hey, you got Kenny G!

Now what that means is that the best of 1993... look, it's all over the place, especially as some of the chart oddities have aged better than what was big at the time, and while there are a few classic cuts from this era, in comparison to stronger years this particular top ten is substantially shakier - and as always, the songs have to have debuted on the year-end Hot 100 in 1993... which actually didn't result in any cuts from this list, and thank god for that, as it's pretty thin. But hey, let's start off with...

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

album review: 'battle born' by the killers

Do any of you remember the music scene in 2004?

If you don't, you should. 2004 was a year where pop music delivered songs that were both critically acclaimed and amazingly popular. The trademark song of that year, 'Yeah' by Usher and featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris, came off of Usher's hit album Confessions and managed to catapult him straight into the A-List. This was also the year that Kanye West exploded into the mainstream, the year 'Hey Ya!' by OutKast charted, the year where gangster rap hit the critical junction of mainstream success and high quality. 

And it wasn't just in hip-hop either. On the metal front, rap metal had finally imploded (with the exception of Linkin Park, who released the relatively solid Meteora that year), and nu metal was on its last legs, with Evanescence experiencing their final puff of popularity before returning to irrelevancy (and the world rejoiced). This was also the year Within Temptation released The Silent Force and Nightwish released Once, the latter Nightwish's biggest hit album driven on the strength of its great singles. This was also the year Arjen Lucassen's Ayreon project released The Human Equation, one of my favourite metal albums of all time. I mean, holy shit, that's a whole lot of awesome, even it isn't tied directly to the mainstream.

But if we are talking about the mainstream, we have to talk about rock music. Post-grunge was thankfully dying off, and people were searching for what would be the next advancement in the genre. Some thought it'd be pop rock or punk rock, driven on the helm of Jimmy Eat World and Green Day. Hell, Green Day released American Idiot in 2004, which was both a critical success and a huge hit, driving Green Day into a resurgence of popularity, and propelling bands embracing the emo aesthetic to the forefront. If I'm being  embarrassingly honest, I don't think this is a bad thing - I like pop-rock, and both Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco made great albums in the following years.

But even that's not the most interesting thing that happened in the 2004 rock scene - because that was the year indie rock exploded into the mainstream. This was the year where Franz Ferdinand, Modest Mouse, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Arcade Fire, the Garden State soundtrack, where all of these acts somehow managed to gain mainstream attention and acclaim, and for a few brief seconds, there was a hope that indie rock might actually take hold in the modern consciousness and become the 'new grunge'.

That didn't happen. And for the reason why, I blame The Killers.