A Sound of Sheer Silence

#1: "One" by U2 (off of Achtung, Baby (1991) The first album I ever owned was The Joshua Tree , on cassette tape.  I pulled out my CD collection the other day and realized I own ten U2 albums, which includes a couple of greatest hits collections.  That's partially a function of U2's enormous longevity, and partially a function of how much I like U2.  Even after the bad albums and weird marketing moves and Bono overexposure, I always come back to U2.  It's pretty much my musical first love. Upon (extensive) reflection, I think Achtung, Baby  is their best work.   The Joshua Tree (1987) begins with three songs ("Where the Streets Have No Name," "I Still Haven't Found What I Am Looking For," and "With or Without You") that even non-U2 fans know and instantly recognize, and has a deeply underrated deep-cut ("In God's Country").  It is a tremendous album, and it made U2 immortals. That was followed by the album...

#2: "Drive" by R.E.M. (off of Automatic for the People (1992)) #2: "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" by R.E.M. (off of Monster  (1994)) I've talked about R.E.M. before , and there is much more than could be said.  What is perhaps the most notable thing about 90s R.E.M. is that they were probably the most popular band of the decade, without producing particularly accessible music.  They released five albums in the 90s-- Out of Time (1991), Automatic for the People (1992), Monster (1994), New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996), and Up (1998).  All five of these albums were enormous hits--the "disappointing" New Adventures in Hi-Fi  "only" peaked at #2 on the U.S. Billboard charts.   New Adventures in Hi-Fi  has to be one of the grimmest and most inscrutable albums to ever reach number #2 on the charts--nothing on it is remotely radio friendly, and all of it is depressing.  Nevertheless, it sold almost a million copies in the United State...

#3: Lucky Man by the Verve (off of Urban Hymns (1997)) The Verve is a criminally underrated band.  Everything Coldplay has done, the Verve did first and better.  They were experimenting with weird sounds and trippy music when Radiohead was writing straight forward rock songs like "Creep."  They are more interesting than Oasis, and I like Oasis. They are not well known because their career was rather short, done in by stereotypical band problems--interpersonal conflicts, drugs, financial disputes.   Urban Hymns , their best album, was also their last significant album.  In a sense, though, it is not tremendously surprising, as their music certainly conveys that they were dealing with some stuff. The song of theirs that you have heard is "Bittersweet Symphony."  It got them into trouble because it sampled an orchestral version of "The Last Time" by the Rolling Stones, resulting in all the royalties going to the Stones.  It is also famous for th...

#4: "This Time of Year" by Better than Ezra (off of Deluxe  (1995)) Better than Ezra is the band that holds the record for the band I have seen the most times live.  Granted, I am not a huge live music person, so the record stands at three times.  Nevertheless, I saw them once in college, once in New Orleans in '06, and once in Philly some time in law school.  Every time I have seen them it has been in a small venue, and they have killed it.  No big rock show, nothing flashy or innovative, but three people playing music and talking with the audience.  It is a good time show in every sense of the word.  What is interesting about the "good time" portion of that is that it is a little incongruous with what the band is best at, which is writing and playing ballads. It is hard to write ballads, and many bands fall into the trap of making them overly sappy, or cliched, or predictable musically ("here is where we break out the piano").  Better th...

#5: "Lightning Crashes" by Live (off of Throwing Copper (1994)) I get why you don't like Live.  Believe me, I do.  You think they are pretentious.  You think they try way, way to hard to be "spiritual," in the most cliched manner imaginable ("hey, I just found this Sansrkit word 'Samadhi'--let's put in in the title of own of our albums!")  Their videos were often painfully earnest and high-concept, such as the video for "Lakini's Juice" off of Secret Samadhi   I discussed in some depth a few years ago.  Their formula was basically copied by Creed in the late 90s, making them indirectly responsible for the reign of Scott Stapp (I will say that Creed never bothered me particularly, but I understand that this is a minority position).  I hear you. The thing is, I recognize and accept all of that, and I like their music anyway.  Live is sort of like, to use a baseball analogy, the pure home run hitter that hits forty home ...

#6: "Walk on the Ocean" by Toad the Wet Sprocket (off of fear  (1991)) It is cliche, but it is true.  There are songs that get locked into your consciousness and become associated with a particular time and place.  This is an example of such a song.  It reminds me of high school, and in particular early high school over-night trips for various competitions.  I hear this song and I am immediately 15 or 16 years old for a few minutes while it is playing. The biggest problem with being a teenager, ultimately, is the information gap involved.  Lots of new and bewildering things are going on, and all of these things feel entirely sui generis , as if you are the first person to go through them.  This is of course entirely untrue--I don't believe there is a single person who has ever lived who has not struggled through adolescence on one level or another.  Perhaps there are teenagers who understand this fact, are not scared by it, and can just r...

#7:  "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" by the Smashing Pumpkins (off of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness  (1995)) I initially had at #7 the song "Come as You Are," off of Nirvana's breakthrough album Nevermind.   I realized, in the course of attempting to explain why I had a Nirvana song at # 7, that I had done so out of some weird sense of obligation.  The general consensus is that Nirvana is the most important band of the 90s, the one that ended the reign of hair metal and ushered in a period where being rich and famous as a rock star was seen as a terrible burden to be avoided, as opposed to a cool lifestyle to aspire to.  All of that may be true.  But it doesn't necessarily follow that this makes Nirvana's music tremendously enjoyable or rewarding to listen to.  It's not that it is bad by any means--I like Nirvana better than the other titan of the Grunge scene, Pearl Jam--but I think it is at best really, really OK, if that makes any sen...

#8: "Protect Ya Neck" by the Wu-Tang Clan (off of Enter the Wu-Tang [36 Chambers] (1993)) When I was in college, I lived in a fraternity house for two years.  Among the interesting and diverse cast of characters in the house was a guy named Aaron Markworth.  Aaron grew up not far from where I live now, in the Amish country of Eastern Ohio, and he was a funny and curmudgeonly guy.  At some point in our history as a fraternity, he was in charge of our social activities, a job for which I don't think he particularly enjoyed or was necessarily perfectly suited for, but on which he expended yeoman's efforts. Our most notable social event under his tenure, at least in my memory, was the Ska Party we threw with the Delta Zeta sorority.  Our fraternity was founded during my freshman year, and by the fall of our sophomore year we had a renovated fraternity house to move into.  To celebrate it, we decided to throw a big party after a rare nighttime home football ga...

#9:  "The Bends" by Radiohead (off of The Bends  (1995)) The knee-jerk Radiohead album to pick in any 90s retrospective is 1997's OK Computer , the album that convinced people that Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and the rest of them were geniuses.  The problem is . . . I don't really like OK Computer .  It feels like a transitional album between normal "rock band" music and the truly weird and amazing Kid A (2000).  "Karma Police" is a good song, but listening to the rest of it always me think of the other, better Radiohead material that came later.  Part of it, I think, is because I got into weirder, more experimental Radiohead stuff late (as in the last five years or so), so I sort of absorbed it all at once, rather than as it came out. By contrast, I liked  The Bends , the album that came before OK Computer , right from the time it came out.

I have tried in various ways to mix in some lighter content, without much success.  This time, I figured I would do a song a week on Fridays, as part of a Top Ten gimmick.  For the first series, I figured I would do my Top Ten songs of the 90s.  This is, for better or worse, my decade musically--I was 11 when it started and 21 when it ended. I should say that this Top Ten is entirely personal--these are my favorite songs, not some "objective" attempt to go for the ten best songs of the decade (to the extent that is even a meaningful thing).  It is entirely idiosyncratic and personally-driven, and it makes no pretense either to a comprehensive knowledge of music.  It's just me. Before getting to #10 of the Top Ten, a few preliminary picks.  I'll start with an honorable mention. I'm not even convinced this song is very good, but it will always stick with me, as it was the song playing when I got kissed for the first time.  Which was a pretty sig...