The backstop to a backstory of a music lover

Written by Christopher Pentecost on February 24, 2024

All right, everyone please stand up, raise your right hand, and repeat after me the solemn pledge once pledged to me back in 1989 which is the first track off the first cassette tape I ever bought with my own money that being said:

“We are a nation with no Geographic boundaries
Bound together through our beliefs
We are like-minded individuals
Sharing a common Vision
Pushing toward a world rid of color lines.”

You may lower your hands you have been sworn in, please be seated.

That was the pledge. After it had been said, there was a sort of interlude of music and sounds, leading into a countdown of 54321, and then probably the greatest intro to a song that I had heard only a week before: “Rhythm Nation”. Now, most of the music I’m going to talk about today does not come from that album, but the pledge was always something that, when I did play it, I took seriously. It was probably the first humanistic thoughts that I had that led me to be sort of the non-racist, judgmental human I am today. It is something I had to revisit, and it is something that I lost a little bit along the way growing up. Got to remember, I heard this when I turned 11; that in itself makes me sad. But it’s still probably one of the more thoughtful ways to open an album.

Going from there, the next year we would get into the 90s. This is where I honed my love of music, both popular and unpopular, and alternative, into the one quarter of my being that is the music nerd. Now, I’ve already posted a bunch of different playlists, and you have read previously that my main love is for that of like Punk and New Wave. So where in the world does Janet Jackson fit into all this? I am eclectic. I love pretty much all music, except for new country. We have to draw a line somewhere, and I decided to draw it at twangy modern pop. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are a couple of songs that will come out of nowhere, and you’re like, “Oh, I don’t mind that stuff,” like The Chicks, you know, “Earl Had to Die”. That’s a good one, but it’s not somewhere I hang my hat, so to speak. I won’t go to places like, you know, Boots and Hearts. I don’t listen to the country station. I like my country more like Johnny Cash, who at one point, if you ask George Stroumboulopoulos, he considered Johnny Cash maybe one of the first-ever punk rockers. And you can kind of tell that from his music. And Kenny Rogers, mainly because he relatively looked like my dad growing up. So it’s kind of weird every time I saw him on TV, I would say, “Oh, look, Dad’s on TV,” and my mom would have to correct me.

In the 90s, I would come into listening to a lot of the records that my father had in his collections: The Beatles, Disco, Motown, R&B, ’70s folk-inspired singer-songwriters like James Taylor, John Denver, Jim Croce. And it wasn’t until 1991 that the airwaves were taken over by what could only be called the Sonic revolution of noise. And that would adjust my attitude just a bit, that I would continue to delve into what is considered alternative music. And it has shaped roughly the rest of my life. Alternative music to me is the mix of punk and rock with a little bit of the influence of all other music genres sitting underneath. I say that now due to a Dave Grohl interview that he did with Pharrell Williams, who himself started in the early 90s writing beats for hip-hop artists. Dave Grohl, when told by Pharrell that he wished he was a better drummer like you, Dave Grohl admitted that he stole a lot of what you heard on the Nevermind album from disco and early hip-hop. The flams that you hear at the beginning of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” are straight out of The Gap Band and Tommy Thompson. I never linked the two until he said something, and once you have that nugget in your head, you can’t unhear it. So it sort of lends credence that a lot of the bands that would shape the bulk of my teenage years actually were working with their influences, even though their genre totally took the left turn to Albuquerque.

So, of course, for this entry, I sat down and I thought about what could I write about 90s alternative music that hasn’t been really covered by pretty much all magazines. And I know there’s a lot of bands and debates about bands and artists as to who really is alternative, who really isn’t alternative, who was an alternative that became alternative, now is an alternative. So I’m not going to go with any of the debated sections. I’m going to deal with what I see as alternative music, and I’m going to work with it and sort of explain why I think some of this is alternative and is an alternative. And it’s mainly how it affected me personally, because art is subjective, and we’ll work with that subjectivity because it’s my blog and hell yeah!

Today, I sat down, opened up Spotify, and created a 101 song list of some of my favorite ’90s Tunes that is more than 7 hours long. I picked random songs that were from the 90s, but I never picked two songs from the same artist. So these are 101 individual songs from individual bands or artists. Some of them are big hits, some of them maybe little-known songs, and a couple are probably hidden gems. But these were the songs that influenced me throughout the 90s and pretty much let me feel differently about a lot of things and a lot of situations. This is the music that pretty much got me through that decade. I’m not going to go over every single song in this list because this thing would be way too long. I will leave this list at the bottom for you to peruse and experience in your own time. I will pick and choose a few and sort of explain why I like them.

The first song in the list, like Quentin Tarantino, you want to open an opus or a piece of art with something big that just says, “This is grand, sit down and enjoy.” So, I opened with Stone Temple Pilots and their song “Down” from the album “Number Four”. It was the opening track. It leads off with just massive chugging guitars and low ringing drums, and a very sort of poignant and staccato use of the music with the vocals, and Scott Weiland being able to jump between soft inviting tones to just yelling in your face. It’s sort of almost sums up his life on drugs, where you have massive ups and downs. That song just dictates to me, at least, a way that you can sort of navigate. Of course, no ’90s list is at all complete without a Nirvana song, but I decided to take one and a mix from the greatest hits album called “Pennyroyal Tea”. I don’t know why this one speaks to me so well, but it’s a song that I just can’t skip, and this particular mix was never originally released on the “In Utero” album, but it would be released on the greatest hits. It was mainly released on the greatest hits because it was, I believe, Kurt Cobain’s favorite mix of this song, and maybe that’s sort of why I like it. It’s not meant, even though Nirvana was not a mainstream musical choice, if you liked Nirvana, you loved Nirvana because they were an alternative to the mainstream. But it’s interesting that this mix was alternative enough to not want to be garnered on the album by the record company, and that Kurt liked this better. So, like, I can’t really say anything bad about it. I like this version, and I appreciate an artist’s preferential view of how his art should sound.

Now, of course, being from Canada, can’t really get away without bringing some Canadian flavor to this. Not that a lot of people would consider The Tragically Hip alternative, but I think “Locked in the Trunk of a Car” is one of those songs that you hear it, and your first thought is, “Who would write something about this subject matter?” And I think it’s the lyrics for me that make it more alternative because it’s not normal to listen to a song whose point of view is the guy who’s about to be buried while he’s stuck in the back of a trunk of a car, and that’s just cool. As a side note, it’s probably the reason why I like Slayer so much, and it’s because they always said that they took a subject matter and looked at it from the opposite side to create their lyrics, which got them in a lot of trouble when you think of songs like “Angel of Death”, “Dead Skin Mask”, “Mandatory Suicide”. And because I’m ADHD and like to think differently, viewing things from the opposite point of view is what made me a good debater, and knowing that, it makes me like certain music a little more when more thought is put into how do I write this from another perspective. Another kick-ass Canadian tune that I put on here is from a Canadian band called Odds, and it’s “Eat My Brain”. It’s just a great song. It comes on, I don’t want to skip it, it just evokes an emotion. And I don’t know what else to say about it, that’s it. It just evokes emotion. I don’t know if it’s positive, negative, or whatever, it just evokes something in me that just says, “Hey, this is a kick-ass tune, makes you want to play air guitar.” And for those people that know alternative, that wasn’t really much in the way of flashy solo, so when you’re playing air guitar, you are a rhythm guitarist. There are a few more Canadian bands, Our Lady Peace, Sloan, the Matthew Good Band, but ultimately one of my favorite alternative Canadian tunes to come out of the 1990s is a song called “Stereo” by The Watchmen. The song begins, “My life is a stereo, how loud does it go? What songs do I know? And whatever happened to my plans? Whatever happened to the life I thought I’d have?” This particular song just speaks to me because even in the 90s, when I was still in high school, I was still getting semi-pestered by my father as to what am I going to do with my life? What are my plans? Am I going to school? Am I going to work? How am I going to go to work if I don’t have education? And it was a comfort to hear it echoed back in docile tones and just knowing how frustrating it was in my own life to not have a direction and being pulled in many different directions. The song starts quiet and continues to build and build and build until the end. It’s loud, it’s raucous, it’s kicking down doors, knocking out windows, and ends with, “Life ends in stereo, pack me up and let’s go, put me anywhere. Please don’t think of leaving me behind. Whatever happens to you, I’ll get on just fine.” And for me, those lines echo the frustration that I felt and made me want to go outside and let it all out and be heard, so great tune, had to include it in this list.

There are songs on this list that come from albums that are just not skippable. The song “Girlfriend” by Matthew Sweet, the song “Army Of Me” by Bjork. Bjork’s album “Post” is probably one of the greatest alternative albums by a woman ever, and people can come ahead and challenge me on that. For me, there is no skippable song on that record, and the only reason I chose “Army of Me” was the fact that it was the song that led me into that album. I saw the video on Much Music, and I needed to know how the rest of this album sounded. It was new, it was upbeat, you could dance to it, but it was also angsty, and that level of angst throughout the song just pulls me in and says, “You’re going to listen to this album, and if you don’t like it, you will face an army of me.” And to that, I say, “I’m okay, I’ll listen, Bjork.” Another huge hit for this artist, also on an album that there’s not a bad song on it and you wouldn’t want to skip any of it, is “Are You Gonna Go My Way” by Lenny Kravitz. That song made it okay to dance to rock music again, in my opinion. It made it okay to listen to rock and not have it be something stale. Now, it would be years before I knew about the punk band Death, Bad Brains, and In Living Color. So at most, a lot of the black artists I knew about who played rock would be like Chuck Berry back in the ’50s and the ’60s, and then it was more funk and disco and Motown and R&B. It was very weird for me to see a black man with dreads kicking ass and asking me, “Am I going to go his way?” And the answer to that, of course, is hell yeah. And then listening to that album that fuses rock and funk and R&B with kick-ass guitar solos by Craig Ross, it just bubbles up, and there isn’t a bad tune on that album at all. I put it on this list because it comes from the ’90s, but also, in my own admittance, this is the first black artist in rock that I saw, which for me makes it the alternative to the mainstream that I had witnessed up until then.

How about some one-hit wonders from bands that probably didn’t hear much of after this one song dropped? If you’re the songs would be “Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger. Just a great all-out rock and roll song about almost alternative living. It made you want to dance, but then it also made you want to sit down and be like, “This is it, still a banger, I will never turn it off if it’s on the radio.” Another good one is the song “Pepper” by the Butthole Surfers. Just a whole bunch of sort of a monotone list of bad things that happened to people, and yet even through a monotone delivery, you still want to sing along with the chorus because quite literally, I don’t mind the sun sometimes and the images it shows. Another one-hit wonder I think just because Nada Surf was a bit ahead of its time with the song “Popular”. The thing that always stuck out to me with this song is when they tell you to wash your hair once every two weeks, and if you’re like me, you take a double take with that going maybe just maybe one or two more times within those two weeks, please. But again, just an interesting song in an interesting time that sort of relates to a lot of things that some of us were feeling in high school, that maybe we weren’t the popular people. I know I wasn’t. And the final one-hit wonder I’ll talk about is Marcy Playground’s “Sex and Candy”. I truly do not know what it’s about, and there’s been a bunch of times where I’ve wanted to google platform double Suede, and I’m not too sure I want to just in case I end up going down that rabbit hole. But hey, whatever floats your boat, I guess. Again, not a bad song, it just sort of sits with you and makes you wonder why “Sex and Candy”, you know? Could have been drugs and alcohol, but nope, we went with sex and candy. I don’t know about you, but I don’t infuse candy with sex because that gets sticky, and I don’t need that kind of mess, especially being a hairy gorilla like myself (and yes, we can joke about ourselves because I’m joking about myself).

There are a lot of other songs on this list. I picked out a few that I like. I’ll point out a couple more. Jane’s Addiction’s “Been Caught Stealing” is just a great banger. Dave Navarro just knows how to play a funky guitar riff, and yet still make it edgy. Perry Farrell’s voice is just very unique. Now, I will say Perry Farrell does show up twice on this list, but as I said, I separated it by bands, so Jane’s Addiction is on here, but also Porno for Pyros. The song “Pets” is fantastic, and I had to have it on this list.

Other songs by bands that were not totally in the ’90s, like The Cure, but “Friday I’m in Love” was my intro to them, and I went back in their catalog after hearing this song. Nine Inch Nails—originally I was going to put “Head Like a Hole” in as The Nine Inch Nails song, but I ended up not because that song came out in 1989. Not having that song to pull from, I went with “The Perfect Drug”. Excellent video, go watch it on YouTube, a phenomenal piece of work. David Bowie does show up on this list. Being influenced by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, I added the song “I’m Afraid of Americans”. Great tune, sort of my reasoning for not going down to the States. But David Bowie was always one of those artists that had to be contemporary, he couldn’t just sit back and lean on his catalog. He always had to change with the times. It’s almost like “Changes” meant something to him. So, teaming up with Trent Reznor to help produce that off his album “Earthling” was a great tune that is also a great album.

Also, had to add some hip-hop, but it also strays in from punk, which sort of makes these guys alternative. So, “What You Want” by the Beastie Boys is one of those tunes where you could play that live using instruments, and it would sound just like the album. The fact that they could flip between sampling and hip-hop and playing their own instruments for a catchy rock song like “Sabotage”, but this kind of blended the rock and the rap, and I sort of like it better.

Oh, and we can’t forget the women. I’ve been doing this entire list and I’ve only talked about Bjork. There were so many great women artists throughout the ’90s. I picked a few: “Criminal” by Fiona Apple, “If It Makes You Happy” by Sheryl Crow, The Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself”. There’s an alternative thought. The fact that nowadays people look at Cardi B and “WAP” and Nicki Minaj with “Anaconda”, and they all get so uptight about, “Oh, well, this is horrible for kids to listen to.” The Divinyls ultimately just said, “When I think of you, I touch myself.” Where did you think she was touching? That’s all I can say about that. Still a great tune. Hole and their song “Miss World”. Nothing really sums up the alternative mid-’90s lifestyle like the words “I’ve made my bed, now lie in it”. Courtney Love, for me, is underrated as a songwriter, but I also think she did herself no favors with the drugs and the sort of lifestyle that she’s worked her way out of. There’s also the band L7 and one of my favorite girl band tunes, “Volcano Girls” by Veruca Salt. Just an all-out banger. There’s nothing really I can say bad about it. It’s just a kick-ass tune you want to turn up every time you hear it in the car, roll the windows down and just scream out, “Leave me right here”. There’s also Garbage with “I Think I’m Paranoid”, mainly because at one point I did think I maybe still do, up in the air, and my go-to song if I ever just want to sit, contemplate and maybe even want to cry. It sort of makes me want to, thinking about it, only because Dolores O’Riordan is no longer with us. I had a lot of Cranberry songs that I could have picked, but this one still stands out as the best one for me, and that’s “Linger”. I will let you listen to that song and figure it out why for yourselves.

This isn’t everything, especially back in the ’90s when the Beatles released their Anthology albums. Of course, we got new Beatles music, and it was where I retuned into the Beatles in the ’60s and the ’70s and all the things that I had listened to up until that point. But alternative music still led the way because, of course, that’s what’s on the radio. I know we don’t listen to radios anymore, or if we do, it’s satellite radio in the car, but I can honestly say that alternative rock really did shape the way for me to feel angsty without sort of selling out, if we could say that. It gave us all a collective way of rebelling against the norms in the ’90s, mainly because as high schoolers, what did we have to rebel against? Although at the end of the ’90s, you could kind of see where a lot of that angst led us to, and I’m not saying music leads people to do things, that doesn’t really… people’s minds have to be really warped in certain ways to do horrible things. We saw at the end of the ’90s the rise of new metal bands like Korn and Limp Biscuit, taking their feelings to another level of angst and unleashing a lot more anger. Where in alternative, the anger was always sort of sitting just under the surface, we could be moody, but we saved it for the mosh pits to let it out.

So, I will link the Spotify playlist I created down below, aptly called “Alternatively Up”, and I hope you enjoy it. Take a minute, throw on some tunes. Maybe one will seem familiar to you and maybe allow yourself to go back to when you first heard that song. Take a small reminisce of what it was like for you when you listened to it. I always find it’s a great journey to do that, and I do almost every time I push play. And I hope that for anyone who listens to this, if you don’t recognize something, maybe if you like it, that will be the song that will open up an artist to you, and there are some really good ones on this list. Trust me, I should know, I lived it.

Photo by John Matychuk on Unsplash