Please stop being such a jerk towards OZ. Hating 90s dorks for hating 90s dorks is the most 90s dork thing you can do, you 90s dork.

It's funny because I spent most of the 90s listening to 1950s academic tape music and first generation Chicago blues.

And the Cramps until I got on Usenet and discovered how much rawer the original versions of the songs they played were.

its like you open your mouth and 90's college pretense falls out

*gets popcorn and a lawn chair*
*sits down*

It's depressing to think that people don't grow out of that sort of pretense long before college. I'm talking about like 10th grade. By the time you're 18 or 19 you should know better.

okay you have always been a hipster but like before it was cool

*pinches chin*
*nods and grins*

The 90's were music's lost decade.

All things considered, I never had much of a problem with Spin Doctors, but I could only name you that one song, which I can't name off the top of my head but know how it goes. We all know the one. I sort of lumped them in with Blues Traveler, Dave Matthews Band, Toad the Wet Sprocket.. stuff that I wouldn't seek out but wouldn't feel physically ill if some girl I liked played them a lot (some girl I liked played them a lot, my first crush actually) vs. other bands where there was just no musical talent whatsoever, just a cliche evil marketing guy getting four attractive guys and girls in a room and having them lipsync.. I dunno.. am I seriously defending the Spin Doctors right now?

People love to hate on the 90s, but I'm not getting the hate. The 80s were rubbish all right; they amped up all our worst national instincts, and the music, TV, and movies were typically shit. And the 00s were too full of the US just plain falling apart for me to see much good. The 90s were a relative island of sanity and promise, compared to what came before and after.

I'm glad to hear "Jimmy Olsen's Blues" again ... a fun song, the worst I can say about it is, in the comics Jimmy was traditionally after Lois's sister Lucy.

http://comicsalliance.com/ask-chris-120-i-hate-you-so-much-luc y-lane/

It's hard to tell whether you're defending them or not, but the song you're referring to is either "Two Princes" or "Little Miss Can't be Wrong".

I had the fucking album, and I think it was a good album. I sort of lump the Spin Doctors with the Presidents of the United States of America and the Bare Naked Ladies.

I was already past 30 and starting to lose touch with what was current, but I have a general sense that for music, the 90s were better than the 80s. Don't ask me to back that up with anything.

Most of the 80's pop culture is great. Suck your own dick.

The 90s was better than the 80s was better than the 70s was about as bad as the 60s. Everything from the 00s on was internet culture, at least as far as I'm concerned, so analog pop culture ceased to be relevant.

I was 12 when Woodstock 94 happened, and I gotta say it's better than the shit we had in the late 90s like Limp Biscuit and Korn; even if it was kinda MOR it had a good attitude. Also, Peter Gabriel and Gil Scott-Heron and Aphex Twin performed there.

Oh and the Violent Femmes. That's the only music I could pick out of the whole list that I actually like. Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks is one of my favorite albums but I doubt if he played anything that anybody wanted to hear; just sounded like Grandpa music like "HEY KIDS I WAS AT THE FIRST WOODSTOCK TOOOOOOooooo NOW GET READY FOR THE RED HOT PEPPER BAND YEAaaa"

The secret is that every decade sucked.

The music industry can make you crawl a mile on your knees to beg for just plain ol' MOR stuff where the bandmates actually formed a band together and play and sing live.

I would lick a bus station clean for that now.

Oh I stand corrected: even though Dylan was living like right there, he didn't actually play the first festival. I've only been to two big ones: Lollapalooza when they were still touring, and Pitchfork, mostly because I wanted to do SOMETHING for an ad-hoc honeymoon years after I got married. Besides a criminally under-attended performance by Slint performing Spiderland in its entirety (I can't complain, I got to be in the front) and Yoko Ono, I can't really remember too much about the bands. I was mostly just excited to run into my friends that I hadn't seen since college.

Most of the 80's pop culture is great. Suck your own dick.

Don't you think I would if I could?

Please don't interpret anything I say to mean that I'm actually taking a position on this stupid argument. It doesn't get a lot more meaningless then generalizing about entire decades of music, and whether they're "good" or "bad".

But I do like the Spin Doctors, or at least that one album I bought around 95. Incidentally, they are still together.

Any decade in which the Royal Trux ended up on a major label cannot be all bad. I suppose you can criticize the nineties for cannablizing eighties-era college rock, but it's hard to deny that interesting stuff ended up on the charts every once in a while. This is much more than you can say for the eighties, in which culture that was worth half a damn had to avoid getting crushed by shit like Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen.

I think a lot of interesting pop music charted, but our definitions of "interesting" may vary greatly. A lot of the sounds would be hugely influential. Of course a lot of it was total garbage, but between what got played on college radio stations and what was happening with electronic instrumentation and hip-hop and it becomes a lot easier to look passed the really, really shitty stuff like Bon Jovi (who sucked worse in the 90s, so there's that).

This vid made me look up the woodstock 94 line up, and I could make about a quarter of a days worth of stuff I'd watch. Aphex Twin is an obvious highlight, but I guess they cut his set short because they realized he signed a fake name on his contract.

I'd probably check out most of the stuff on the Ravestock stage, particularly Aphex Twin, Orbital, and DJ Spooky. Henry Rollins, the Cranberries, Primus, NIN, Green Day, Metallica sadly enough because they weren't dead to me until Napster, probably stop by for a couple Cypress Hill songs, just to say I saw them. Oh, and Jackyl, because fuck you guys.

Contextually, there are maybe twice the amount of good bands. But now, in (almost) 2015, the good bands could have played on one stage in one day.

... but Ayumi Hamasaki's debut album wasn't released until 1999! There were a lot of good J-rock and visual kei bands in the 90s, yes, but J-pop didn't start coming into it's own until the 00s, and even then, it wasn't until the last few years that the genre peaked with Sakura Gakuin.

I mean, what good 90s J-pop bands were there? I can't think of any, aside from a few 80s bands that were still around, and a few 00s bands that technically got their starts in the ass-end of the 90s. You had no Ayumi, no Tokyo Girls' Style, almost no capsule, not even AKB48 (who are honestly kinda dumb but girls love them for some reason so w/e). Morning Musume was sort of active in the 90s, for like two years with no good members yet, and Pizzicato Five was around, but again they're an 80s band so they don't really count. I guess maybe Puffy AmiYumi would count as a 90s J-pop band that was worth listening to... but everyone knows that Puffy is just the poor otaku's version of Hangry&Angry, so who cares?

Honestly, Caminante, you usually have good taste when it comes to things like anime and also ponies, but your taste in music is laughably terrible! Laughably!

J-Pop? What about 90s punk, rockabilly and shibuya-kei coming out of Japan in the 90s?

You had Shonen Knife, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant, The 5678s, and Pizzicato Five off the top of my head, not to mention Fantastic plastic Machine and Kahimi Karie.

And Guitar Wolf! GUITAR WOLF!

And Takako Minekawa! And Super Junkie Monkey! And Buffalo Daughter!

Towa Tei, Cornelius.... I could go on for a while.

EXACTLY! Thank you, kingarthur. The 90s was the time for J-rock. J-*rock*! Good J-pop was a strictly 00s and 10s phenomenon.

Malice Mizer, Dir En Grey, L'Arc-En-Ciel, and of course FUCKING X JAPAN. Versus, what? That chick who sang the theme song for the Ranma 1/2 OVAs?

All I have to do to prove you wrong is bring up Megumi Hayashibara, but I might as well bring up Chisa Yokoyama, Yoko Takahashi, Namie Amuro, and Nanase Aikawa, just to show off.

And, yes, 90s J-rock was also great. Nobody's going to argue against that.

Megumi and Chisa were voice actresses who happened to sing anime tunes on the side, so they don't really count. Nanase and Namie were really only notable for being on Avex, and as such being early templates for Ayumi (see: Puffy vs Hangry&Angry). That leaves Yoko, and yeah, maybe in the 90s she was good, with her whole Japanese Gloria Estefan sound that got all the anime ladies grooving, but I put it to you that nowadays Yoko would be barely fit to open for Tokyo Girls Style.


J-pop was well worth listening to back in the 90s, seeing as all the best J-Pop had yet to be made and really, how could music fans know any better? It's not like Led Zeppelin fans could wake up in 1976 and say, "hey! We should stop listening to this hippie crap, because in forty years we'll have BABYMETAL!" But your initial statement: "The only thing worth listening to in the 90s was J-pop", is clearly false.

Oh, yeah, sure, the ones that prove you wrong don't count! You know you're on your way to making a great point when you have to say something like that!

But they don't prove me wrong, and they don't count. Even if they did count, which they don't, they'd still just be cruddy pale shadows of post-Ayumi J-pop bands, and there's no way they'd be the only things worth listening to in the 90s.

Hell, you yourself have *already admitted* that your original statement was incorrect! You said, and I quote: "90s J-rock was also great." ...ahem, great enough to listen to?!

Yes, clutch to semantics like a drowning rat clutching to a waterlogged sailor's corpse! That's certain to make you less wrong! Hey, if you're going to get that pedantic, I'm going to include J-rock as part of the spectrum of J-pop! I'm still right!

It's not semantics when you've already admitted you're wrong. You're welcome to amend your original statement: you are perfectly entitled to shift the goalposts, and in fact I wish you would, as by including J-rock in your statement, you would be conceding what kingarthur and I have been saying all along! You'd still be wrong, of course, as there was plenty of stuff other than J-rock that was worth listening to in the 90s - C-pop, for example, or even K-rap - but at least you'd be admitting that the king and I are right about the 90s being a J-rock decade.

Nobody mentioned Silverchair, Radiohead, or Weezer either.

(I still listen to Nirvana and Radiohead, and I make no apologies. Even for No Apologies.)

(er, All Apologies. okay I suck as a Nirvana fan. bite me.)

Do you really think Nirvana was that terrible, Mr Holmes? And anyways, they weren't at Woodstock 94, owing to Kurt being, well, dead.

Nirvana inspired more shitty bands than any other band in history.

"Nickleback OWNS this retarded shit"

You should pick a different, less well known, but equally horrible band. Using Nickleback as your bait comes too far out of left field, and is way too obvious. Remember: credibility and believability are the key.

Nickleback could work in, say, a discussion about Nirvana - "fuck this shit, Nickleback was LOADS better than Shitvana" - because Nickleback had a close resemblance to Nirvana (see: spikes and his comment about "shitty bands") and it's not too big of a leap to go from one to the other; people will be jarred by your statement, but still able to accept it.

Thanks man it was actually really forced and I wished I could have taken it right back. You got my back dude. Peace.