What Were the 1990s?

Under the pen name of Mary Cadwalladr I often write about music from the 1950s and ‘60s, when I was not yet even a Necco wafer in my father’s glove compartment. I assume, when I write in this vein, that I am saying many things that must cause older people, with actual historical experience, to roll their eyes (though one of my greatest accomplishments last year was to have turned Greil Marcus on to the raw genius of Brenda Lee). I in turn roll my eyes at the things many younger people write about the music of the 1980s and ‘90s — but not when it’s Hinternet Associate Editor Sam Jennings doing the writing. We disagree on some substantial points concerning what the music of that period can “really” tell us about culture and history, and of all the artists he treats below Cat Power is the only one I’ve ever cared much about (ok, Janet Jackson too, I suppose, who was my first truly intense crush in her turn as Willis’s girlfriend on Diff’rent Strokes). But this is all productive disagreement, and never the sort to induce eye-rolling. Sam and I agree, fundamentally, that music criticism must not be merely an ornament of intellectual and material history, but is rather the clavis for understanding all of it — who we are and how we ended up here. Sam has promised eventually to supplement this masterful survol of the 1990s in music with a treatment of Tag Team’s “Whoomp! (There It Is)” (1993), for which we are all of course very eager. So play it all, again, Sam. —JSR

“Ahhhhh, the 1990s. The last of the great decades.” —Comment on a Gin Blossoms video, YouTube, 2 months ago

This will be the first in a series of on what I’m calling “The Metaphysics of Music.” Though in the course of these occasional pieces—covering certain eras and genres, even particular musicians—I’ll be playing pretty fast and loose with the term. In the most general sense, I’ll be dealing with meaning—and meaning is a tricky thing in music. By saying this, I don’t intend to dwell on the “content” or the “text” of the music in question, rather on what you could call the “signified.” My preoccupations will be its internal logic (form), and its external context (history/style/genre). Since music is