2023 Rock & Roll HOF screechfest

that 1996 playlist sucks. Whoever put it together didn’t do it Justice. No Beck. No Rage. No Cake. Here’s a much better playlist for 1996. It’s not as bad as the one you found makes it feel.

Best of Rock: 1996

 

Also, 1988? It's probably the last year where hip-hop didn't have a major influence on the chart and maybe the final year where Baby Boomer artists had consistent prominence too. It was my last year where top 40 radio was my first choice. I began to recoil at the banality and turned to classic rock (Hey! It was new to me!), and shortly after as I went to college, inde rock.

It was also where the record companies basically figured out MTV to the point where they could churn out formula in almost every genre.

I recall not liking or being blase about most of it at the time (Guns 'n Roses being an exception), but some of the songs that wouldn't have appealed to a 16-year-old me I'm more accepting of now. Whereas Guns 'n Roses has faded somewhat in my pantheon.

For example, in '88, I would have wanted to melt every cassingle of "Faith" I could find as I hated it and it was over-played too. Now? I can hear it for what it was ... a decent pop song.

And I'll defend "Shattered Dreams". It's fine. Perfectly harmless, breezy, check-your-brain at the door pop.

What I won't defend is Def Leppard's "Hysteria", which lorded over much of 1988. Back then it sounded over-produced and it still does.

And what I definitely won't defend is complete meltdown garbage like Chicago's "I Don't Want To Live Without Your Love". The soft rock stuff that was around for the entirety of the 80s really hit a nadir in '88.

 

Pretty sure all of those playlists I linked are just the Billboard's top 40 alternative songs for the given years.

Take it up with Casey Kasem (or Shadoe Stevens or whomever), keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars!

 

Looking deeper, y’all are giving the late 90s too much shit. Radiohead had some of their best stuff then. RATM the same. Foo Fighters. Everclear. Linkin Park. Neutral Milk Hotel (fight me). Arguably Pearl Jam’s best album (I would say Vs. is the best, but I’ve seen diehards say Yoeld). Rob Zombie. But 1999 fell off a cliff with the punk-pop fad.

Also, anyone who thinks late 1990s Pearl Jam was just copying themselves hasn’t listened to much late 1990s PJ. No Code and Yield sound way different than their first three albums. A lot of folks got turned off by No Code, which is a favorite for a lot of the faithful these days.

 

FUCK. YOU. BUBS!!!!!!!

I love me some schmaltzy Chicago, but yeah, they just turned it to 20 at the end of the '80s. Their best/worst song was "If She Would Have Been Faithful..." with this completely random bridge:

It's a paradox, full of contradiction
How I got from there to here
It defies a
Logical explanation

Dudes, we just want some schmaltzy pop we can slow dance to while trying to will our stiffy back into the shell so as not to create an embarrassing scene in the high school cafeteria. Lay off the triple word score Scrabble words.

 

My issue with Pearl Jam has less to do with their music, but how they handled themselves after "Vitalogy". (Which is my favorite PJ album.)

They were the biggest band in the world, much more popular than Nirvana, to be honest, because Pearl Jam wasn't as "weird" to the casual rock fan as Nirvana was. They seemed like they were trying to forge something cool. The whole Ticketmaster thing was a worthy cause.

But then, when there started to be ramifications for their stance? They backed off and consciously stepped back. They've said since they regret the Ticketmaster thing, but I don't think it hurt their popularity as much as they seem to think it did. They were just afraid of not being a live band and didn't want to sacrifice that.

Their right, but I do think if they had stuck with their cause, maybe even consciously put some of what they were peeved about into music, they could have led from the front and maybe the late 90s wouldn't have been so shit?

Then again? Maybe I'm just dreaming? Part of the reason I turned away from PJ at the time was I was getting tired of Eddie Vedder's voice, so perhaps it was just the natural way of things.

 

Well, that and Neil Peart was much, much better at it.

That and '70s-era Chicago was so much better. Much, much better. Go away, David Foster.

 

Thing is? There are songs on "Chicago 17" I still actively enjoy to this day.

Back then, they mixed up some OK mid-to-high tempo ones with the ballads, even if they were just Chicago by name at that point. It was basically Peter Cetera, David Foster and the Toto house band.

I know 70s Chicago fans recoil in horror at basically all of Chicago's 80s stuff, and I get that none of it equated to Terry Kath free-styling on guitar or (over-)complicated horn suites, but there's some listenable ones in there, especially if you were unaware of their 70s output, as I was at the time. I'll keep "Stay The Night" or "Along Comes A Woman" on the 80s on 8 if they happened to come on.

Once Cetera was fired, there was some sort of event horizon, where they all collectively decided to put out the most syrupy, jizz-on-the-microphone dreck imaginable.

Cetera's solo stuff, plus, "Chicago 18" fired off the starting gun in '86. Even Foster bailed by "Chicago 19" from 1988, which is beyond horrifying. I mean, the '88 iteration of the Beach Boys were lapping Chicago in quality at this point, and the '88 iteration of the Beach Boys deserve to be shot into the heart of the sun.

However, to your point, it probably would have been good boner medicine, only rivaled by "Anything For You" by Miami Sound Machine, which could put anyone's dong into dry dock.

The top 40 scene in 1988 certainly wasn't helped by our radio and MTV overlords either. Rather than dip a toe into what was then called college radio or towards the emerging scenes in the UK (where '88 is held in reverance), they decided that what we needed to cure what ailed us was fucking Samantha Fox.

 

Haha I was replying to Sam as Bubs posted and was going to mention that like a lot of dorky-looking acts in the mid-'80s, Chicago did a good job of tapping into the new medium and making entertaining videos. Stay The Night, Hard Habit To Break & Along Comes A Woman all had great videos (let's not talk about the pap that was You're The Inspiration). Even Look Away was solid. Of course, that was also several degrees schmaltzier than anything they'd done previously. And it might have also knocked "Kokomo" out of the top spot! Both were no. 1 hits that fall.

 

Guys, keep posting engaging stuff like this around here andI can go back to just reading you guys instead of posting fertilizer around here.

 

SJ.com: One person's posting gold is another's fertilizer.

 

Deadeye Dick helped curdle the cheese in '94 ...