re: Billie Joe Armstrong to renounce US Citizenship because Trump is President

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Rock Legend…

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I had heard of Green Day and was familiar with a couple of their tunes, but I couldn’t tell you the name of a band member. I know who Billy Joe Shaver is, or was.

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Tell that coward to renounce his citizenship as well.

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it's literally the title of the thread

I really don’t care what a 60 year old dude that wears eyeliner says or does.

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Billie Joe Armstrong to renounce US Citizenship because Trump is President
Seldom Seen

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Good.

trade his despicable arse for a nice Mamacita from Cuba

Until he actually leaves he’s a Walking Contradiction.

Achtung Baby and OK Computer the only legitimately great 1990s rock albums. I would have said Pearl Jam ten years ago, but I literally NEVER listen to Pearl Jam. I always go back to the first two I mentioned.

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Billie Joe Armstrong to renounce US Citizenship because Trump is President

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How punk of him.

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In my opinion, the 90's are mid. There's tons of very good music, but not a ton that's truly great. On the flip side, not a ton of music that's truly awful either. It's like comparing a consistent base hitter vs a batter that hits lots of homeruns but also frequently strikes out. The best of the 70's outshines literally any other decade, but the worst of the 70's is absolutely putrid. The 80's are similar in that regard. The 90's had consistently good music, and a ton of variety, but little that was truly "great" in my opinion.

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Well, by the mid-90s a gigantic shift had happened in the music industry that started music going downhill well before file sharing (although that was the final cancer that made its condition terminal, at least for artists).

I was actually a professional musician from about 1992-2000, so I had a front row seat to all of this.

What happened is that the government rescinded a previous policy that limited the number of radio stations any one entity could own (I think 9 was the magic number). Once they did, corporate conglomerates like ClearChannel started buying up entire radio markets and formatting the stations according to extremely narrow and specific and sterile standards. "This is going to be our R&B radio station for black females aged 18-26. This one is going to be the alternative rock station for males aged 20-28," etc.

And they started market testing songs, and they controlled what songs got played from the corporate office. No longer could a d.j. in Chicago come across an indie band he liked and put their song into rotation which was how a LOT of acts got discovered back in the 70s and 80s and early 90s. Local stations playing local indie artists.

Now, if a song didn't market test well the radio station wouldn't add it. So songs got one chance.

That made a huge difference...you remember that song by Chris Issak, "Wicked Game?" That song took almost TWO YEARS to break. It was released in July of 1989 and didn't become a hit until March of 1991, and only after a d.j. in Atlanta championed it and began playing it all the time at his station. Then the video got put in heavy rotation at Mtv and the rest is history.

But if it had just gotten one chance with radio market testers it never would have gotten off the ground.

So. Once this radio trend happened, artists and labels began to get a whole lot more risk averse, and labels especially started only trying to sign acts that sounded like acts that were already successful. They got to the point that they would only very rarely take a chance on anything new sounding.

I remember looking at a trade magazine from around 1991 and another one from around 1998, and there was no comparison. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like in 1991 the average radio station played 8 brand new artists and added 20 new songs in a week, and in 1998 it played 1 brand new artist and added 4 new songs. Crazy difference in a very short period of time.

And you can see it if you think about the decade. Most of the innovative music that I can think of during the 90s came out at the beginning or the middle of of the decade, not near the end. There's a reason for that.

BUT, I will say that the 90s was probably the best sounding decade for music. Meaning that the production value of the music was extremely high.

People were still using equipment like Neve consoles and Fairchild limiters and Studer tape machines and vintage Neumann microphones that were still in pristine shape, and they really knew how to use them. And Pro Tools was available to edit and tune with (nobody yet was tracking or mixing with it...we would fly it over to the computer to edit, then fly it back to tape). And budgets were extremely high. The best sounding equipment with the most evolved skills set to use it for that iteration and plenty of time to spend in the studio to get it right.

What you didn't see in the 90s was as much originality. For the reason I already mentioned, but also the 90s is when culture started folding back on itself. A pretty big chunk of 90s music were recycled trends. Nirvana was a punk throw-back from the mid-70s. Pearl Jam was a blues-based rock throwback formula from the 70s. Smashing Pumpkins was a rehash of T Rex from the 70s.

Not bashing these bands, but think about the 70s and 80s. During those decades you saw rap for the first time, you saw glam rock (for the first time), you saw punk emerge (for the first time), new wave bands, hair metal, soft rock, heavy metal, Reggae, Ska, disco, prog rock, etc., etc. Music was still evolving and new genres were still emerging.

The 90s were mostly (not entirely) like the musical equivalent of kids rediscovering Chuck Taylors.

Anyway...that's all you never wanted to know about why the music in the 90s was good but not great. There were a lot of really vanilla turds being polished in really great studios so as to avoid running afoul of the radio testers.