Category: 90ies Page 1 of 4

Back in 1999 there was a big advertising campaign for Levis Jeans featuring “Flat Eric”, a nonsensical creature that the ad director Quentin Dupieux came up with and had made by Jim Hensons Creature Shop. It was constantly on air.

Since Dupieux, who is not only a film-maker but also a musician, had already created a piece of electronic music for the ad (in all of two hours) and it proved to be so hugely popular he decided to release it as well under his musician’s name Mr. Oizo (a corruption of the French word for bird, oiseaux, as he was called by his friends ever since they got really high a long time ago).

People craved for nonsense in those days and the song became a huge international hit.

The 90ies were characterised by a wide variety of musical genres of which we’ve only touched a few so far. One of them that emerged right at the beginning of the decade in Bristol, 100 miles west of London, was Trip Hop, a wild mixture of genres incorporating Acid-Jazz, Soul, Dub and Funk but typically prominently characterized by slowed down break-beat drums with heavily accented bass frequencies and strong melancholic feelings. The perfect soundtrack to lose yourself in a stoned daze.

While the title of first band to bring the genre to the attention of a wider audience would probably go to Massive Attack, the broad popularisation happened when Portishead – named after a small town on the coast just outside Bristol – released their debut album “Dummy”. It received universal critical acclaim even though the band had a strong disliking to press coverage. To be honest, I found it hard to choose just the one song for this blog, as it’s a complete work of art – one of those albums that really should be listened to from beginning to end, like The Beatles’ Abbey Road, Pink Floyd’s The Wall or Manu Chao’s Clandestino. Also, the songs tend to flow into each other and it’s often not quite so clear where one ends and the next one begins.

The video to “Sour Times” is made up of footage from the short film “To Kill A Dead Man”, a spy movie the band made around the same time.

When you hear the name Bruce Mathers, you, as an employee of VSHN, of course know that we’re talking about our Chairman of the Board. There is, however, a second person sharing the name who is almost as famous.

During his childhood Marshall Bruce Mathers’s family rarely stayed in one place for more than a year and his early life was marked by poverty, violent beatings, and an absent father who rejected his regular letters marking them with “return to sender”. Although he was interested in storytelling and the English language, he never made his peace with the school-system and dropped out at the age of seventeen. However, he was able to express his talent in the form of Rap, going by the name of M&M, which developed into MC Double M and finally Eminem.

Mathers invented yet another character, “Slim Shady”, a brutal and vicious alter ego that allowed him to express his anger with the state of the world and his life. He recorded an EP with the same name that in the aftermath of the 1998 Rap Olympics found its way to Dr. Dre, who upon hearing it requested to meet Eminem immediately. Despite criticism of Dr. Dre for hiring a white rapper and the artist’s fear of being starstruck by the famous producer, the collaboration proved to be very fruitful, with the introduction of Slim Shady – My Name Is – to a wider audience leading to world-wide success.

Unfortunately by today the videos on all official sites – including the one below – have been replaced by a variant with more advertiser friendly lyrics, but with a bit of searching you can still find the original version.

Come next Monday Eminem will celebrate half a century on this planet.

The song features samples from the song I Got To… by British singer Labi Siffre and similar to Coolio’s case, Eminem was required to change some lyrics before being allowed to use the track, as Siffre, being a gay activist, was not okay with the line “My English teacher wanted to have sex in junior high. The only problem was, my English teacher was a guy.”

Remember the time we talked about Frank Farian, the practice of having performers lip-sync songs, and the backlash this brought about? Well, just around the time Milli Vanilli got caught when their tape skipped at a concert it happened that another band of their label (Ariola Munich) called Snap! produced a video of their 1990ies hit “The Power”. The two German producers had gone to an American army base to find themselves an American rapper, but for the melody, they had flown in Penny Ford, who at the time was Chaka Khan’s vocal director and main backup singer. However, when it came to the video, instead of looking for Ford (who was working with Mick Jagger by then) they went back to the army base and found themselves another nice face, Jackie Harris, to mime the vocal track. Which did not sit well at all with Ford, who made sure to become the proper legitimate face of Snap!.

The relationship didn’t last long though, as the chemistry between Ford and rapper Turbo B. didn’t work out, and when Snap! asked her two years later to do the vocals on “Rhythm Is A Dancer” she couldn’t do it, as she had signed up with Sony and Ariola belonged to BMG. She was allowed to write for them though, and for the actual singing part, she found them Thea Austen as a replacement. Who performed in the video, too. Pinky swear.

Austen left the band shortly after the song was recorded, to be replaced by Madonna’s backup singer Niki Haris. It was way more complicated to keep track of which group consisted of which musicians with Eurodance than back with the good old Rock bands. But then again, nobody really cared.

“I’m as serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer” certainly must be a strong contender for the worst line in pop history.