Category: 1994

Songs published in 1994

Bristol’s Bitter Beat

On 25 October 2022

In 1994, 90ies

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.

First Breaths

By vanElden

On 13 September 2022

In 1994, 90ies, Around The World

We continue last week’s theme of only locally popular music and have a closer look at the Senegalese artist Youssou N’Dour, who is considered one of the most celebrated African artists in history. He joined Star Band, Dakar’s most popular band in the 1970ies at the tender age of sixteen and became one of the founding fathers of Mbalax, a hugely popular musical style combining traditional Senegalese music with the Latin styles popular at the time. But despite frequent collaborations with several well-known Western musicians (not least among them Peter Gabriel or Paul Simon) outside Africa he is by far best known for the single he did together with Swedish singer Neneh Cherry.

Cherry – whose family history is rather complicated and who moved a fair bit around the Western hemisphere in her life – stated that the huge success the song had worldwide took her quite by surprise, as the track was supposed to be an experiment.

The title of “7 Seconds” refers to the first few breaths in the life of a child, as of yet unaware of the harshness and violence of the world it’s coming into. It features lyrics in French, English and the West African Wolof.

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Staggering Stuttering

By vanElden

On 22 August 2022

In 1994, 90ies, Must-See-Video

The art of Scat singing – vocal improvisation with nonsensical syllables, vocables and other sounds produced by means of the human vocal apparatus – has been part of Jazz vocalists’ repertoire since at least 1911 and was popularised in the Roaring Twenties by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. Which is how a young John Paul Larking, a Californian child born in 1942, who had been suffering from a massive stutter ever since he began to speak, realised that there were means to communicate without having to go through what for him was constant humiliation: Music! He began to play the piano and became a proficient jazz pianist.

In 1990 Larkin moved to Berlin, where he found a thriving Jazz scene that welcomed him warmly and he became able to add singing to his acts as well despite the deep insecurities, receiving standing ovations. But when his agent Manfred Zähringer suggested to go one further and produce a song combining the modern jazz derivatives of dance and Hip Hop with scat singing he still was very apprehensive, fearing being laughed at and criticized again, as he was used to as a child. Luckily for us, his wife Judy was able to convince him to tackle the problem full frontal and speak about his struggle in his own way – through music.

He adopted a new persona along with it and Scatman John soon became a worldwide star at the age of fifty-three.

Sadly, he would contract lung cancer only four years later and died a month before the great party when we rolled over into 2000. Fsck Cancer!

Apocalyptic Celestial

By vanElden

On 17 August 2022

In 1994, 90ies, Guitar Gods, Must-See-Video

We briefly touched the importance of Detroit for Techno. Seattle provided a similar role for Grunge (a slang term meaning “repugnant” or “dirt”), an alternative rock subgenre that blends Punk and Heavy Metal and was hugely popular in the early to mid Nineties. While some of the bands considered to be typical representatives of the genre embraced the term, others – like Soundgarden, one of a number of big names to initially sign with “Sub Pop”, the Seattle label that popularised the musical variety – did not at all.

Formed in 1984 it took the band ten years to get to their zenith, the album “Superunknown” which contained a number of Grammy award winning hits, among which “Black Hole Sun” is probably the best-known.

The song was allegedly written in about 15 minutes, with lead singer Chris Cornell mishearing something on the news as the titular quote, then fantasizing about what might happen should a black hole collide with our sun. It’s a rather bleak end-time scenario, but the singer disclosed that writing such lyrics “usually make me feel better”.

When it came to producing the video the band at the time was quite disillusioned, as they had been working with a number of directors that did not understand their point of view. So they told Howard Greenhalgh that they just wanted to stand there, doing nothing and distinctively not be excited about it, while he was given a free pass to do whatever he liked around them – an idea he ostensibly loved.

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The Love-Child of Country and Techno

By vanElden

On 19 July 2022

In 1994, 90ies, Must-See-Video, Swanky Sweden

Two weeks ago we learned about a high point of Swedish music videos. This week we’re having a look at the other end of that scale.

We do not even need to go into Hegelian dialectic to realise that sometimes when you mix two things a beautiful new synthesis may result. Unfortunately, the opposite is true as well: take the worst of two musical genres and you might just end up with a frightening chimera. I honestly tried my best to do proper research and put some kind of spin on it. But you know what? It’s simply utter trash. And that’s all it is.

Highly successful trash, to be fair though. It held number one for over 13 weeks in Switzerland’s hit-parade, for example. So if nothing else this internal education gives an answer to whether really “everything was better in the olden times”, at least when these olden times happen to be just about 30 years ago. Hell, no, it wasn’t.