As 1964 was for British Invasion Pop and 1977 for Punk, 1994 now emerges as the year for Alternative Rock. The early ’90s may have produced more innovative stuff, but 1995-on saw a sliding off of sorts as quantity overtook quality. It’s inevitable now that a genre clearly defined by name as to exist outside the mainstream would implode once it achieved a certain level of popularity.
I spent the year in transition from a commuting college freshman to a sophomore living in a dorm. I was at the obvious age and in the ideal environment to take to alt-rock; shortly after moving on campus (and about six months after the demise of WARP-AM), Milwaukee got its first commercial radio station in the genre (then called “New Rock 102ONE”), exposing us all to new sounds we mostly hadn’t heard before. That is, until a few months on when they became painfully familiar due to the sort of repetition you’d find on any Top 40 station, of course.
This is a long way of justifying why my 1994 mix is heavily alt-rock, although I’ve sidestepped the era’s most heavily saturated artists (like the bands mentioned in Pavement’s sardonic and lovely “Range Life”) in favor of definitive but less overplayed (and in some cases, near-forgotten) selections (Tori Amos, Morrissey, Indigo Girls, Liz Phair.) I’ve also included some longtime personal faves/non-hits by Milla (dropping the “Jovovich” for her brief music career), Sam Phillips, Luscious Jackson and Soul Coughing and a few token pop hits outside the alt-rock spectrum (Erasure’s fluke late hit, M-People’s retro-house crossover).
Of course, Britpop theoretically overlapped with alt-rock, even if little beyond Oasis’ best single crossed over here. Blur’s arguably best album track, The Auteurs’ more cerebral take on the sound and Echobelly’s distaff Smiths notwithstanding, one could stretch the definition of the term. After all, what is a terrific Alison Moyet single (why it never became a drag lip-synch standard is puzzling), an electro-folk epic from Saint Etienne or a sun-kissed but still salty almost-hit from Scots The Jesus and Mary Chain (with Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval) great British pop? Aussies (the proto-Belle and Sebastian twee sweetness from Frente!) and Canadians (Sloan, Nova Scotia’s finest) also showed Britpop could scan as an attitude that didn’t even necessarily need to be from the UK.
Tracey Thorn is easily the year’s MVP, both for an artistic comeback with her own duo Everything But The Girl (their big hit from the same LP would not hit big until the following year) and her indelible collaboration with Massive Attack, whose trip-hop (also repped here by Portishead and the perpetually trend-spotting Madonna) resonated more deeply with me than alt-rock ever did. I haven’t even addressed the lithe fragility of Jeff Buckley, the underrated omnipresence of Michael Stipe (both with his band and as a guest on a Kristin Hersh song) or Sinead O’Connor stripping down newly deceased Kurt Cobain to his essential core. But “Bad Reputation” still sounds remarkably fresh today–hearing it always reminds me that I should explore Freedy Johnston’s back catalogue a little further.
1994: Nobody’s Going To Tell Me Who To Love
- Tori Amos, “God”
- Luscious Jackson, “Deep Shag”
- Jeff Buckley, “Grace”
- Sloan, “Coax Me”
- Milla, “Gentleman Who Fell”
- Freedy Johnston, “Bad Reputation”
- Everything But The Girl, “Rollercoaster”
- Ani DiFranco, “Overlap”
- Kristin Hersh, “Your Ghost”
- Sam Phillips, “I Need Love”
- Echobelly, “Insomniac”
- Erasure, “Always”
- Alison Moyet, “Whispering Your Name”
- The Auteurs, “Chinese Bakery”
- M People, “Moving On Up”
- Soul Coughing, “Casiotone Nation”
- Indigo Girls, “Least Complicated”
- Saint Etienne, “Like A Motorway”
- Massive Attack, “Protection”
- Madonna, “Bedtime Story”
- Sugar, “Your Favorite Thing”
- Frente!, “Accidentally Kelly Street”
- Steve Wynn, “Wedding Bells”
- Liz Phair, “Whip-Smart”
- Pavement, “Range Life”
- Ween, “What Deaner Was Talking About”
- Roxette, “Sleeping In Your Car”
- Sinead O’Connor, “All Apologies”
- Portishead, “Glory Box”
- The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Sometimes Always”
- Oasis, “Live Forever”
- Blur, “This Is a Low”
- Morrissey, “The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get”
- Seal, “Newborn Friend”
- R.E.M., “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?”
Haunted Jukebox 