The song that represents the END of the 90s

In one sense - "I Have A Dream/Seasons In The Sun" by Westlife.
In another sense - "Steal My Sunshine" by Len.
Mental block following my bus accident means I cannot remember much about this period without looking it up.

Yeah really we're looking at 'event' singles, big hits that felt like they couldn't really have happened any earlier given fashions, musical climate etc. The Artful Dodger felt like a break between what came before and the start of what felt like the first 'new' music of the 00s. Rollin' wasn't the first nu-metal single by any means but felt eblematic of its arrival in the UK.

The Strokes were the first big 'haircut indie' band and seemed to signify a big sea-change from Britpop hangover to something else. Britney keeping Blur off #1 seems to fit as well for a different reason.

I can't quite place an equivalent moment in rnb or hip-hop, mostly because 1997-2003 feels like a mini-decade in itself.

artful dodger is a sound choice.* like limp bizkit, though, it feels like part of a mini-epoch of its own, that ended about 2002. there isn't really a big decade-defining sound in any decade.

*i wonder if it couldn't have happened earlier though. 'rip groove' happened.

I remember trying to count how old I’d be
When the clock struck twelve in the year two G
is possibly my favourite lyric ever

I think Artful Dodger's good, and 2001 had 'Do You Really Like It?', '21 Seconds' and 'Can't Get You Out of My Head', none of which could've been nineties records. I don't think any Spice Girl has been to number one since, which is also a pretty good marker.

goddamn it 'rip groove' bangs.

OTM. But its something of a different beast nonetheless.

wieny 10000% OTM. fred durst at woodstock.

Then I'll go with Le Tigre's "Deceptacon."

DFA Remix = first track of the 00's

"get low" a good call too

Umm, the spiceys still had top ten hits solo after 2000, but for number ones, here:

1 Emma Bunton What Took You So Long Apr 2001

1 Geri Halliwell It's Raining Men May 2001

that's it.

"What Took You So Long?" is a lovely record. First number one of the noughties I really liked.

Correction: first number one of 2001 I really liked since there were plenty of good 'uns in 2000 (as well as plenty of crap 'uns).

I can't quite place an equivalent moment in rnb or hip-hop, mostly because 1997-2003 feels like a mini-decade in itself.

-- Matt DC, Tuesday, February 19, 2008 1:58 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

This is kind of otm (and why I suggested "Get Low", because that one changed everything)

The straight 120 bpm 4/4 disco beat, however, was almost nonexistant for most of the 80s, until the French started picking it up again towards the end of the decade.

wtf a lot of well-selling American and British house music between '86 and '96 did this before the French

for me, 99/00 was the uk singles chart's peak in my experience, precisely because corporate-indie had yet to recover from the collapse of britpop, and it seemed like it might have permanently failed. fuck the haters.

99: "The Man Who"
00: "Parachutes".

And pop indie survived. Of course. It's the best current music after all. :)

2000 was a total blip

2000 was like the last cry of the 90s

http://www.kompaktkiste.de/cd/_artist/kwerk/cdem562.jpg

Blur's "Tender" seems to me to be the end of the 90's, particularly when it got stopped from being number one by Britney's "Baby one more time" which was the start of the 00's.

I'll go with this as well.

confession:

I had to google "Windowlicker", which makes me question how era-defining or ending it is. Plus, i guess i think of Aphex Twin as hella 90s.

I did not have to google Windowlicker. And Aphex Twin is hella 90s.

Electronica=hella 90s.

Unless it's called electro, electroclash or eurotrance.

aphex is hella 90s but windowlicker was atypical and that's why it feels not-90s. but this is, again, LAST SONG OV 90S, so being hella 90s is not a mark of disqualification.

Carrot Rope. Last song on the last Pavement album

"Windowlicker" was kind of electro, so you may have a point there. But Aphex Twin is a bit too leftfield (with a lower case "l") to really have much impact.

Possible parallel: "Rollin'" (top of Twin Towers) as end of the 1990s; "Don't Cry" by G'n'R (top of an L.A. skyscraper) was the end of the 1980s.

Aphex Twin sounds nothing like Leftfield.

Windowlicker is significant because Aphex was seen as the standard-bearer for 90s modernism and it's his last record that felt remotely 'new', as opposed to drill and bass retreads or acid revivalism.

Aphex Twin sounds nothing like Leftfield.

Which is why I stressed the lowercase l.

"Have you never heard of irony, Baldrick?"
"Yes sir, of course I have. It's a metal like goldy and silvery."

Some really great picks on this thread for start of the 00's - "Deceptacon," the "Fell In Love With A Girl" video, "Idioteque," things that just seem hard to imagine as existing in the 90s. And for talking about something that firmly, undeniably spelled the END of the 90s I guess that makes sense. But somehow the side of the thread that interests me more is trying to put a finger on the last song OF the 90s, the dead-ending of the decade's exhausted musical project (whatever that might mean).

I vote "No Way Out" by Stone Temple Pilots, or "Pinch Me" by Barenaked Ladies (especially the video)...

Will 2k

I like Doctor Casino's argument (end of 90s vs. start of 00s) and the suggestion of things by Stone Temple Pilots and Barenaked Ladies, though I've never heard the songs in question. STP and the Ladies could only have existed in the 90s, and can be viewed as self-limiting mechanisms: inevitable yet toxic byproducts of the decade.

Similarly, "Pretty Fly for a White Guy"

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31C6CF5CGPL._AA240_.jpg

The particular thing that strikes me about "No Way Out" is that it was a comeback attempt - the first time an alt-rock band found itself in the position of having to <i>make</i> a comeback attempt, no longer the de facto music of today, but the music of yesterday. The thing about "Pretty Fly" is that I think it hit entirely new constituencies. I'm thinking in terms of age demographics here - people who were fourteen when it came out thought it was something fun and new, and went on to buy future crappy novelty Offspring songs. With STP, nobody who wasn't around for the first wave even came close to caring. This is also about the point at which it started to feel depressing and boring when someone would list "alternative" as one of their musical interests on Geocities, etc.

In the same vein, "Go Let It Out" by Oasis, but that's such an explicit 60s throwback that it's hard to really make it work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fell_in_Love_with_a_Girl

I'm listening to Bellybutton by Jellyfish now, from 1990. This record still strikes me as totally 90s: guys in Cat In The Hat hats, bright colors, lots of acoustic instruments (strings, pianos, horns). And I was thinking that maybe the end of this sound was The Soft Bulletin, for better or for worse: all the things on Bellybutton but jacked so loud that it sounded like it was gonna burst. So that's my vote, the last song on The Soft Bulletin, whatever it was, "Sleeping On The Roof" or something (and maybe the remixes at the end of the record are the birth of the 2000s or something).

An involved discussion in the pub resulted in "This is Hardcore" being declared the death knell of britpop.

I'm listening to Bellybutton by Jellyfish now, from 1990. This record still strikes me as totally 90s: guys in Cat In The Hat hats, bright colors, lots of acoustic instruments (strings, pianos, horns). And I was thinking that maybe the end of this sound was The Soft Bulletin, for better or for worse: all the things on Bellybutton but jacked so loud that it sounded like it was gonna burst.

If you were right, then I would have loved the 90s. I most certainly didn't.

I am really surprised that no one has followed up on Fell In Love With A Girl. When you combine that song with Hate To Say I Told You So by The Hives, and Last Night by The Strokes, it pretty much ended the dominance of electronic music in the US.

I think those "garage" singles reset the clock for music in the first half of the decade.

it pretty much ended the dominance of electronic music in the US.

I loved the White Stripes and Hives songs both, but I don't remember this dominance of electronic music before that. What specifically do you have in mind? The "electronica" thing was several years earlier, although there were still a few random semi-high-profile singles along those lines (like BT & M Doughty's fabulous "Never Gonna Come Back Down"), but I remember chart rock as being pretty MOR post-alt-rock (things like Third Eye Blind's "Never Let You Go," Everclear's "Wonderful," etc), and chart pop being the stereotypical boy band/girl idol mix...

Brandy - What About Us? comes to mind.

Prml Scrm: Kill All Hippies

Geir, a lot of 90s US "alternative" music has sounds like that on the first Jellyfish record: early Posies, early 90s REM, PM Dawn. Both grunge and gangster rap splintered the marketplace, but you still hear these sounds throughout the 90s: most of the fans made their way into the jam band scene (you saw those Cat In The Hat hats at Phish shows), but there's also the Elephant 6 scene.

This is all just my US perspective, and particularly my Georgia-Texas perspective, which colors my view of the 90s. At least in the main scenes I traveled in, Britpop was mainly a less texturally-interesting version of this stuff: some great songs, but mostly just guitar combos (same could be said of GBV and Pavement, but they fit in better because of the whimsical lyrics I think).

that's interesting 'cos to me I see that Jellyfish/ Shiny Happy People/ World Party thing as the end of the late-eighties acoustic pop thing. I'd put, say, aztec camera, fairground attraction, deacon blue in the same rough category. Can see the lineage to Phish fans, but not so much to Elephant6?

See, it's funny (and again, it may be that I spent so much time in Athens that my view is blurry), but I see the lineage of these sounds more in Elephant 6 than in Phish etc. I'm thinking of the usual suspects: OTC, Elf Power, Apples in Stereo. I guess I see the relation between all these in the instrumental textures: mostly not rocking out with guitars (and when this sound breeds with electronic sounds in Chicago, you get Tortoise etc: see, isn't this kind of armchair genealogy fun?).

Thomas, you mention bands like Aztec Camera that I don't know: I'm too provincial. But in the US (particularly Georgia), if there are 80s influences, it's Camper van Beethoven. I think a lot of the influence was political: there was a feeling that we needed to be better progressives, but prog rock in the US had become sort of right-wing (emphasis on chops rather than "feeling it") and so progressives needed a new sound. Bringing in DIY string and horn sections met the challenge.

Crowded House are another example.

And I can see some musical similarities between them and Elephant 6 bands. But for me, Elephant6 took the Sgt Peppers template and made it dirty & lo-fi. If anything, what distinguishes the early nineties stuff we're talking about is that it's understated, nicely recorded, organic and "tidy"-sounding.

I kinda see most of those E6 bands as being a US counterpart to stuff like Super Furry Animals or Gorkys over here

"Beautiful Day" opened the door for "Fell in Love with a Girl".

on SFA and Gorky's: totally, those two bands were the ones from the UK that stuck the most among the scene in the US I'm talking about.

I got the impression that the E6 bands were trying to get a high 60s sound, but didn't have the cash. But I don't think that's all they were trying to get. And you're right that Jellyfish was nicely recorded, on a major label. I don't think Jellyfish was particularly understated though: "The King Is Half Undressed" is an enormous sounding record, with rock signifiers (climaxes, etc.) but with different textures than usual in rock (first Lenny Kravitz album another one that fits here in the early 90s).

yes and yes on jellyfish and lk.

in my thinking, the difference there (and with presidents, ween...things i cant think of) was the split between "alternative" and "indie". jellyfish didnt want to be a bar band or do the van circut, they wanted to be stars, which is much more the british formula. and the sort of thing current us blogrock-pop seems to go for. a twist on what can be huge vs. going for a certain sound cause yr into it.