Once the Inevitable 90s Revival occurs which genre will be the most influetial or popular?

there was so much anti-eighties rhetoric in the nineties, iirc, that its revival seemed unlikely. (i guess the 90s was my first go-round as a person as well: i hadn't figured out how these things work.) there doesn't seem to be as radical a disjuncture between the nineties and now, though, not by comparison.

reivials of daft punk, massive attack, portishead, nirvana -- sure not to blow anyone's mind.

― lipster grifter (history mayne), Friday, 19 March 2010 15:14 (2 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah, i remember people being outraged by the idea of an 80s revival. zoot woman did an interview around 2001 where the journo was all like "but... thatcher and yuppies and blah blah blah... think of the children"

90s revivalism pretty big among UK wtfeverstep merchants, whether it's Zomby rave nostalgia, Joker and Ikonika sampling old MegaDrive games, Subeena's general Warpiness... whether this actually informs any new UK pop idk

― mdskltr (blueski), Friday, 19 March 2010 15:22 (2 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah, was just about to post something along these lines. i guess it started with burial bringing back the 2step beats.

Fugees - ugh no

s fucking b (for the rest of the post too)

Reagan/Thatcher actually looking pretty good next to their 00s revival counterparts.

A word of warning:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/18/alphabeat-la-roux-goldfrapp-90s-revival

― Ned Raggett, Friday, 19 March 2010 15:06 (3 hours ago) Bookmark

whoever this "tom ewing" guy is, he obviously knows shit all about music.

*loud joyful bar banter suddenly stops, icy glares from everyone at "max arrrrgh"*

Please no Arrested Development. They seem like the exact thing that doesn't get revived; a watered down version of Native Tongues rap, which I guess had too many reference to doo-doo to get a cross-the-board foist.

and running through it were the huge, sad keyboard sounds of 90s trance records – great glass spears of melancholy sending me back to a time I never realised I could miss

trance could be a key sign of a return of the repressed uk 90s, has the requisite emotional directness at the expense of tastefulness that revivalists like to fuck with oh so playfully

not the same with scandinavians doing it (even silent shout a bit i guess)

ardkore revival was always easier cos it was fairly clownish to begin with

whoever this "tom ewing" guy is, he obviously knows shit all about music.

Send in a clown -- don't bother, one's here.

the answer o the question is..... swing revival

We will see the true dawn of the Alexvanderpoolera
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mYA0gir4PA

I could totally see more R&B vocal groups.

lol u kno i <3 ewing rly.

trance and garage is where it's at on the retro tip, super OBVS

I think dubstep has as much potential to branch into an IDM revival as it does a trip-hop revival.

Yeah, trance is gonna make it's way into pop music.

Somehow...

sampling will def come back big time. not that sampling was strictly a 90s phenomenon, but it seemed to permeate practically all forms of popular music apart from indie rock

maybe the korg microsampler will get people into sampling in the same way the microkorg got people into synths last decade

I think it might probably come as a natural transition between the late 80s and early 90s. Thinking about music and clothing - like the 'Graffiti Gear' windbreaker featuring Garfield as a muscle man in the following video - from 1991:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK4Rc0uuvIE

Artists like Tensnake and Joy Orbison sound at least to my ears like they are exploring that path and they seem to be getting favorable attention... might be another 3 or 4 years until it reaches the mainstream and makes it 'uncool' before we move to the teenage angst and nostalgia of the mid 90s.

Sampling is welcome (although it never really went away.) Just please spare us the wall-of-drumloops that plagued mid-90s alt-rock.

sampling is pretty complicated litigation-wise, doubt we'll ever see its revival on the scale of its prevalence in the 90s. it's just too expensive.

i think of the 80s as the really big sampladelic era ne way. that important gilbert o'sullivan vs biz markie (iirc) case was in about 1990 i think.

yeah peak is like '87-'9something

sampling, trancey synths, 2step, boyzIImen early mariah TLC

stickers/t-shirts of calvin peeing on things never really went away (though it is also a kind of sampling)

The nineties' collective memory largely saw the eighties as a monstrous joke.

exactly -- and that never happened to the during the noughties. i don't think, anyway. trousers got tighter but there's no noughties equivalent to "the wedding singer" if you get me.

What about Eurodance? I'm sure to many people stuff like this feels as corny now as 80s lipstick pop felt in the 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH7Mn5fHmNI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKuRn8gjMhs

Somehow I feel this isn't gonna be the style the inevitable 90s revivalists are going to bite.

yeah you might be right, but that stuff was always seen as slightly cheesy

i guess i mean that even stuff that was "taken seriously" in the 1980s (yeah yeah, needs unpacking) wasn't much loved in the 1990s

or so it seemed to me

also surely the "uncool" stuff is exactly the stuff that *will* get revived?

Though if this style is gonna come back in vogue, I'm gonna be so happy, because those were THE BEST DAYS EVER!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BhueqxT4Ss

also surely the "uncool" stuff is exactly the stuff that *will* get revived?

When the first ironic Eurorapper shows up I'm gonna believe you, but not quite yet.

yeah you might be right, but that stuff was always seen as slightly cheesy

Not if you were a "rave" teenager back then.

sampling, trancey synths, 2step, boyzIImen early mariah TLC

― plax (ico)

This could be true for independent and underground musicians for the following 2 years but as home production becomes more advanced independent artists will be able to gather influence from genres with more complex production (as opposed to garage rock, lo-fi, "chillwave", folk and all sample based music that dominates the scene). Mainstream will likely continue to evolve and might be drawing inspiration from the underground scene in the 00's rather than from the 90s.

I don't really see rock making an important comeback anytime soon.

also surely the "uncool" stuff is exactly the stuff that *will* get revived?

― rip sarah silverman 3/19/10 never forget (history mayne)

Yes, reviving crap is all part of the the hipsters' ironic nature. What I meant is that it will become uncool once the mainstream catches unto it, then hipster musicians will have to review their kitsch history and move to another spot.

But then I constantly think of the new generations as some sort of punk identity with no real idealism and who just love pranking their mediatic environment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul_hcxlA5KU

I used to dress up like this back in the 90s... Except that I had more colourful clothes, like orange baggy jeans and neon green rave shirts. If the 2010s kids will find it cool again, that'll be AWESOME!

Which come to think of it might just be some sort of 80s subconcious revival where it's all fun and games and nobody really has a strong opinion or hates deeply or gives a shit about science or politics. New generations might have to deal with it and suddenly wham here comes a 90s social revival of depression and sectarianism.

the 80s being blissfully free of depression and sectarianism

bobby sands revival we hardly knew u

Well, sure no decade or century for the matter has been truly free from depression or sectarianism, but I sort of have the idea that in the 80s and 00s people preferred to get distracted from them and subconciously avoid them while in the 90s generations seemed to want to gorge on them.

the depressive 90s (which is like mnstrm singer songwriter, postgrunge, maybe britpop afterbirth?) will be difficult for revivalists because the sentiment is usually conveyed in rote minor key mopiness rather than any coherent aesthetic ready for reappropriation

the 90s was a stitch, the 00's was a migrane. i think the 10's are shaping up to be a welt of some kind.

Is there a name for that genre of turn-of-the-90s pop-rock with the positive vibes, huge guitar leads, and gated drums?

^^^ rooting for revival of this. But I'm not sure it will really pan out in the same way as 80s revivalism, for reasons already hinted at on this thread. 90s music, at least rhetorically, was supposed to be about either violent rejection of "80s things" or some kind of serious step forward for them. This is clearest with the hoary old "grunge killed hair metal" story, where the 80s were inauthentic and evil and the 90s brought something "real," but I think similar stuff was going on with gangsta rap being offered as something harder and more real than previous styles. This obviously doesn't cover or explain all musical developments in the decade, but it doesn't have to - - the reason why the 80s could be revived is that they were on some level suppressed.

That never happened with the 90s in the same way. Part of this may have to do with generational demographics, and the massive waves of teenagers kind of coming in at awkward times, always with older and younger siblings to maintain continuity through. I have students now who are 19 but know every word of "Ice Ice Baby." That is to say, they were born after the song was a hit and know it as if it were some sort of classic rock radio staple, which at least where I'm from it definitely is not, but who knows whether that proves anything.

But the relationship between 90s and 00s music has always felt, and been pitched as, more evolutionary than revolutionary. There are plenty of things that fell by the wayside and maybe some of them may come back; there's no genre of music whose typical product "sounds" the same as it would have ten years ago. I'm reminded of this inconclusive thread: The song that represents the END of the 90s which got as far as identifying a 3-5 year transition zone of stuff that was popular in the last couple years of the 90s and first couple years of the 00s that seemed really foreign to a general conception of what either the 90s or the 00s "sounded like." If you need a three-year transition zone, there may not be enough of a rejection to give rise to later revival.

Although I think the "positive vibes" bands belong to a similar "transition zone," so maybe all of this looks a lot more orderly with 20 years' distance rather than 10.

That's an interesting point, in the 80s album poll we had a similar discussion about whether or not 90s popular music distanced itself from 80s music - was it more "hard" and "keeping it real"? You can read the discussion here (after my post you have scroll down a bit for Contenderizer's answer, and that's where the discussion starts):

Now this is how it started: THE ILX 1980s ALBUM POLL RESULTS!!

I agree that there doesn't seem to be such a clear, conscious break between the 90s and the 00s. I guess one of the most visible signs of 00s starting was the back-to-the-basics rock revivalism of The Strokes et al, but it doesn't really signify a big break from the 90s, as nineties rock wasn't particularly proggy either. And another big change, which relates to the above, was electronic music dropping largely out of the mainstream and going back underground, at least for the first part of the decade. But again, it doesn't feel like there was any "fuck 90s!" sentiment behind that change.

I'm not sure if I get your demographic explanation though... Weren't there more teenagers in the 90s than in the 00s?

Hopefully the 90s will never be revived. They deserve to be forever buried, the same way those metallic digital/FN synth sounds of the late 80s/early 90s thankfully never ever seem to be revived.

With respect to dance music, I don't think that there was a big break between the 80s and 90s. Techno and house music drew also inspiration from New Order, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys and Art of Noise. These bands also drew inspiration from those genres as well.

I had a conversation about this last night - is there anything from the 90s pop landscape that's worth saving? The musical palette turns me off completely in a way the 80s and 00s don't. I don't know if this is a residual of my most rockist period, but even the pop-rock stuff I liked in my early teens (Green Day/Bush/Foo Fighters) sounds rubbish to me now.

(I'm not saying there was nothing good in the 90s, just that what was good was happening way outside the pop mainstream)

A lot of 90s rap and dance music was great, moreso than in the 00s, I would argue. And a lot rap and dance were in the pop mainstream back then. I'd definitely argue for saving stuff like G-funk or jungle or even rave.

Nowadays I don't think songs like "It's A Sin" or "Just Can't Get Enough" or "Electric Dreams" sound dated at all, and really a lot of these songs could've come out in 2007 if I didn't know better. But in the '90s they sounded so old fashioned. Back then I remember thinking that bands like Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys may have been the most ahead of their time in the 80s, but by the 90s their sound was dated. I think this feeling was largely based on both bands' lack of loops and samples and a reliance on machine sounds. Of course in the '00s synths and drum machines came back in vogue, while break and loop-based music felt very much a nineties thing. Essentially Moby and Fatboy Slim took sample'n'loop about as far as people could stomach, killing off the '90s in fine style. More leftfield artists, particularly working in IDM, were taking it even further, literally smashing loops up into little pieces and putting them back together to create glitch, drill'n'bass etc. When people like Miss Kittin and the electroclash brigade turned up, it was a real breath of fresh air to have dance's textural landscape swept clean and to start again with these basic machine-drum beats.

I would like to start a thread about tracks from the late 70s and 80s that really could have been electro tracks in the 00's. I had a really good example and I've forgotten it now. Doh!

More than anything, I think that the musical differences between the 90s and the 00s are sociopolitical rather than audible. Dance music, up until the mid-90s was still seen as this dark, illicit movement associated with warehouses, drugs, the squatter movement, secret meet-ups on the M25 etc. Acid house, rave and jungle were punky styles of music - fast, engaging and rebellious. Attending a rave or being a raver wasn't just something you did to release tension after a hard week at the office. In many ways it was a matter of identity, a political statement or even a lifestyle choice. But as much as it was political, early '90s dance had a great sense of humour, largely attributable to the fact it was largely sample-based music. So while big raves had to be organised like a military operation, you still had Trip To Trumpton getting into the charts etc. And then you had such violent genres as gabba and hardcore (dance music's equivalents of Oi! and death metal I guess?) which just don't really exist anymore, but did do a lot to bring fans of metal, punk and industrial into the dance fold.

Take this scene of underground warehouses full of dreads, caterpillar boots, camo, smiley faces then zip forward a few years to your average dancefloor in 1999. Following the death of rave (it was the Criminal Justice Act on the veranda with the candlestick btw), dance music is no longer a statement, it's a huge commercial enterprise with superclubs, holiday destinations, megastar DJs, shiny shirts, hair gel, high-heels, bouncers, £5 pints etc. It wasn't about blowing your mind on acieeeeed or raving against Thatcher; it had become, in my eyes, a much more sordid affair than even Inspector Morse could have anticipated.

Having gone from rampant irreverence to commercial sellout in 10 years, the 2000s at least saved dance music from it's own success, not by "going back underground, to stop it falling into the wrong hands", but by turning it into a true "artform". Dance fans, producers and DJs were demanding to be taken seriously, to show that their music mattered as much as rock and jazz and everything else. So in a way, the 2000s was when dance music went truly middlebrow. The '00s dancefloor having become a place of art, of contemplation, of soul-cleansing, of spirituality through music - not in a hippie way, but through that sort of stoicism audible in Miss Kittin's deadpan delivery, the repetition and subtlety of minimal house, Vitalic's controlled synth build-ups, LCD Soundsystem's art-school tendencies etc.

I think of the musical 90s beginning in early 1989 with acid house, Superfuzz Bigmuff, Stone Roses, De La Soul, Napalm Death and ending with the appearance of the Spice Girls.

Fingers crossed for New Jack Swing.

TEXTBOOK SOCKING A++++++ WOULD SB AGAIN

Has anyone done the 90s Lounge/Exotica thing yet?

I mean I enjoy other genres but barely any of them are my thing as far as a 90s sound goes. I'm also not sure where I'm going with any of this besides just being compelled to comment after "90s revival" is mentioned anywhere.

wasn't that stuff so inherently retro that any revival of that be seen more as i dunno a '60s thing? (xpost)

That means we are running out of past!

Can't tell if Evan is referring to stuff like "Everlong" or stuff like "Allison Road." The latter maybe has a more direct connection back to the 60s....

Ha, neither I'm talking about what's mostly indie stuff, early/mid nineties era. And the 60s comment seems to be referring to the Lounge mentioned.

This is the most straight up I-can-barely-tell-this-actually-isn't-from-the-90s thing I've heard in a long time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCC9thDM53o

His best Dave Grohl impression.

i'd been predicting a wayne's world revival for a long time but it so far hasn't really happened.
no boisterous renditions of bohemian rhapsody in cars, no alice cooper history lessons.

i was schrwong.

Epic pail.

i dunno, that emporers thing sounds post-90s to me.. the production is a dead giveaway IMO.

as opposed to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeaT-v1T7kI

there's a lot of weirdness/subtlties/jokeyness/tongue-in-cheek/irony and straight-up creativity in actual 80s and 90's music that is completely missing from pretty much everything being labelled "80s revival" or "90s revival" .. this is the element from 80s/90s that i wish would return more than any other.

you should check out total slacker

i've seen them live.. havent heard their recordings tho.

not bad imo

The Emperors is not the Black Wizards