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

Do you guys remember people around that time saying "I listen to progressive music"?

Damn, that was a confusing time to like college, er...modern rock, er...alternative. I'd probably just go with "pop rock". That's probably too nebulous, but it's a pretty acurate description of those acts.

On a side note, I was really into what dell calls a Madchester/baggy thing, or even Grebo at the time, but probably just called it modern rock or progressive (thanks, WHFS!). I remember hearing people refer to the city of Manchester as "Madchester", but never heard any of these genre names. Was I out of the loop, or did we 'Muricans just not latch on to these tags?

Wonderful picks everybody! "Dizz Knee Land" is one of those songs I've managed to hear of a million times but never actually hear before, and it fits right in there in the more "alternative" wing of the genre, along with "Three Strange Days." And yeah, "Three Strange Days" is fantastic.

From my old moldering Deadeye Dick thread:

My wife has this friend, and he showed up late to this party last year...I asked him why he'd been late and he said, "Oh well, I wanted to come earlier but I went to the Fine Line cuz my favorite band was playing"

Me: "Oh really? cool...what band?"

Him: "Dada"

His favorite band is Dada. Huh. Didn't see that coming.

-- M@tt He1geson (Matt Helgeson), Thursday, November 3, 2005 5:35 PM (Thursday, November 3, 2005 5:35 PM)

Deadeye Dick themselves probably don't quite make the cut as "Post-Cannibals," the mix is a little too thin and the tone a little too grungey. But the Spin Doctors are a really good call.

Haha "Three Strange Days" was the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread's title.

Would Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend" fit into this genre, or would his retro leanings and/or later hits negate his candidacy?

I always associate "Right Here, Right Now" and EMF's "Unbelievable." (Perhaps because both were on the chart in summer 1991.)

"Unbelievable" was totally on that CD whose commercial I was babbling about above!

btw, for anyone still catching up, videos for:

Three Strange Days
Joyride
Black Or White

"Black Or White" also features Macaulay Culkin and a pan-racial, pan-national, "the Cold War is over! the future is bright!" message which only adds to the positive vibes. See also "Right Here Right Now."

"the Cold War is over! the future is bright!" message

Also see: Scorpions, "Wind of Change"

Would Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend" fit into this genre

Matthew Sweet is way too rugged. : )

Damn, judging by the video, School of Fish were the Silverchair of their time.

C+C Music Factory: "Here We Go"

haha i'd forgotten abt that dada story, but it is true. blew my mind.

geggy tah would fit this.

Those examples at the start don't have much in common the way I see it.

Roxette and Jesus Jones were both influenced by Powerpop though, only in very different ways and with very different stylistic outcome.

A lot of examples aren't fitting together for me, but there is a certain guitar sound running through a bunch of them that seems telling: a rhythm guitar thing, up front in the mix, somewhat think (or at least not taking up a ton of space) and usually verging on staccato or telegraph -- the opposite of the sludgy/blurry blanket the other end of alt-rock would bring in.

"Black or White" has this hardcore
School of Fish do, if I remember right
Roxette kicked this a TON, being a duo
"Two Princes" had it (most Spin Doctors, really)
"Life is a Highway"

I think the paradigm that's getting pinned down here is one where rock bands are uptempo rhythm machines, with the rhythm sections having really mild doses of funkiness or propulsion, and that's supposed to be sufficient enough on its own that the guitar doesn't need to occupy all the space above it. Whereas the alt paradigm that comes after it is very guitar-blanket and would have no truck with a guitar playing a scratch rhythm line (like the one on "Life is a Highway" especially), and the rhythm sections aren't treated as sufficient -- in fact, they usually have to lay down a fuzzy rhythm guitar just playing the chords on eighth notes before they can move on toward adding another guitar to play even simple leads.

That would seem like a turn in a bad direction, and kinda was, except that the turn-of-90s stuff had a huge problem: it tended to sound like a drum machine and a Very Corny Bassist playing out of a karaoke box while some guy played rhythm Strat as if there were actually a band around. I think the late 80s and early 90s were kind of a horrible end point of using technology to make really slick, artificial music, but still aspiring to make it in the mold of, like, 60s American rock'n'roll classics, blues, funk, and all -- by the end of the 80s we were getting these weird chromed-out replicas of the old stuff, old-school R'n'R played on digital keyboards and triggered gated drums, and it started to feel uncomfortable, and that sort of thing seems to have died hard going into the next decade.

Wonderful posts nabisco. I'm not sure how much I buy the narrative but it's nice to see one being floated, particularly one focusing in on "that guitar sound" that I've had a hard time putting into words.

So does this mean that there were no heirs to this lineage? That alt-rock's influence, even on people that were ultimately not consuming alt-rock albums, was to restate a certain standard of "authenticity" when one was to undertake doing genre work? That is, the bands of the late 90s working "in the mold of, like, 60s American rock'n'roll classics, blues, funk, and all" seem to have gone for a much more "organic"-sounding production. Fastball comes immediately to mind, but I suppose that a lot of the pop-rock which is so reviled by rockist CW would fit in here - Matchbox 20, Hootie, Deep Blue Something - not "alternative" bands in any sonic sense but they seem to have absorbed the ethos.

This also makes me wonder how many of the Post-Cannibals records were the result of "alt" bands showing up in the studio with producers who only knew how to make certain kinds of records. The School of Fish song seems to make a case for this - everything about it besides the production suggests that these guys walked in the door as a garage psychedelia band.

I just realized I saw School of Fish live. They opened for the Charlatans in early 1991.

Just thought of another one - The Proclaimers, "500 Miles." It's a little weird, but the snare and the chunky guitar both make an appearance to my ears.

Seems like some movie soundtrack hits from 89 and 90 might fit this bill. Interesting ideas from Nabisco here -- kind of like sounds from the 60s-channeling baby boomer demographic finally grappling with these technologies.

Oh man: the guy at the next desk is listening to "Life is a Highway."

So the more I think about it, the more I can't tell if the development I'm talking about was a good one or not. Doctor Casino is totally right: most anyone making an old-school rock'n'roll record after 92 or so would shoot for production that sounded natural, "vintage." And while this was WAY less embarrassing, it feels weird to applaud a development that put stuff in a glass case to be properly preserved and recreated.

Movie soundtracks are a great example of this, Mark! I'd trace it back toward the early 80s, where you have two things going: (a) the shine and ambition of prog and "yacht rock" have kinda died, and (b) you have one of rock's early generations first hitting the question of how to be an older rocker. (E.g., Rod Stewart is all over MTV).

And if you look at big movie-sountrack type hits in particular, a ridiculous number of them are pastiches of rock's early days -- a lot of them lyrically about the roots of rock:

- Huey Lewis is all "The Heart of Rock and Roll is the Beat"
- George Thoroughgood is doing "Bad to the Bone" blues pastiche
- Billy Joel is going further back and doing doo-wop pastiche like "Uptown Girl"
- "Old Time Rock and Roll" by Bob Seger!
- I would kinda class "Footloose" here too
- and stuff like Aretha singing "Freeway of Love!"

Plus stuff like Mellencamp and Tom Petty -- it was like everyone soldifying a mythology of what rock'n'roll was, only nobody yet felt like there was some great incompatibility between classic rock/soul and 80s production techniques. (It surely helped that the people working in big studios, the session players, the label heads and producers, and plenty of the stars had genuinely been working since the glory days.)

Point being that seems to fall apart right around "Life is a Highway," or something. (I would go on and on about the details of this, but I don't think they're hard to imagine; there was a kind of changing of the guard here, I think.)

Spin Doctors didn't have gated drums at all! Aaron Comess was a sick drummer, dudes

B-52's "Roam" may fit into this.

And those early 90's Def Leppard singles

like "Let's Get Rocked"

There really should be a name for this kind of thing. It's like the hair-metal aesthetic, only with "party rock" instead of hair metal.

Get rocked here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B05EDye9QII

There is so much wrong with that video, I don't even know where to start.

Soup Dragons, "Divine Thing"

I have been rocked by that video.

I didn't remember that I owe the expression "let's get the rock out of here" to that song! I probably say that ten times a week!

- Huey Lewis is all "The Heart of Rock and Roll is the Beat"

I'll be pedantic: "The Heart of Rock and Roll is still Beating" was the lyric.

Another name for that genre: "hot new country" (e.g. Alan Jackson "Chattahoochee").

Big Audio Dynamite II, "Rush"
The Farm, "Groovy Train"

This is the continuing application of mid 80s pop production to rock music, right? Sound of Bob Clearmountain on Bryan Adams Reckless and Hall & Oates Big Bam Boom, and of Mutt Lange on tons of stuff (AC/DC, Def Lep, Huey Lewis, the Cars' Heartbeat City, etc.). Kind of based in dance music in the first place - Clearmountain worked with Chic. Vic Maile did some similar stuff in England, though he's more associated with hard rock bands.

By the time you get to the 90s, the drums aren't quite so prominent & boomy, the once-trendy new wave dance elements starting to shrivel, more naturalistic production coming back into favor.

That's not pedantry, that's important: I've spent decades thinking Huey's pointing out that, like, rhythm is the foundation of rock'n'roll music!

Plus, exactly, add to the "explicit nostalgia" pile -- "Summer of 69" by Bryan Adams

Nabisco is giving this thread a B-story.

And while this was WAY less embarrassing, it feels weird to applaud a development that put stuff in a glass case to be properly preserved and recreated.

Yeah, in general I'm much more drawn to pastiches of "classic sounds" that seem to be made unhesitatingly with whatever "today"'s sounds are, no matter how dated they may rapidly turn out to be. Over at Popular, Tom Ewing is starting to hit that stretch of the 70s where every third number one is a really blatant attempt to recapitulate specific sounds of the 50s or 60s, except they sound totally weird and idiosyncratically of their times as well. And thank god, because it turns out that if you sound exactly like the classic records, but aren't actually as good of a musician/performer/songwriter, you have no legs left to stand on and will inevitably suffer from the direct comparison....

In a slightly different vein and a good decade before the stuff I started the thread about, you have "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me" by Billy Joel, where he insists repeatedly on a continuity between rock n' roll and the present-day musics, while performing in the style of Joe Jackson...

So anyway, yeah, I like this version of the history that focuses on the talent pool working in the biz - it's much more interesting to conceive of these people as being rock veterans getting on board with what looks like the next big thing than cynical cash-ins milking a perverted form of rock for no good reason at all. See also: the Traveling Wilburys, basically an interpretation of "roots rock" by 60s musicians, produced by a 70s master in his 80s style. Actually, all of Jeff Lynne's 80s records fit really snugly into this history...

Spin Doctors didn't have gated drums at all! Aaron Comess was a sick drummer, dudes

So was Phil Collins! I'm no recording engineer or anything, but I definitely hear that famous "80s drum sound" on Two Princes. It's not quite "Myth of Fingerprints" but it's there.

I was going to mention Traveling Wilburys right after Nabisco's first post today, but I haven't actually heard them.

I suspect the legacy of hair metal is more of a factor of all this than I thought at first too. If you asked me to make a record that sounded like "Cherry Pie" or "Pour Some Sugar On Me" for a band without a lead guitarist it might end up sounding a lot like "Joyride," I dunno.

xpost Traveling Wilburys are GREAT! The whole first album is really wonderful and shockingly unforced-feeling for a supergroup-type thing. The Lynne-y-ness varies from track to track, though, and I don't think anything on it sounds quite as keen on the 80s as "Got My Mind Set On You."

I would also like to add that listening to Morrissey in the early 90s was a useful balancer to listening to the type of music described on this thread---put it together and you get something like a pop speedball, up and down together.

Possibly worth reviewing: That Eighties Drum Sound

Which, not to spam my own thread, quickly raises the possibility that the explicit goal of sounding like this was to AVOID being hidebound by the spectre of rock history. Hrm....

Re: the backstory. Maybe it isn't the application of modern production to tradition rock 'n' roll sounds and themes, but the other way around - lyrical window-dressing that attempts to connect this ostensibly un-rock sound with "respectable" no-homo rock history. A bunch of artists saying, "No, this really is rock, just like you grew up with. Don't get all uncomfortable like you did with disco."

Thus the relentless, protesteth-too-much insistence on AMERICAN ROCK N ROLL. All these super ordinary, gritty blue collar dudes in denim jackets singing about how it used to be, working-class kicks, the heart of rock n roll, and the fact that it was only ever about dancing in the first place.

I.e., taking a lyrical step back in order to make the musical step forward more palatable.

So was Phil Collins! I'm no recording engineer or anything, but I definitely hear that famous "80s drum sound" on Two Princes.

What "Two Princes" are you listening to? There's like sputtery funk fills and ghost notes and a break. How could you hear ghost notes if it was gated? There's like a world of difference between "In The Air Tonight" and the Spin Doctors. Spin Doctors are produced to sound like a BAND. The drums sound like drums.

I guess I just mean how the snare counts its way through the song on the 3 (nothing really unusual about that) and sounds like a ringing shiny TONGKK!!! Someone else back me up here?

I'll totally back you up on the pushed snare, but in general, the drums do sound more natural than most of what's being discussed here.

I think he just tuned his snare funny.

But I'll take the drums alone in "Two Princes" over any beats I've ever heard Dave Grohl or Janet Weiss come up with.

-- chuck, Monday, March 17, 2003 11:49 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

OTFM

Yeah, the drums do sound really naturalistic on Two Princes. The snare is cranked pretty high (tuning-wise and in the mix) and there's a lot of reverb on there, but it's really live-sounding.

It still totally fits the vaguely funky, party-rock vibe though!

Actually listening to the break in that tune I wouldn't be surprised if there was some gating going on? Not Phil Collins extremes or anything, just a little.

i was just about to mention Collective Soul, and Tonic, in response to hearing King's X's guitar breaks. very direct line of succession IMO.

King's X is a bit different from what I thought this thread was about tbh but if that fits, how about solo Robert Plant like "Tie Dye on the Highway"? "Tall Cool One" might even fit by the narrower definition?

I think I'm coming around to thinking of this unnamed genre as having a pretty small, exclusive "core" of perfect fits, surrounded by various hybrids which are individually more numerous (roots-rock version, clubby/dancey versions) and brushing up against the New Jack Swing solar system also.

To my ears, "Tie Dye on the Highway" lacks too many of the common threads and late 80s production tropes to qualify, but "Tall Cool One" with its booming empty space, makes sense for one of the satellite categories. who is that inventing Marilyn Manson's vocal delivery in the spoken-word section at 1:45?

speaking totally as a layperson when it comes to production, it's hard for me to be too precise about this, but i feel like one of the unifying threads could be producers going ALL in on gating sounds, maybe also something to do with the switch to digital equipment...? the tightest-fitting examples are very very "clean" - sounds decay really quickly and don't overlap and wash together; the sound does not feel like a live band. so for example, even on something as comparatively artificial as "Tall Cool One," Plant knows he's trying to hearken back to Johnny Burnette's "Honey Hush" (right??) and instinctively wants to sound like a bar band that's really cooking, really boogie-ing, perhaps even choogling. the desire for an updated radio-ready sound is cutting across that, to make something that is unmistakably of its time and very weird. but it's still - again, to my ears - distinct from Roxette on "Joyride," where they seem really actively excited about crafting a fresh modern pop-rock sound for the 90s, and every piece of it sounds like it's proud to be pasted in from a different recording session.

"This and That", Michael Penn's follow-up single to "No Myth", has more vigorous rhythm guitar, and less of the vintage keyboard retro elements.

I'd say that the more jangly the rhythm guitar (R.E.M., Cranberries), the further you get from this sound. Appropriately, "Pop Song 89" is probably as close as R.E.M. came to this.

agreed on jangle and "Pop Song 89." would be fascinating to get the isolated tracks of that one and try to remix it with Berry's drums massively overclocked and punching through the mix. "This and That" is pretty close to the mark for an acoustic variant!

Semisonic > Mister Mr. > The Call

(Though Semisonic is late 90s so is more of a piece with the Goos etc.)

Your comments make sense, Dr. Casino.

After checking the video and a couple of live clips from around that time, I'm pretty sure the deep spoken part on "Tall Cool One" was the keyboardist and co-writer Phil Johnstone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey14j7c9Phw

(1:45)

How about Semisonic antecedents Trip Shakespeare?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkOepnPJS3o

The "positive vibes" are as essential a part of this aesthetic as the bright, clean, separated mix, the gated drums and the buzzing guitar. It's like there was a brief moment of euphoria after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when innocence, happiness and hope for the future could be expressed lyrically without seeming trite or corny. That moment quickly wore off and the rest of the '90s overcompensated by fetishizing an angst and cynicism that in retrospect seem a bit out of proportion to the way things were going in the country at the time.

U2's Zooropa is the transition between those two times ^^.

The European Union forming in January 1993 is another part of this transition: the optimism of peacetime, a new level of cultural homogenization, and the pushback from right-wing/nativist movements.

My friend just spun this on his TwitchStream

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

Mock Turtles: "Can You Dig It?" (1990)

That song reminds me that Byrds-esque jangle (most likely via REM) was a major ingredient of this micro-genre.

no one mentioned freedom 90 yet? that's a big one imo

Horribly bad album title I've always been confused by turns out to have horribly bad origin.

Schubert Dip is the debut album by British rock band EMF, released on Parlophone Records on 7 May 1991.[1] It features the worldwide hit single "Unbelievable" which reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100. The name of the album is a pun on the name of the popular sweet sherbet dip and the 19th-century composer Franz Schubert.

Woah, that Mock Turtles song is pretty cool! Definitely towards the indie end of things but the impulse towards a clear, ringing, booming sound is there, and certainly the Positive Vibes. Get one really assertive commercial producer in the room and it could have been the theme song to a Friends-wannabe show. Apparently Fatboy Slim remixed it in 2003, but to the extent that he changed anything it seems to have been to muddy things up further with busy percussion, spacey whooshy noises, and turning the organ way up in the mix.

Another single from the same album, "Strings and Flowers," similarly straddles the thread's core and what I think of as Britpop:

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

How influential was REM on British bands of this era? I would have assumed Johnny Marr as a more important source than Pete Buck, but I have no idea.

How influential was REM on British bands of this era?

That's an interesting question. There are tantalizing bits of evidence scattered around the web. It seems that they weren't very well known in the UK until their breakthrough hit 'The One I Love', which went top 20 in the UK, though not for lack of trying. They actually recorded Fables of the Reconstruction in England, and toured on it in the UK, but apparently without much traction.

The band's third album, Fables of the Reconstruction (1985), demonstrated a change in direction. Instead of Dixon and Easter, R.E.M. chose producer Joe Boyd, who had worked with Fairport Convention and Nick Drake, to record the album in England. The band members found the sessions unexpectedly difficult, and were miserable due to the cold winter weather and what they considered to be poor food; the situation brought the band to the verge of break-up.

https://classicrock.fandom.com/wiki/R.E.M.

Also found this amusing early interview where they disavow any direct Byrds influence:

As for frequent comparisons to the Byrds, (Buck) declares, "I probably listen to people that stole from the Byrds more often than the Byrds. I've got one Byrds album, and it's the one that doesn't sound anything like them -- Sweetheart of the Rodeo -- because I love Gram Parsons. The Byrds are OK, but none of us ever paid much attention to them."

Instead they point to the Velvet Underground and country music as major influences.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/20/rem-rocks-backpages-classic-interview

I like the careful wording of "what they considered to be poor food".

It is interesting that the left not just the South, but the U.S., to record their big Southern Mythos album.

(I actually don't think I knew, or at least remembered, that – I think I assumed Joe Boyd came to the U.S. for the sessions.)

How influential was REM on British bands of this era?
That's an interesting question. There are tantalizing bits of evidence scattered around the web. It seems that they weren't very well known in the UK until their breakthrough hit 'The One I Love', which went top 20 in the UK, though not for lack of trying.

It only became a hit *after* they'd broken through with Out of Time. It was re-released in either 1991 or 1992. Their first hit was Orange Crush - not massive, but definitely top 40 because they got on Top of the Pops.

Yes, I remember that one: "Nice and cool on a hot summer day, that was REM with ORANGE CRUSH!!"

1) That's not what the song was about
2) Even if it was, did it need that level of explanation?

I forget the presenter, but I don't think he was on much after that.

The One I Love was taken from the non-US Best Of which IRS released on the back of Out of Time - top 20 in the autumn of '91

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

Never heard the Fatboy Slim remix of that Mock Turtles song but the Steve Proctor piano / breakbeat / house mix is pure sweet MDMA. Nothing to do with the genre in question except the ridiculously positive vibes.

It only became a hit *after* they'd broken through with Out of Time.

Interesting. So I guess that's another point in favor of them having little influence on UK bands in the 80s.

R.E.M. were big UK sellers the faster their American popularity waned.

Even though it’s more on the enigma/proto-trip hop side of thing, for some reason I keep thinking of moodfood by moodswings (feat the cover of “state of independence” with Chrissy Hynde). there’s some big sampled drums on there though. and I get major “paisley shirt of synthetic fabric” vibes from it. Feel like “worldbeat” (ugh) stuff runs parallel to this thread’s remit… the vague we are all one people, love the planet vibes, idk

So I guess that's another point in favor of them having little influence on UK bands in the 80s.

I mean, they were definitely known in Britain in the 80s by the kind of people that would have been in indie guitar groups. But they wouldn't have been known by, say, your aunt until 1991/92.

Direct from tonight's TwitchStream:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9TsXzOkoMc

Ian McCulloch: "Honey Drip"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o20_aSVM9Rk

Baby Animals: "Painless" (1992, singer is/was married to Nuno Bettencourt)

never heard that before! what an amazing '1992' combination of elements.

I remember them - when I was doing more music business work, I somehow ended up on the promo list of their US agent when their first album was released. IIRC the singer was on the short list to take over vocals in INXS.