Pitchfork: The Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s: 20-01

I really don't know if this is the time to challenge deej's assertion:

i dont think theres a high school student in america who doesnt know who [gucci mane] is.

― *sets trend* (deej), Sunday, September 12, 2010 8:09 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hahahahahaha

apparently deej didn't know any super-Christians growing up

iirc there was a year or so in 94-95 that was the only time in the '90s that my family didn't have cable, and the lack of MTV kind of left me with some weird blind spots where I kind of totally missed a few big songs/artists I would've otherwise known from that period. Biggie's first album was one of them, I think my first exposure to a Biggie song was when David Spade went "I love it when you call me big poppa" on SNL. so i didn't even hear a lot of Biggie until he died (whereas 2Pac had been big earlier than '94 so I knew all his big singles).

iirc there was a year or so in 94-95 that was the only time in the '90s that my family didn't have cable

Haha I've literally never had cable.

doesn't this basically boil down to the divide between "hip-hop" and "mainstream" music/radio being much more strongly in place in '94? feels like that wall didn't really start to come down until the post-"Fantasy (Remix)", Bad Boy Entertainment, east-coast-vs.-west-coast era was in full effect (at least this is how rap (beyond MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice) first started to penetrate my sheltered suburban consciousness)

i don't know, i mean snoop, dre, 2pac and wu were pretty huge at my high school (i'm 31). not so much biggie til college, "hypnotize"

yeah but bernard is right in that if you lived out in the sticks, like i did at the time, then you might not have lived within listening range of an all-rap station, and the pop or R&B station might have played as little rap as possible, which is why not having MTV for a few months dropped me pretty well out of touch with hip hop for a while

in the uk 'hypnotize' and (more so) 'mo money mo problems' ('featuring the puff daddy' as it says on my cd) were crossover chart hits. we didn't have as many radio stations, or as much diversity, or anything like as much cable tv. so 'juicy' came and went and was probably heard by rap heads but not by anyone else. (similarly 'california love' was tupac's first hit here. apart from method's collab with mjb i doubt wu-tang had a hit, collectively or individually, till 'gravel pit'.) 'juicy' does seem to be a thing among people who are actively interested in rap music/hipsters/______ but otherwise no.

fwiw went to a lol 90s 'hipster' dance party a coupla weeks ago & the biggie song that had the most ppl (median age like 22) 'rapping' along was "dead wrong"

i dont think this proves anything but yknow

'juicy' was the 1st biggie song i heard, watched the video on the box, stuck w/ me in a way big poppa didnt, everyone at my jr. high & high school knew it, not sure what else to tell u except what max said

idk i think im saying imo its kind of weird to not know anyone who had a biggie cd in college?? am i crazy

i mean ive said before in chicago biggie wasnt nearly as big as bone thugs or tupac around the same time, but juicy & big poppa def had their time

i get the feeling that deej went to a way less diverse high school than me when he gets on the "everyone in my high school" kick.

my only point is that it's not "impossible" for me to never have heard it before 2006 when that kind of thing wasn't really on my radar screen at all

i mean...yeah, i guess i don't find it surprising that eg my mother has never heard "juicy", what with that kind of thing not being on her radar. or if you were in prison for the second half of the 90s and first half of the 00s, it wouldn't be impossible for it to have bypassed you in that case either.

i just find it really surprising that someone with an interest in popular music could have made it through their late teens and early twenties, and the parties in that period, without having heard it - not even played, maybe, but talked about, referenced. or that thing where you realise that biggie is a big deal and you might want to quietly check out some of his biggest hits.

i get the feeling that deej went to a way less diverse high school than me when he gets on the "everyone in my high school" kick.

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Tuesday, September 14, 2010 12:24 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

my h.s. was fairly diverse but, like, black pop music was basically the sound & texture of popular culture at the time. white kids all knew the lyrics to biggie songs. the basketball pep band used to cover 'are you that somebody' like a year after it came out

Did Usher DJ your prom and teach you all a routine for "The Rockafeller Skank"?

lol

i just find it really surprising that someone with an interest in popular music could have made it through their late teens and early twenties, and the parties in that period, without having heard it - not even played, maybe, but talked about, referenced. or that thing where you realise that biggie is a big deal and you might want to quietly check out some of his biggest hits.

By the time Biggie became a big deal, I wasn't really interested in "popular music" per se. Late high school and college for me was all about burrowing further into indie rock, post-rock, IDM, and the like. I did manage to hear some pop/hip-hop songs here and there -- e.g, Eminem seemed very inescapable right around the time I graduated from college (2000). Friends of mine who weren't normally into hip-hop bought The Marshall Mathers LP, and "The Real Slim Shady" was played on the Chicago alt-rock station, which I still occasionally listened to when I was home from school. But that was an exception.

When I finally came up for air in 2003, I did go back and discover some stuff I'd missed out on, like Missy Elliott and Aaliyah and OutKast. But for whatever reason, I never thought to check out Biggie. Tbh, I only downloaded Ready to Die after watching The Wackness (lol) two years ago.

deejer,

I mean, I would say that black pop/rap was definitely the DOMINANT dialogue in my HS. But there was also a huge Green Day/Sublime/Metallica contingent that wouldn't touch the stuff as well as an equally huge contingent of like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbH60wCO-Yw

Ha, I just remembered how when The Marshall Mathers LP came out, I felt frustrated b/c I found Em very fascinating and wanted to write an essay on him as a ~cultural phenomenon~ but felt like I lacked any kind of immediate context for his music, since I was too busy listening to Mouse on Mars or Jim O'Rourke or whatever.

I remember in high school, my biggest beefs were the popularity of

Live's "Lightning Crashes, Boyz II Men's II and the Macarena

I think deej and I went to similarly diverse high schools, but maybe the difference is that I went to h.s. in the early 90s, when alt-rock still felt like the predominant musical current. The people I knew who were really into music were all like 120 Minutes devotees.

I def think you have to make a distinction between "the people who you knew" and "the people I went to high school with."

Like I only can't conceive of any high school where everyone listens to the same shit

While he was alive, I definitely knew "get money" & "crush on you" .. and throughout 97 pretty much all of the singles from both Life After Death and Victory were super ubiquitous.. I didn't know of "juicy" until around 2000 (due to college parties, funkmaster flex, etc etc).. so I got the impression that its legacy as his signature song grew the most throughout the 00s.

In my sophomore English class in '90, a total dork carried a pencil case for his art class on which he'd written "Beastie Boys rule!" I thought, "lol who cares about the Beastie Boys in 1989?" Paul's Boutique was a non-event then.

^^^ that's a massive truthbomb

The thing I've always wondered about is how Check Your Head immediately got to be a big deal if Paul's Boutique wasn't. Was it just that MTV got behind it in a big way or was Paul's Boutique already getting more love in the interim?

as a kid I had no real grasp of what was going on with those guys between the baseball cap Ill videos I saw all the time and the sock hat Check videos I saw all the time

"Hey Ladies" was huge on MTV but it was definitely pushed in a "Doowutchyalike" sort of way, a kitsch goof. No question the record went over almost everyone's head, completely slept-on or at best misinterpreted until after Check Your Head. Definitive ahead-of-its-time record.

also "non-event" is hyperbole

All I know is I bought SPIN in March or April '92 and the Beasties were already cover stars with the headline "Best Album Ever?"

also "non-event" is hyperbole

Okay: "total fucking flop" is more accurate.

croup, "Pass the Mic" was massive as the lead single on MTV. Twinned the rise of street skating and the toughening of rap, moving away from the club.

I def think you have to make a distinction between "the people who you knew" and "the people I went to high school with."

True. After I posted that, it occurred to me that there could have been wide swaths of people listening to Biggie in '94 and I wouldn't have necessarily known. Although, as I believe I mentioned upthread, I do remember my friend Chris quoting "Big Poppa." Not sure I realized who it was by at the time, I just thought "lol rap" (or rather "lol at the incongruity of this pale skinny Converse All Star-wearing smart kid reciting mainstream hip-hop lyrics"). (Actually, haha, Chris was a big Beastie Boys fan.)

The thing I've always wondered about is how Check Your Head immediately got to be a big deal if Paul's Boutique wasn't. Was it just that MTV got behind it in a big way or was Paul's Boutique already getting more love in the interim?

― da croupier, Tuesday, September 14, 2010 2:42 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Basically after rap fans abandoned em, they fit snugly into the new post-Nirvana Alternative Nation thingy

"Hey Ladies" charted higher than "Pass the Mic" but I never, ever heard the former on the radio while the alt-rock station in the Twin Cities played the shit out of both "Pass the Mic" and "So What'cha Want"

You must be talkin' about GARUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNGE

nah

"So What'cha Want" fit in beside "100%" and "Lithium" a lot more comfortably than "Hey Ladies" did around Richard Marx and Skid Row.

I think another problem faced by Paul's Boutique is that it strongly embraced sampling of various funky 70s tunes at a time when folks were still trying to forget that the 70s had happened. It seems hard to believe now, but 70s nostalgia was kind of a bizarre notion in 1989.

'Twas something Mike D said to Tabitha Soren when she tip-toed around "post-Nirvana Alternative Nation thingy", Whines.

Moodles diamond-tip otm

Well, it's sorta true. 1989 and 1990 were also the peak of house crossovers, which pilfered seventies disco left and right.

I don't really know for sure but I think maybe it took a few years for "juicy" to become like the default/best-known b.i.g. song. I'm 31 and I heard "hypnotize" and "big poppa" way before I heard "juicy," but I think maybe for the dudes on here in their 20s, "juicy" had become one of the canonical b.i.g. songs by the time they were seriously into music and/or going to parties like this. just a theory.
xpost

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, September 14, 2010 7:04 AM Bookmark

is otm, as it did take a while for it to become biggie's legacy song ahead of his bigger hits, but deej and lex are right about "juicy" getting played at all types of parties. it peaked at #27 btw, not #72.

i'm totally on deej & lex's side re: "juicy" (also re: gucci mane -- whiney lives in williamsburg, let's remember this) -- seriously everyone i knew in high school would instantly know that "it was all a dream" was the opening line of "juicy", or at the very least a song by notorious BIG -- and i went to a not very diverse high school

must be an age thing? i have no idea -- & all my friends then just listened to the strokes

i think it might also be because i (and presumably you and deej) never actually hung out exclusively with people who shared our music taste in school or university

i think theres some history rewriting going on if ppl think juicy is a canon biggie song only in retrospect or something

It depends on where you were when the canon was being compiled.