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

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.

first off, none of my friends listened to the Strokes, J0rdan...in fact I don't think I hung out with people who listened to the Strokes until prolley 2004-2005, by then of course they were past their prime: so it goes...

I told my good friend/recent neighbor that I only heard Juicy for the first time a few days ago and he nodded, unsurprised, noting that I was white and that I never went out. I'm sure he was reaffirming in his head that Biggie was neither obscure nor European nor active musically in the 70s (as per his usual dogging on me...)

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

― Gucci Mane hermeneuticist (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, September 14, 2010 6:32 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark

i guess if you werent listening to the 'rap canon' when the 'rap record in question' was being released then you might somehow have missed one of its 'biggest artists' 'biggest songs'

not sure why i went all out w the scare quotes there

OK so now we're arguing about what kind of bros we befriended ten or fifteen years ago.

it seems totally reasonable to think that there are tons and tons of people (young people, old people, people in between) who still haven't heard juicy

arguments like this are totally infuriating because people conflate "EVERYONE IN MY HIGH SCHOOL" with "everyone that I actually hung out/talked to in high school"

and then when I introduced the word "diverse" to describe my high school, I meant "including a huge cross-section of cowboys and skaters who didn't give two fucks about biggie" people immediately started using diverse to mean "lots of blacks and latinos went to my high school"

Also, remember that entire reign of BIG, from the premiere of "Juicy" through his death occured WHILE I was in high school, so these weren't yet "rap classics," they were "songs on the radio"

ie, like J0rdan said, it might be an age thing

my hs was about 2% black. :/

ppl mostly listened to like...limp bizkit and eminem, except for the younger kids who all seemed to listen to emo

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

― cee-oh-tee-tee, Tuesday, September 14, 2010 3:02 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

Ha, yep. Whenever grunge comes up I almost always get a little "You must be talkin' about GARUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNGE" earworm from that clip. God knows how many years later it is now. Damn you, Mike D!

even the fucking nerds sitting around listening to talking heads at the age of 12 knew what "it was all a dream/ i used to read 'word up' magaine" is from is what i'm saying

that's like the most iconic line rap music, or so i thought

Stereotypes of a white indie male misunderstood
And it's still all good

and then when I introduced the word "diverse" to describe my high school, I meant "including a huge cross-section of cowboys and skaters who didn't give two fucks about biggie" people immediately started using diverse to mean "lots of blacks and latinos went to my high school"

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Tuesday, September 14, 2010 7:26 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is not what i meant weirdo. at my h.s. white ppl were really really into rap too .... u couldnt throw a wallaby w/out hitting a white dude who bought 'wu tang forever' the day it was released

and at my college, white frat dudes all listened to / knew biggie songs!! esp juicy!! as did ... everyone?? its a totally standard obvious rap classic

it was a single! with a video! from one of the most well known rappers of the nineties! his first crossover hit!

man, you really travel in some circles full of not exceptionally diverse white people then